quote:Originally posted by the lioness: book not notes: Outlines of Egyptian History by François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette
The Hyksos possibly Turanian
The discoveries of Mariette at Tanis, a Hyksos town, brought to light two statues of an Egyptian king bearing a cartouche on the arm, which M. Naville reads as follows: ' The good god Ra-aa-Kenen, the son of Ra-Apepi.' This is a clear case of a statue of a native predecessor being appropriated by a Hyksos ruler, who, though a worshipper of Sutekh, yet called himself a son of Ra. From the mathematical papyrus in the British Museum we learn the name of another of these princes, Ra-aa-User, with the coronation name of Apepi; and a broken statue found by M. Naville at Bubastis bearing the name User en Ra Ian-Ra is, both from the workmanship and the inscription, judged to be that of a Hyksos ruler. The pose and detail of this and two other kindred statues are entirely Egyptian, while the character of the faces is Turanian.
Professor Virchow, the great German ethnologist, seeing the celebrated Hyksos head from Bubastis in the British Museum, at once pointed out its foreign features, and, while saying how difficult it would be to strictly define the nationality, thought that it might be that ' the models of these heads were Turanians, but I should not be able to say which.' Professor Flower inclines to the view of the Mongoloid origin of the Hyksos. M. Naville has very clearly shown that both these opinions are not incompatible with the history of the foreign invasion. He says : ' The presence of a Turanian race in Mesopotamia at a remote epoch is no more questioned by most Assyriologists. It does not mean that the whole bulk of the invaders, the entire population that settled in Egypt, was of Turanian origin. It would be contrary to wellestablished historical facts. It is certain that all that remained in Egypt of the Hyksos, in the language, in the worship, in the name of Aamu by which they were called, everything points to a decidedly Semitic influence. But the kings may very well not have been Semites.
How often do we see in Eastern monarchies and even in European states a difference of origin between the ruling class, to which the royal family belongs, and the mass of the people ! We need not leave Western Asia and Egypt ; we find there Turks ruling over nations to the race of which they do not belong, although they have adopted their religion. In the same way as the Turks of Bagdad, who are Finns, now reign over Semites, Turanian kings may have led into Egypt and governed a population of mixed origin where the Semitic element was prevalent. If we consider the mixing up of races which took place in Mesopotamia in remote ages, the invasions which the country had to suffer, the repeated conflicts of which it was the theatre, there is nothing extraordinary that populations coming out of this land should have presented a variety of races and origins. Therefore, I believe that though we cannot derive evidence from ethnological considerations, they do not oppose the opinion stated above that the starting point of the invasion of the Hyksos must be looked for in Mesopotamia, and that the conquest of Egypt by the shepherds was the consequence of the inroads of the Elamites into the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates.
Tūrān (Modern Persian توران) is the Middle Persian name for Central Asia, literally meaning "the land of the Tur". As described below, the original Turanians are an Iranian tribe of the Avesta age. As a people the are one of the two Iranian peoples both descending from the Persian Fereydun but with different domains and often at war with each other.
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