At the end of the Early Bronze Age, movements of people led to the abandonment of settlements, with the reasons—political, economic, ecological, or social—remaining partly mysterious. Although regional clusters are often hard to identify, the "Greater Levantine Area" was interconnected through trade networks. At Tell el-Dabʻa/Avaris, a significant harbor town and trade center in the Middle Bronze Age, diverse foreign contacts are evident in the material culture. Current research suggests that the elite inhabitants of Avaris likely originated from northernmost Syria and northern Mesopotamia, as indicated by similar religious and funerary practices. This volume presents papers from two workshops organized by the ERC Advanced Grant: "The Enigma of the Hyksos," led by Manfred Bietak during the ASOR Conference in Boston (November 2017) and the ICAANE Conference in Munich (April 2018). The workshops aimed to enhance understanding of Western Asiatic populations settling in Egypt's eastern Delta from the late Middle Kingdom to the early New Kingdom, focusing on their origins and migration patterns through comparative cultural studies and bio-archaeological methods.
