The fall of the Government and the victory of the mass is followed by outbreaks of the army and the rise of ambitious soldiers. In Egypt from about 1680 appears the name of the "Hyksos,"[1] a designation with which the historians of the New Empire, who no longer understood or wished to understand the meaning of the epoch, covered up the shame of these years. These Hyksos, there can be no doubt whatever, played the part that the Armenians played in Byzantium; and in the Classical world too, the destinies of the Cimbri and Teutones, would have gone the same way had they defeated Marius and his legions of city canaille; they would have filled the armies of the Triumvirs again and again, and in the end probably set up barbarian chieftains in their place — for the case of Jugurtha shows the lengths to which foreigners dared to go with the Rome of those days. The provenance or constitution of the intruders does not matter — they might be body-guards, insurgent slaves, Jacobins, or purely alien tribes. What does matter is what they were for the Egyptian world in that century of theirs. In the end they set up a state in the Western Delta and built a capital, Auaris, for it.[2] One of their leaders, Khyan by name, who styled himself, not Pharaoh, but "Embracer of the Country" and "prince of the young men" (names as essentially revolutionary as the Consul sine collega or dictator prepetuus of Cæsar's time) a man probably of the stamp of John Tzimisces, ruled over all Egypt and spread his renown as far as Crete and the Euphrates. But after him began a fight of all the districts for the Imperium, and out of that fight Amasis and the Theban dynasty eventually emerged victorious.
For us this time of Contending States began with Napoleon and his violent-arbitrary government by order. His head was the first in our world to make effective the notion of a military and at the same time popular world-domination — something altogether different from the Empire of Charles V and even the British Colonial Empire of his own day. If the nineteenth century has been relatively poor in great wars — and revolutions — and has overcome its worst crises diplomatically by means of congresses, this has been due precisely to the continuous and terrific war-preparedness which has made disputants, fearful at the eleventh hour of the consequences, postpone the definitive decision again and again, and led to the substitution of chess-moves for war. For this is the century of gigantic permanent armies and universal compulsory service. We ourselves are too near to it to see it under this terrifying aspect. In all world-history there is no parallel. Ever since Napoleon, hundreds of thousands, and
- ↑ The Papyrus says: "the archer-folk from without" — that is, the barbarian mercenary troops. To these the native youth attached itself.
- ↑ Glance also at the Negro-state in Irak and the "contemporary" attempts of Spartacus, Sertorius, and Sextus Pompey, and we get a fair idea of the variety of the possibilities. Weill assumes, 1785-1765, the collapse of the Kingdom, a usurper (a general); 1765-1675, numerous small potentates, in the Delta wholly independent; 1675-1633, struggle for unity, especially the rulers of Thebes, with an ever-increasing retinue of dependent rulers, including the Hyksos; 1633, victory of the Hyksos and defeat of the Thebans; 1591-1571, final triumph of the Thebans.
