"The fact that much of the uniquely Spartan political vocabulary can be plausibly derived from Late Egyptian is linked to the tradition that the Spartan lawgiver Lykourgos visited the East and Egypt to study their institutions. Moreover, the notion of Egyptian cultural influence there in the 9th and 8th centuries is strengthened by the strikingly Egyptian appearance of early Spartan art. All these link up with the Spartan kings’ belief in their Heraklid—hence Egyptian or Hyksos—ancestry; and would thus explain such anomalies in the Aryan Model as the building of a pyramid at the Menelaion, the Spartan ‘national’ shrine, and the letter one of the last Spartan kings wrote to the High Priest in Jerusalem, claiming kinship with him."