The Task Masters of oppression.
The application of placing ethnic labels on other peoples is thought of as a relatively modern phenomenon. But it could be suggested that the tensions that existed in Ancient Egypt, could be of a similar experience to that found in recent history.
The Egyptians, based in the south around Thebes during the 2nd Intermediate Period, had experienced a squeeze by at least two foreign forces, the Asiatic Hyksos from the north and east and the Nubians from the south. Liberated by the reunification under Ahmose, the 18th Dynasty pharaohs increasingly depicted the gods of foreign lands as forms of their god Seth. Seth represented, amongst other things, all that was chaotic, strange and disturbing.
Prior to the New Kingdom, Egypt seems to have had little to do with the Levant, with only its trade with Byblos, its copper and turquoise mining activities in Sinai and the Negev proving the exception. But with the expulsion of the Hyksos, Egypt forged a buffer zone that stretched as far as the Euphrates under Thutmose III, if not before under his grandfather, Thutmose I. With the expelling of the Hyksos, Ahmose tore down the citadel of Avaris and established a military base with hundreds of grain silos to feed his troops. This garrison city was remodelled 250 years before Pi-Ramesses and it incorporated, to judge from the excavated burial and pottery evidence, Nubian soldiers. This presents the possibility that the use of a nekhtu fortress, was not only being used to overturn the Nubians’ tongue, but may have been employed to control the Asiatics living in the eastern Delta. [42]
