The Egyptians called them the Aamu. And, to understand exactly who these Semitic-speaking people were, as I explore in Deciphering the Proto-Sinaitic Script (the following is an excerpt from page 25):
In the course of these years leading up to the execution of the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions in the Middle Kingdom period (sometime after 2000 BC), a large number of Canaanite immigrants made their way into the eastern Nile Delta region, forming settlements under the Egyptian authority. By the 17th century BC, this important influx of people would finally result in the takeover of the eastern Delta by the Canaanites, which in all likelihood was one of the main contributing factors in the political restructuring of Egypt. Previous to this, Egypt had had a centralized rule from the northern capital in the Lisht-Memphis region and, as Daphna Ben-Tor explains, this “change is best explained as resulting from the retreat of the 13th Dynasty rulers to Thebes, and the takeover of the Mediterranean trade by the foreign rulers at Tell el-Dab‘a”.¹¹ So basically, what appears to have occurred is that, initially, when these Canaanite immigrants had started moving into the Delta area, the Egyptian authorities had first attempted to repel these “Asiatics” (Aamu in the Egyptian language, as the Canaanites were called), but then the Egyptian attitude towards them would eventually change. For less than a century following the absorption of the Canaanite influx into the eastern Delta, the Egyptians were by this time not only allowing ‘select’ Canaanite populations to settle in the eastern Delta, but they were also even preoccupying themselves in cultivating relationships with Canaanite city-states in the Mediterranean.¹²
Endnotes
11. Ben-Tor 2009: 27.
12. Goldwasser 2010.
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Halfway between Memphis and Thebes, are the rock tombs of an ancient Aamu village now called Beni Hassan, hewn out of the steep hill on the east side of the Nile.
The above reproduction of a painting from one of their tombs shows us some examples of Aamu figures, Semitic foreigners to Egypt, who migrated to the eastern Nile Delta valley from Canaan sometime around the end of the 12th dynasty, c. 1800 BC.
As I explore at length in my book, many scholars often make the connection between the Aamu presence in ancient Egypt with the biblical narrative (the following is an excerpt from page 26):
In the past, Biblical scholars have pointed out that the Aamu represent "a Semitic tribe exactly like Abraham's people, and that in the patriarch's own day" (John Cunningham Geikie 1881: 316), thus making a possible link between Abraham's sojourns in Egypt with the newly-discovered ancient Aamu presence there. Some of these Aamu Canaanite rulers would play an integral part in the formation of the Hyksos rule over Egypt; having first taken over the Nile Delta area, their rule eventually extending over the whole of Egypt, in what is known as the Hyksos period, identified with the 15th Dynasty (c. 1650–1550 BC) of Egypt. The Hyksos would finally be expelled from Egypt, c. 1550 BC, and there are several scholars (myself included) who like to point out many possible parallels between this forced departure of the Hyksos from Egypt with that of Moses and the Israelite Exodus.
Below: An image showing the entrance to the Beni Hassan Tombs.
Credits: First image is a detail from a Beni Hassan Tomb, from Wikimedia Commons. File:Beni Hassan (Lepsius, BH 3) 03.jpg, CC-PD-Mark. Second image, showing the entrance to the Beni Hassan Tombs, from Wikimedia Commons. File:Grottes de Beni-Hassan (8136405830).jpg, CC-PD-Mark.