Heat baked the Canaanite highlands into cracked clay. Shepherds drove their starving flocks south toward the marshlands of the eastern Nile Delta. The river provided the only reliable water source in a region paralyzed by severe drought. Silt deposits turned the riverbanks black. Men carried empty sacks past stone monuments of Egyptian kings.
The settlement zone of Goshen sat roughly 200 miles southwest of Hebron in the Wadi Tumilat. This fertile land corridor stretched 30 miles along an ancient water route connecting the eastern Nile branches to lakes further east. Egyptian state records detail massive grain reserves stored within mudbrick silos measuring up to 24 feet in diameter. Administrators weighed and taxed local harvests to supply the royal treasury during extended dry seasons. Semitic pastoralists regularly crossed the heavily guarded border walls around 1650 b.c. to find surviving pasture for their herds.
Royal overseers established a strict monopoly over the agricultural sector. Starving laborers traded their livestock and eventually their inherited fields for basic seed grain. The state claimed ownership of all arable soil outside the temple complexes. Officials instituted a permanent 20 percent tax on all future crop yields. Farmers surrendered one fifth of their barley and emmer wheat to the local granary outposts.
Hunger transfers the title of the earth from the desperate to the fed.
This state machinery secured the absolute authority of the throne. The newly arrived herdsmen grew wealthy in the delta mud while native farmers worked as sharecroppers on their former estates. The aging leader of the foreign clan saw his death approaching and rejected a burial in the local sand. He demanded his sons carry his bones back to the rocky caves of Canaan. They placed their hands under his thigh to finalize the bargain.