Around 1550 BCE the Theban Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Dynasty kings, Kamose and then Ahmose I, ended the rule of the West Asian Fifteenth Dynasty that had governed the eastern Nile Delta from Avaris for roughly a century, and pursued its forces into southern Canaan at Sharuhen. New Kingdom Egyptian texts present this as the violent expulsion of foreign occupiers, and Manetho's much later account gives a treaty departure of 240,000 people. Archaeology at Tell el-Dab'a, however, indicates that the Hyksos rulers emerged from a West Asian community that had been settling the Delta gradually for centuries rather than from an invasion, that no destruction horizon marks the transition, and that people of West Asian material culture went on living at the site afterwards. The episode is included here because a state ended a rival polity and Egyptian sources describe a forced removal, but the scale of any actual population transfer is not established, and the 'expulsion' narrative served the legitimising purposes of the New Kingdom monarchy.
The Theban rulers Kamose and Ahmose I made war on the West Asian ('Hyksos') Fifteenth Dynasty ruling the eastern Nile Delta from Avaris, and later Egyptian tradition recorded the expulsion of its population
There is no census. Karl Butzer's reconstruction from cultivated floodplain area and settlement density in Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt gives roughly 2.9 million for early New Kingdom Egypt, against about 1.6-2 million for the Middle Kingdom. The population of the Hyksos-ruled eastern Delta is not separately reconstructible, though excavation at Tell el-Dab'a suggests Avaris itself held on the order of 25,000-30,000 people.
No usable death toll exists. Egyptian royal texts describe fighting and captives at Avaris and Sharuhen but give no figures, and excavation has produced no evidence of mass violence at Avaris in this period.
Egypt