countless thousands on the outlying provinces of the Roman Empire, or as when the hordes of Jingis Khan overran Kashgar and Kharesm—­the contest was too unequal for anything that can be called a struggle to be made.  Egypt collapsed before the invader.  Manetho says that there was no battle; and we can readily understand that in the divided condition of the country, with two or three subordinate dynasties ruling in different parts of the Delta, and another dynasty at Thebes, no army could be levied which could dare to meet the enemy in the field.  The inhabitants fled to their cities, and endeavoured to defend themselves behind walls; but it was in vain.  The walls of the Egyptian cities were rather banks to keep out the inundation than ramparts to repel an enemy.  In a short time the strongholds that resisted were taken, the male population put to the sword, the women and children enslaved, the houses burnt, the temples ruthlessly demolished.  An iconoclastic spirit possessed the conquerors.  The gods and worship of Egypt were hateful to them.  Where-ever the flood passed, it swept away the existing civilization, deeply impregnated as it was with religion; it covered the ground with the debris of temples and shrines, with the fragments of statues and sphinxes; it crushed existing religious usages, and for a time, as it would seem, substituted nothing in their place.  “A study of the monuments,” says M. Francois Lenormant, “attests the reality of the frightful devastations which took place at the first moment of the invasion.  With a solitary exception, all the temples anterior to the event have disappeared, and no traces can be found of them except scattered ruins which bear the marks of a destructive violence.  To say what during these centuries Egypt had to endure in the way of upsetting of her past is impossible.  The only fact which can be stated as certain is, that not a single monument of this desolate epoch has come down to our days to show us what became of the ancient splendour of Egypt under the Hyksos.  We witness under the fifteenth and sixteenth dynasties a fresh shipwreck of Egyptian civilization.  Vigorous as it had been, the impulse given to it by the Usurtasens suddenly stops; the series of monuments is interrupted, and Egypt informs us by her very silence of the calamities with which she was smitten."[15]

It was, fortunately, not the entire country that was overrun.  So far as appears, the actual occupation of Egypt by the Hyksos was confined to the Delta, to the Lower Nile valley, and to the district of the Fayoum.  Elephantine, Thebes, Abydos, escaped the destroyers, and though forced to certain formal acts of submission, to an acknowledgment of the Hyksos suzerainty, and to the payment of an annual tribute, retained a qualified independence.  The Theban monuments of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties were undisturbed.  Even in Lower Egypt there were structures that suffered little or nothing at the conqueror’s