23 Facts About Kamose

Kamose was the last king of the Theban Seventeenth Dynasty at the end of the Second Intermediate Period.

Kamose is usually ascribed a reign of three years, although some scholars now favor giving him a longer reign of approximately five years.

Kamose was the son of Seqenenre Tao and the brother of Ahmose I, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty.

Kamose's mother is unknown, but is thought to be Ahhotep I Kamose's reign is important for the decisive military initiatives he took against the Hyksos, who had come to rule much of Ancient Egypt.

Kamose's father had begun the initiatives and lost his life in battle with the Hyksos.

Kamose was the final king in a succession of native Egyptian kings at Thebes.

Kamose sought to extend his rule northward over all of Lower Egypt.

Kamose holds the land of the Asiatics; we hold Egypt.

Kamose sought to regain by force what he thought was his by right, namely the kingship of Lower and Upper Egypt.

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 first reached Nefrusy, which was just north of Cusae and was manned by an Egyptian garrison loyal to the Hyksos.

The second stele of Kamose continues Kamose's narrative with an attack on Avaris.

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.

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.

However, it now appears certain that Kamose reigned for one or two more years beyond this date because he initiated a second campaign against the Nubians.

Evidence that Kamose had started a first campaign against the Kushites is affirmed by the contents of Apophis' captured letter where the Hyksos king's plea for aid from the king of Kush is recounted in Kamose's Year 3 Second stela:.

Kamose is choosing these two lands to bring affliction upon them, my land and yours, and he has ravaged them.

Since Kamose's name was recorded first, he would have been the senior coregent.

Donald Redford notes that Kamose was buried very modestly, in an ungilded stock coffin which lacked even a royal uraeus.

The mummy of Kamose is mentioned in the Abbott Papyrus, which records an investigation into tomb robberies during the reign of Ramesses IX, about 400 years after Ahmose's interment.

Kamose erected two stelae in Thebes that seem to tell a consecutive narrative of his defeat of the Hyksos.