The Second Intermediate Period in Egypt: Hyksos in the north, Thebes in the south

The frame

On the Met's timeline for Egypt, 2000-1000 BCE, the Second Intermediate Period is dated about 1640-1550 BCE and defined as Dynasties 15-16 in Lower Egypt and Dynasty 17 in Upper Egypt. According to the source, Egypt was again ruled by competing dynasties: the north was controlled by the Hyksos, "descendants of people from western Asia who had settled in the eastern Nile Delta", and the Hyksos formed an alliance with the rulers of Kerma in Nubia against the Egyptian dynasty based in Thebes. The period ends when the Theban king Ahmose I reunites Egypt, founding Dynasty 18. The site follows the Met's timeline here, as for the periods before it. Source 1.

Boundaries and overlaps

According to the Tell el-Dabʿa page of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, the site can be identified with certainty as Avaris, capital city of the Hyksos, about 1640-1530 BCE. The start matches the Met's, but the end is twenty years later than the Met's end of the period, about 1550 BCE, and falls in the site's New Kingdom. The range is not trimmed: the article on Avaris is placed in the Second Intermediate Period, and the years 1550-1530 are stated in it as an overlap. According to the same page, the city reached its greatest extent during the 15th Dynasty, and the river branch F3 was already extensively silted up in the late Hyksos period. Sources 2, 1.

On this site

Two articles are placed in this period. "Avaris: the Hyksos capital at Tell el-Dabʿa" describes, after the Austrian institute, a port city between branches of the Nile, and what the description lacks for a discussion of the capital itself. "Dra' Abu el-Naga: the Theban cemetery of Dynasty 17" deals with ten funerary chapels above shaft tombs and the three ways in which they were dated; its source could not be opened in this round, and the article says so. Sources 2, 3.