Ahmose, rebelling against Egypt’s Hyksos overlords, weakens…

Pharaoh Ahmose I, following his capture of Avaris, pursues the enemy across the Sinai Peninsula to Sharuhen, near Gaza, a Hyksos stronghold in Palestine.

He reduces the city after a three-year siege, after which the site is abandoned, marking the sudden end of Canaanite influence there.

Apopis I, the last great Hyksos king of Egypt, who reigned from about 1585 BE to 1542 BCE, had initially controlled most of Egypt but is driven back northward to the vicinity of his capital in the Nile River delta by the successive attacks of the Theban pharaohs.

Apopis is attested in Upper Egypt by stone fragments from Al-Gabalayn that show his name surrounded by the sun disks of the solar god, Re.

A story concerning Apopis and the Theban king Seqenenre shows that the Thebans were vassals of the Hyksos ruler.

Egyptians and Hyksos peacefully coexisted for some time, as the Thebans grazed their cattle in the Nile delta, which was ruled by the Hyksos.

Apopis quarreled with Seqenenre, and war may have erupted.

The Theban king's mummy displays terrible head wounds.

His successor, Kamose, declares a Middle Egyptian town as his northern frontier.

He carries on the war, as is shown by two monuments from Thebes, and drives the Hyksos northward to the vicinity of Memphis (near Cairo).

A Theban fleet also sails by Avaris, Apopis' delta capital.

Apopis reactes by calling on his ally to the south, the Cushite prince, to attack the Thebans in their rear.

His messenger is intercepted, however, and his plan is thwarted by Kamose.

Apopis dies some time soon after this raid, but before the final Hyksos expulsion.

He honored the sun god, Re, and had many collaborators in Middle and Lower Egyp, contrary to later Egyptian propaganda.

Nerik, a city to the north of the Hittite capitals Hattusa and Sapinuwa, had, like Hattusa, been founded by Hattic language speakers; in the Hattusa archive, tablet CTH 737 records a Hattic incantion for a festival there.

Under Hattusili I, who reigned from about 1650 BCE to around 1620 BCE, the Nesian-speaking Hittites had taken over Nerik, where they maintain a spring festival called Puruli in honor of its storm god, who is the son of Wurusemu, sun goddess of Arinna.

In it, the celebrants recites the myth of the slaying of Illuyanka.

The weather god is associated or identified with Mount Zaliyanu near Nerik, responsible for assigning rain to the city.

Under the rule of Hantili, Nerik is ruined, very possibly by the barbarian Kaskas, and …

…the Hittites have to relocate the Puruli festival to Hattusa.

Assyria has been ruled for a century by vassal kings dependent on the Babylonians.

Babylon having fallen to the Kassites, the Hurrians dominate the northern region, including Assur.

The influx of Aryan Kassites from the north increasingly threatens the Babylonian Empire.

The Kassites dislodge the Amorites about 1531 BCE to become the new political masters of Babylonia.

The Kassites, who probably constitute a very small ruling class, aim to continue earlier Mesopotamian traditions as much as possible.

Like the Sumerians before them, the Kassites speak a language not related to any other (insufficiently recorded and only poorly understood by modern scholars).

Like the Hittites, Hurrians, and Mitanni, the Kassites adopt cuneiform script to write their own language.

The Babylonian Empire engages in regular trade with city-states to the west; with Babylonian officials or troops sometimes passing to Syria and Canaan, and Amorite merchants operating throughout Mesopotamia.

The Babylonian monarchy's western connections have remained strong.

An Amorite named Abi-ramu or Abram had been the father of a witness to a deed dated to the reign of Hammurabi's grandfather; Ammi-Ditana, great-grandson of Hammurabi, still titled himself "king of the land of the Amorites".

Ammi-Ditana's father and son also bear Canaanite names: Abi-Eshuh and Ammi-Saduqa (or Ammisaduqa, Ammizaduga).

Samsu-Ditana (Samsuditana) succeeds Ammi-Saduqaas king of Babylon in 1626 BCE.

The well-disciplined armies of Babylonia had conquered the city-states of Isin, Elam, and Uruk, and the strong Kingdom of Mari, and the rule of Babylon has been obeyed as far as the shores of the Mediterranean.

But Mesopotamia has no natural, defensible boundaries, making it vulnerable to attack, and the Babylonian Empire suffers increasingly from incursions by Kassites invading from the north.

Huzziya I, who succeeds Hittite king Ammunu in about 1530, may be his son; he rules for about five years.

By the time his successor, Telepinu, ascends throne in about 1525, the Hittite Empire has contracted to its core territories, having long since lost all of its conquests made in former times under Hattusili I and Mursili I—to Arzawa in the West, Mitanni in the East, the Kaskas in the North, and Kizzuwatna in the South.

Mursili I plunders Babylon around 1531 BCE, leaving it to the further depredations of the Kassites and other groups of which little is known, notably the Dynasty of the Sealand, based in the far south, who fill the power vacuum left when the Hittites withdraw.

Mursili defeats the Hurrians on his return march from Babylon, bringing with him captives and possessions of Babylon to Hattusa.

Following the death of Mursili in 1526 BCE, the Hittite kingdom will experience several decades of internal strife, punctuated by political insurrection, royal assassinations, and palace intrigues.

As a result of the ongoing chaos, the Hittites will lose control of much of their previously acquired territory in Anatolia and Syria.

The culture of Avaris, which has become a huge city, is overwhelmingly Canaanite by the time of Egypt's Fifteenth Dynasty, as the reign of Hyksos kings is known, evincing a long and gradual development of Canaanite power in the delta, and a peaceful takeover of power there.

The Hyksos traditionally also form the sixteenth dynasty, although those rulers are probably only vassals of the fifteenth dynasty kings.

Avaris, which becomes the Hyksos capital about 1530, is sacked nine years later by Ahmose, the victorious founder of the native Eighteenth Dynasty who completes the war of liberation begun by his kinsman Kamose.

Having expelled the Hyksos, Ahmose institutes the New Kingdom policy of conquest in Palestine and Syria.

The once-great Delta city of Avaris fades into obscurity, and the towns of Canaan are on the defensive.