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( 208 ) mediate period. The period of the sixteenth Dynasty of the Second Intermediate Period and dynasty seventeenth of the
New Kingdom remarkable for the occupation Hyksos
of Egypt by the Hyksos kings about 1738 to 1587 B. C. These Hyksos Kings are also characterised as Shepherd Kings of Egyptian history. They were the Hittites; the men of ignoble race, barbarous and cruel. Wherever they penetrated, they spread ruin and desolation around, massacred the adult male population, reduced the women and children to slavery, burnt the cities and demolished temples. They indiscriminately razed all the Egyptian temples to ground. But this purely destructive time was followed by one of reaction and to some extent of reconstruction. They borrowed the superior civilization of those whom they conquered and adopted their art, their official language, their titles and the general arrangement of their court ceremonial. After throwing out the Hittites from the land of Egypt; the Egyptians came to terms with the Aryans of Asia and developed friendly relations with them. Thothmos IV of the Eighteenth Dynasty asked for the daughter of Artamama, the Mittani King, in marriage and concluded a formal alliance with them. Egypt afterwards developed the state technique of their neighbours. It took to materialistic means with short interludes of spiritual revivals as in the time of Amonhotep IV, also known as Akhenaton. Materialistic reaction overpowered Egypt. Military became their strength which removed cultural distinctions between them and their neighbours. They came to terms with each other.
The Aryan in West Asia; the Hittites, the Hurrians and the Kassites; quarrelled amongst themselves and
became weaker. The region witnessed Internecine
relis political and social decadence but the basic Aryan Quarrels
original culture truimphed over that of the
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