READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER XIV

THE RESTORATION OF EGYPT

I.

THE XXVIth DYNASTY: THE GREEKS

BEFORE opening the new chapter of Egyptian history that begins about 650 BC, we should take a brief backward glance over the period that has elapsed since the death of Osorkon II, two hundred years before. We have seen that the spirit of tribal chieftainship was introduced into Egypt anew by the Libyan chiefs, the ‘great chiefs of Ma’ and the others, who possessed themselves of the rich lands of the Nile in the time of the XXIst Dynasty. For a century the development of this spirit was checked by the rise of a royal house, that of the XXIInd Dynasty, from among their number; but when, after the reign of Osorkon II, the old division between south and north re­asserted itself, full rein was given to the particularist and disruptive tendencies of the Libyan chiefs, especially in the broad lands of the Delta and Middle Egypt, where they could be more easily asserted than in the confined valley to the southward, and where the Libyan element was more potent than in the south. Accordingly, we have seen the disintegration of Egypt, and its partition among ‘the wearers of the feather’ (the Libyan chiefs), even involving the appearance, unknown since the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, of rival local pretenders to Pharaonic dignity (the ‘wearers of the uraeus’). This caused the invasion of Piankhi, and it handed over Egypt to be the prize of Ethiopians and Assyrians, finally bringing upon her the catastrophe of a new Hyksos invasion, a new conquest by Asiatics who despised her gods and defiled her temples.

The terrible experience of this time had a curious result in the minds of the common people. To them the age, which to us seems a mere welter of degenerate anarchy and senseless bloodshed, was one of heroic achievement to be celebrated in contemporary ballads and handed down in song and story. It has usually been so in the history of the world. Periods of unintelligent and barbarous petty quarrelling, killing and absence of controlling authority have generally been transfigured in legend as days of romantic chivalry. So now the intrigues and struggles of the Delta-dynasts of the period 750—650 BC with one another and with the Ethiopian kings and the Assyrian foreigners were celebrated in romances, apparently first written down in the Ptolemaic period, four centuries later, and still current as popular literature in Roman times. Chief among these may be mentioned the story of the Holy Boat of Amon and the Thirteen Asiatics, and that of the Fight for the Armour of the King Inaros. The thirteen Asiatics who seized the Holy Boat of Amon with the help of a priest of Buto in the Delta are evidently a reminiscence of the Assyrians who possessed themselves of Thebes in alliance with the traitorous dynasts of the Delta, and their final rout with the help of ‘Min-neb-mai, Prince of Elephantine’, represents the struggle of the south under the leadership of the Ethiopian kings.

It is most interesting to find that the historical prince Pedubastet (the Putubishti of the Assyrians) of Tanis, figures in this tale as well as in that of the Fight for the Armour, where also figure Pakruru of Pisopdu, Ziha, and a Pimai who is probably the Puaima (Purema) of the Assyrian inscriptions. Their names were handed down as those of heroes, and, as a matter of historical fact, Pakruru was one of the most energetic enemies of the Assyrians. The story of the Armour of Inaros, in which the mighty Syrian warrior Mentu-Baal represents the Assyrians, has been contaminated by tales of the later Delta-king Inaros, who in the fifth century b.c. headed the national rising against the Persians as the older Delta-kings had fought against the Assyrians.

The whole ‘Petubastis-saga’ forms a most interesting footnote to history. Tales were current in later days, and probably in his own time also, about Psamatik (Psammetichus). Thus, there is that which Herodotus tells, how he poured his libation from his brazen helmet, instead of a golden bowl, and how he incurred the wrath of his eleven fellow-kings of the ‘Dodekarchy’, on account of the oracle that foretold that whoever among them should offer a libation from a brazen bowl should be sole king of Egypt. And the story goes on to relate how he, though banished to the marshes of the Delta, received the oracle of Buto that ‘vengeance should come from the sea, when the brazen men should appear’, and this was fulfilled by the arrival of the Ionian and Carian pirates in their brazen armour who, civilly entreated by him, assisted him to gain the regal power and so fulfilled also the oracle of the brazen bowl. Here we have a popular version of the fact of the ‘Dodekarchy’ of Delta dynasts, of whom Psammetichus was one, and of his obtaining the sole royal power; it is a valuable hint of the aid which very probably was in fact given him by the Ionian and Carian mercenaries, whom Gyges sent, and who acted as his huscarls and guards of his royalty when he had attained the crown and the Assyrians had departed.

The name Psamatiko or Psamatik, being probably of Libyan origin like the names of other contemporary chieftains, would be meaningless to the Egyptians. But the tale of the brazen bowl may perhaps be connected with some popular belief that it was derived from words which, written in demotic script, could mean ‘wine­seller.’ The ascription of the ‘Labyrinth’ of Hawara by Herodotus to the Dodekarchy is interesting, since Hawara is close to Heracleopolis, which was the traditional centre of the Libyan families and in some sense the chief city of Egypt at this period. The princes of Hnes and the other dodekarchs were better remembered in the fifth century BC than the Xllth Dynasty king Amenemhet III, who really built the Labyrinth.

