But we are without any clue as to their real name, language, or origin. The writers of classical times were unable to come to an agreement on these questions: some confounded the Hyksôs with the Phoenicians, others regarded them as Arabs.* Modern scholars have put forward at least a dozen contradictory hypotheses on the matter. The Hyksôs have been asserted to have been Canaanites, Elamites, Hittites, Accadians, Scythians. The last opinion found great favour with the learned, as long as they could believe that the sphinxes discovered by Mariette represented Apôphis or one of his predecessors. As a matter of fact, these monuments present all the characteristics of the Mongoloid type of countenance--the small and slightly oblique eyes, the arched but somewhat flattened nose, the pronounced cheekbones and well-covered jaw, the salient chin and full lips slightly depressed at the corners.** These peculiarities are also observed in the three heads found at Damanhur, in the colossal torso dug up at Mit-Farês in the Fayum, in the twin figures of the Nile removed to the Bulaq Museum from Tanis, and upon the remains of a statue in the collection at the Villa Ludovisi in Rome. The same foreign type of face is also found to exist among the present inhabitants of the villages scattered over the eastern part of the Delta, particularly on the shores of Lake Menzaleh, and the conclusion was drawn that these people were the direct descendants of the Hyksôs.
* Manetho takes them to be Phoenicians, but he adds that certain writers thought them to be Arabs: Brugsch favours this latter view, but the Arab legend of a conquest of Egypt by Sheddâd and the Adites is of recent origin, and was inspired by traditions in regard to the Hyksôs current during the Byzantine epoch; we cannot, therefore, allow it to influence us. We must wait before expressing a definite opinion in regard to the facts which Glaser believes he has obtained from the Minoan inscriptions which date from the time of the Hyksôs.
** Mariette, who was the first to describe these curious monuments, recognised in them all the incontestable characteristics of a Semitic type, and the correctness of his view was, at first, universally admitted. Later on Hamy imagined that he could distinguish traces of Mongolian influences, and Er. Lenormant, and then Mariette himself came round to this view; it has recently been supported in England by Flower, and in Germany by Virchow.