f the encounter. So much the worse that the Theban monarchy of the
Middle Kingdom was overthrown, and Northern Egypt was actually conquered
by the Asiatic foreigners and ruled by a foreign house for several
centuries. Who these conquering Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, were no
recent discovery has told us. An old idea was that they were Mongols. It
was supposed that the remarkable faces of the sphinxes of Tanis, now
in the Cairo Museum, which bore the names of Hyksos kings, were of
Mongolian type, as also those of two colossal royal heads discovered
by M. Naville at Bubastis. But M. Golenischeff has now shown that these
heads are really those of XIIth Dynasty kings, and not of Hyksos at all.
Messrs. Newberry and Garstang have lately endeavoured to show that this
type was foreign, and probably connected with that of the Kheta, or
Hittites, of Northern Syria, who came into prominence as enemies of
Egypt at a later period. They think that the type was introduced into
the Egyptian royal family by Nefret, the queen of Usertsen (Senusret)
II, whom they suppose to have been a Hittite princess. At the same time
they think it probable that the type was also that of the Hyksos, whom
they consider to have been practically Hittites. They therefore revive
the theory of de Cara, which connects the Hyksos with the Hittites and
these with the Pelasgi and Tyrseni.

This is a very interesting theory, which, when carried out to its
logical conclusion, would connect the Hyksos and Hittites racially with
the pre-Hellenic "Minoan" Mycenseans of Greece, as well as with the
Etruscans of Italy. But there is little of certainty in it. It is by no
means impossible that we may eventually come to know that the Hittites
(_Kheta_, the _Khatte_ of the Assyrians) and other tribes of Asia
Minor were racially akin to the "Minoans" of Greece, but the connection
between the Hyksos and the Hittites is to seek. The countenances of the
Kheta on the Egyptian monuments of Ramses II's time have an angular
cast, and so have those of the Tanis sphinxes, of Queen Nefret, of
the Bubastis statues, and the statues of Usertsen (Senusret) III
and Amenemhat III. We might then suppose, with Messrs. Newberry and
Garstang, that Nefret was a Kheta princess, who gave her peculiar racial
traits to her son Usertsen (Senusret) III and his son Amenem-hat, were
it not far more probable that the resemblance between this peculiar
XIIth Dynasty type and the Kheta face is purely fortuitous