The sack of Avaris was only the first step in a series of campaigns needed to secure the unity of Egypt. The sequence of events is not universally agreed, but following the account of Ahmose, son of Ibana, after the Avaris campaign came a campaign to southern Palestine during which Sharuhen was taken. We do not know whether the intention was to destroy the remnants of the Hyksos or to exploit the vacuum they left to push on into Palestine and even as far as Lebanon. There are later references to the importation of cedars of Lebanon and the bullocks of ‘Lenekhu’—a term thought to refer to Phoenicia. Ahmose, son of Ibana, continues, ‘Now when his majesty had slain the nomads of Asia, he sailed south to Khent-hen-nefer (below the second cataract) to destroy the Nubian bowmen.’ We have confirmation that King Ahmose restored (if that were necessary) Egyptian control of Buhen, because a door jamb shows him and his mother offering to Min and Horns (of Buhen) and names a commander of Buhen called Turo.
After Ahmose returned from Nubia, he had to deal with two uprisings. The first was a minor mutiny in which a non-Egyptian (possibly a Nubian ) called Aata brought a small force into Upper Egypt from the north. This may have been no more than a raid for booty, since Aata did not seek to engage the king’s army. He was found and defeated and he and his men were captured alive, two young warriors being given as a reward to Ahmose, son of Ibana. Assuming that Aata was a Nubian, and given that Kerma Nubians served in the army at Avaris and Memphis and disposed of enough wealth to have substantial burials, it is plausible that a group of such Nubians might have attempted to exploit the king’s absence in Nubia to go on a plundering raid into Upper Egypt.
The second uprising was of a different character. It was led by an Egyptian, Teti-an, who 'gathered the malcontents to himself; his majesty slew him; his troop were wiped out’. The seriousness of this rebellion is shown by the severity of its punishment. We can only speculate that the malcontents were those who had, up till then, served Ahmose’s rival, the king of Avaris. The last five years of Ahmose’s reign were devoted to a massive building programme at the great cult centres (Memphis, Karnak, Heliopolis, and, above all, Abydos), and at the northern and southern boundaries of Egypt, Avaris, and Buhen.
The earliest i8th-Dynasty stratum at Tell el-Dab'a has produced discoveries, extraordinary even in the context of this unique site. In the immediate aftermath of the sack, the fortifications and palace of the last Hyksos king were systematically destroyed. Ahmose replaced them with similar fortifications and palatial buildings that were equally short lived and can now be reconstructed only from their foundations and from fragments of wall paintings found in dumps created as the buildings were levelled. The wall paintings are, in style, technique, and motif, Minoan, but there is as yet no consensus among Aegean scholars as to whether they were painted by Minoan artists or by Egyptians imitating them. Hundreds of fragments have been found, but in very poor condition, and it will take years of conservation and study before they can be fully assessed. Nevertheless, their presence in contexts over loo years earlier than the first representations of Cretans in Theban tombs, and earlier than the surviving frescos at Knossos, whose subject matter they share, has revolutionized ideas of the relations between Egypt and Crete.
One of the buildings they came from was a royal palace and the only comparable building of the time is the North Palace at Deir el-Ballas. The few surviving wall paintings from there are utterly different, painted in a simple style similar to that of contemporary tomb paintings. The Tell el-Dab'a frescos seem to owe little to the traditions of Egyptian wall decoration, which go back to the beginning of the Old Kingdom. By analogy with the Knossos frescos, they seem to have been executed to serve a ritual purpose, and are full of symbolic references to the Cretan ruler cult. Bull-leapers and acrobats, associated with motifs of the bull’s head and maze pattern (labyrinth), belong totally to the Aegean world. The varying scales of the frescos, their subject matter and background colour, all indicate that the decorative scheme was extremely complex and spread over not one but a series of buildings. Other frescos, less complex and more clearly imitations of the Minoan style, have been found at Tell Kabri in Palestine. One of their most puzzling features at Tell el-Dab'a is that they appear in a vacuum. There is a small amount of Cretan Kamares ware pottery but it occurs in early I3th-Dynasty strata and there is no continuity in buildings or artefacts between it and the strata of the frescos. Strangest of all, there are no Cretan artefacts associated with the frescos themselves or in the strata from which they originally came.
The discovery of the frescos has revived old ideas, dismissed until now, that Ahmose was an ally of the Cretan kings and may have taken a Cretan princess as a wife. Evidence cited has been a Minoan-style griffin on an axe of Ahmose, and the fact that Ahhotep, the king’s mother, had a title ‘mistress of the Hau-nebut’ that was originally thought to refer to the islands of Greece, although it has recently been argued that this interpretation is implausible. Nevertheless, the frescos prove that Minoans were present at Tell el-Dab'a, whether as artists themselves or as supervisors guiding Egyptian artists.
The questions posed by the frescos inevitably lead to another problem, the date of the eruption of the Thera volcano, since the best preserved frescos found so far are those from the Cycladic island of Thera sealed beneath layers of lava. The eruption is a key event for relating the chronological sequences of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean to each other and to an absolute chronology. Much effort has been expended in attempts to identify the event in Egyptian sources so that it can be dated by regnal years. The Rhind Papyrus’s references to storms, and a stele of Ahmose describing a destructive upheaval, have been produced in the argument, but the most telling evidence so far comes from Tell el-Dab'a. Pumice, identified by analysis as deriving from the Thera volcano, has been found in settlement strata datable to the period from the reign of Amenhotep I until the beginning of that of Tuthmose III. However, the pumice occurs in a workshop where it was being used as raw material, and the context provides only a terminus ante quern, since the pumice could have been collected, from the seashore, for example, at an earlier date, and, in any case, could have lain there for some considerable time. Not all of the pumice derived from Thera: the source of at least one of the samples has been identified as an eruption in Turkey that took place over 100,000 years ago. It is remarkable that no pumice has been found so far in earlier strata at Tell el-Dab'a and no ash (that is, ‘fallout’ from the eruption) has been found at all. Using a combination of evidence, including data from records of ice cores and tree rings, where exceptional atmospheric conditions can sometimes be linked to historical events, it has been suggested that the Thera eruption occurred in 1628 BC. The evidence from Tell el-Dab'a could be interpreted as support for the traditional date, c.1530 bc (within the reign of Ahmose), but much more work needs to be done to clarify the interpretation of the scientific data, and the question must be left open for the present.
Little of Ahmose’s reign was left after his reconquest of Egypt. Many building projects were left unfinished, but the benefits of unification were clear to see. The fine objects from royal burials and lists of donations to the gods of Thebes testify to growing wealth and artistic skill. The fragments of relief from Abydos left to us after the depredations of Ramessid masons show that a style that we can easily recognize as i8th Dynasty had already evolved by the end of his reign.
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