Kamose

He was the son of Seqenenre Tao and the brother of Ahmose I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty. His mother is unknown, but is thought to be Ahhotep I. His reign is important for the decisive military initiatives he took against the Hyksos, who had come to rule much of Ancient Egypt. His father had begun the initiatives and lost his life in battle with the Hyksos. It is thought that his mother, as regent, continued the campaigns after the death of Kamose, and that his full brother made the final conquest of them and united all of Egypt.

Campaigns

Casus Belli

Kamose was the final king in a succession of native Egyptian kings at Thebes. Originally, the Theban Seventeenth dynasty rulers were at peace with the Hyksos kingdom to their north prior to the reign of Seqenenre Tao. They controlled Upper Egypt up to Elephantine and ruled Middle Egypt as far north as Cusae. Kamose sought to extend his rule northward over all of Lower Egypt. This apparently was met with much opposition by his courtiers. It appears that at some point, these princes in Thebes had achieved a practical modus vivendi with the later Hyksos rulers, which included transit rights through Hyksos-controlled Middle and Lower Egypt and pasturage rights in the fertile Delta. Kamose's records on the Carnarvon Tablet (in the text also parallelled in the Thebes stelae of Kamose) relate the misgivings of this king's council to the prospect of a war against the Hyksos:

See, all are loyal as far as Cusae. We are tranquil in our part of Egypt. Elephantine [at the First Cataract] is strong, and the middle part (of the land) is with us as far as Cusae. Men till for us the finest of their lands. Our cattle pasture in the Papyrus marshes. Corn is sent for our swine. Our cattle are not taken away... He holds the land of the Asiatics; we hold Egypt..."

However, Kamose's presentation here may be propaganda designed to embellish his reputation since his predecessor, Seqenenre Tao, had already been engaged in conflict with the Hyksos (for unknown reasons), only to fall in battle. Kamose sought to regain by force what he thought was his by right, namely the kingship of Lower and Upper Egypt. The king thus responds to his council:

I should like to know what serves this strength of mine, when a chieftain in Avaris, and another in Kush, and I sit united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his slice of Egypt, and I cannot pass by him as far as Memphis... No man can settle down, when despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics. I will grapple with him, that I may rip open his belly! My wish is to save Egypt and to smite the Asiatic!"

There is no evidence to support Pierre Montet's assertion that Kamose's move against the Hyksos was sponsored by the priesthood of Amun as an attack against the Seth-worshippers in the north (i.e., a religious motive for the war of liberation). The Carnarvon Tablet does state that Kamose went north to attack the Hyksos by the command of Amun, but this is common to virtually all royal inscriptions of Egyptian history, and should not be understood as the specific command from this deity. Kamose states his reasons for an attack on the Hyksos was nationalistic pride.

Northern Campaign

In Kamose's third year, he embarked on his military campaign against the Hyksos by sailing north out of Thebes on the Nile. He first reached Nefrusy, which was just north of Cusae and was manned by an Egyptian garrison loyal to the Hyksos. A detachment of Medjay troops attacked the garrison and overran it. The Carnarvon Tablet recounted this much of the campaign, but breaks off there. Nonetheless, Kamose's military strategy probably can be inferred. As Kamose moved north, he could easily take small villages and wipe out small Hyksos garrisons, but if a city resisted, he could cut it off from the rest of the Hyksos kingdom simply by taking over the city directly to the north. This kind of tactic probably allowed him to travel very quickly up the Nile. The second stele of Kamose (found in Thebes) continues Kamose's narrative with an attack on Avaris. Because it does not mention Memphis or other major cities to the north, it has long been suspected that Kamose never did attack Avaris, but instead recorded what he intended to do. Kim Ryholt recently has argued that Kamose probably never advanced farther than the Anpu or Cynopolis Nome in Middle Egypt (around the Faiyum and the city of Saka) and did not enter either the Nile Delta, nor Lower Egypt proper.

According to the second stele, after moving north of Nefrusy, Kamose's soldiers captured a courier bearing a message from the Hyksos king Awoserre Apopi at Avaris to his ally, the ruler of Kush, requesting the latter's urgent support against Kamose. Kamose promptly ordered a detachment of his troops to occupy and destroy the Bahariya Oasis in the western desert, which controlled the north–south desert route. Kamose, called "the Strong" in this text, ordered this action to protect his rearguard. Kamose then sailed southward, back up the Nile to Thebes, for a joyous victory celebration after his military success against the Hyksos in pushing the boundaries of his kingdom northward from Cusae past Hermopolis through to Sako, which now formed the new frontier between the seventeenth dynasty of Thebes and the fifteenth dynasty Hyksos state.

Ryholt notes that Kamose never claims in his second stela to attack anything in Avaris itself, only "anything belonging to Avaris (nkt hwt-w'rt, direct genitive) i.e., the spoil [of war] which his army has carried off" as lines 7–8 and 15 of Kamose's stela—the only references to Avaris here—demonstrate:

Line 7–8: I placed the brave guard-flotilla to patrol as far as the desert-edge with the remainder (of the fleet) behind it, as if a kite were preying upon the territory of Avaris.

Line 15: I have not overlooked anything belonging to Avaris, because it (the area which Kamose was plundering) is empty.

The Second Stela of Kamose is well known for recounting that a Hyksos messenger was captured with a letter from Apophis—appealing for aid from the king of Kush against Kamose—while travelling through the western desert roads to Nubia. The final evidence that this king's military activities affected only the Cynopolite nome, and not the city of Avaris itself, is the fact that when Kamose returned the letter to Apophis, he dispatched it to Atfih which is about a hundred miles south of Avaris. Atfih, hence, formed either the new border or a no-man's land between the now shrunken Hyksos kingdom and Kamose's expanding seventeenth dynasty state. Furthermore, Kamose states in his second stele that his intention in returning the letter was for the Hyksos messenger to inform Apophis of the Theban king's victories "in the area of Cynopolis which used to be in his possession." This information confirms that Kamose confined his activities to this Egyptian nome and never approached the city of Avaris itself in his Year 3.

First Nubian Campaign

Kamose is known to have campaigned against the Kushites prior to his third year since the Hyksos king directly appeals to his Kushite counterpart to attack his Theban rival and avenge the damage which Kamose had inflicted upon both their states. It is unlikely that Kamose had the resources to simultaneously defeat the Kushites to the south and then inflict a serious setback on the Hyksos to the north in just one year over a front-line that extended over several hundred kilometres.