The Ionians, as well as the Carians and Lydians, now undoubtedly appear in force in Egypt both as warriors and traders, and the history of the XXVIth Dynasty is largely bound up with that of their settlements at the Fort of the Milesians (Naucratis, to which we have already referred) and Daphnae, and of the relations between them and the Pharaohs and their people. The first settlement of the Greek traders from Miletus is said by Strabo to have been made ‘in the time of Psammetichus’, which should mean about 650 BC; but it is probable that the phrase is but a vague one, and can be stretched to cover the preceding half-century or more, and that ‘the Fort of the Milesians’ may have been built at least as early as 700, if not still earlier (about 750), even before the time of Tefnakhte, whose power must have been due largely to wealth derived from the trade with Greece. In confirmation of this may be adduced the statement of Athenaeus that, according to Polycharmus of Naucratis, a certain merchant of Naucratis named Herostratus, who traded with Cyprus, dedicated a statue of Aphrodite in the Naucratite temple of that goddess as early as the twenty-third Olympiad (688 BC). Dates in stories of this kind are always doubtful, but this date does point to a tradition that Naucratis existed as early as the first half of the seventh century, at least; and the original ‘Fort of the Milesians’ must have been considerably more ancient

Greek pirates were already known on the coasts of the Delta before that, as is shown by the reference in the Odyssey, to some ‘king’ repelling in person an unimportant raid of sea-rovers. This ‘king’ would be one of the Delta kinglets, and, in the present writer’s opinion, the passage is probably no earlier than, say, the beginning of the eighth century, when such conditions existed; for though there were pirates in the days of the ‘Peoples of the Sea’, the king then could not have been on the spot so soon. Traders and pirates were more or less one; and by the time of the accession of Psammetichus, the Naucratis that succeeded the Fort of the Milesians not far from the royal city of Sais must have grown into a considerable settlement. The kings of the XXVIth Dynasty no doubt continued to derive considerable profit from this trading-mart, exchanging the products of their estate with the strangers from over sea, and deriving from this some of the wealth which had enabled the Saite princes to hire mercenaries and take the important position which was recognized by Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal.

Psammetichus developed the use of his ‘brazen men’ by establishing camps of them, one at Marea near Kanobos, the other on the opposite eastern border of the Delta, the ‘tents’ which became the important Ionian settlement of Daphnae (Tahpanhes, the modern Tell Dafnah or Defenneh). It was at the latter place that Petrie discovered that store of fragments of Greek pottery which proved so important for archaeology, because they must all date between 650 and c. 565 BC, when Amasis abolished the camp and concentrated the Greeks at Naucratis. His discovery of and excavations at Naucratis (the modern Tell Nebireh), supplemented by Hogarth’s later investigations, have told us much of the later buildings of Naucratis, erected after the synoikismos and refoundation of Amasis. Its peculiar constitution no doubt existed already under Psammetichus. It was not a colony, but a trading factory governed by its own magistrates, who were ‘chosen by the different states which contributed to the common treasury and participated in the common city-hall, the Helleneion, just as now at Shanghai the European communities combine in club and municipality’. Like Marea in the west, Daphnae in the east was a purely military camp in the isthmus of Suez, corresponding to Pelusium in the north much as Ismailiya or Kantara does to Port Said today.

The forts and mercenaries combined effectively, we cannot doubt, with the gifts of Psammetichus to stop the flood of Scythian invasion which between 630 and 625 overran Asia, having previously destroyed the Cimmerians. Like the Philistines who were stopped by Ramses III at the gates of Egypt, the Scyths were baulked by the Egyptian defences which only Assyrian engineers could deal with, and whether or not they settled in Palestine, they at least gave their name to the important and ancient fortress of Bethshan (Scythopolis), which five cen­turies before had been seized by the Philistines after their defeat of Saul.

The defence of the far south of his kingdom Psammetichus entrusted partly to Egyptians, and we hear from Herodotus the story of how these troops at Syene deserted into Ethiopia in spite of the king’s efforts to stop them. The explanation of Diodorus that these deserters (or Asmakh as Herodotus calls them) deserted from jealousy of the privileged position of the Ionian mercenaries as the king’s guards, is feasible enough. The story could, however, also be explained as referring to a momentarily successful attack of Tanutamon or one of his immediate suc­cessors on the southern frontier, which resulted in the capture of the garrison of Syene and its removal into Ethiopia. The story in Polyaenus that Psammetichus attacked king Tementhes with a body of Carian mercenaries certainly refers to Psammetichus I, as Tementhes is evidently Tanutamon; but the event recorded need not have been more than the expulsion of Tanutamon from Thebes. We need not ascribe to his ‘brazen men’ the supposed Lydian inscriptions noted by Sayce at Wadi Haifa, as they may simply be graffiti of merchants. Moreover, the famous Greek inscription at Abu Simbel must undoubtedly be referred to another and later expedition, recorded also at Karnak, in the reign of Psammetichus II, which did not proceed beyond Abu Simbel.

In fact, relations with Nubia were peaceful, and in the temple of Mut ‘in Ishru’ at Karnak is a stele commemorating the return of the admiral and governor Simto-Tefnakhte from Nubia with rich gifts and an embassy, apparently, from the Amon-priests of Napata to those of Thebes. The ‘ship of Amon’ came first in the solemn procession, followed by the admiral in his flagship, ‘the Great Ship of Sais’. It has been suggested that the origin of the Jewish colony which we find at Elephantine in the fifth century BC is to be sought in a body of mercenaries, sent there with his other troops, by Psammetichus. The suggestion is interesting, as it is known that Palestinian mercenaries were employed in Egypt at this time. Others, however, ascribe the settlement to Psamatik II.

The Ethiopians do not seem to have attempted to recover Thebes. It remained peacefully united to the rest of Egypt, ruled by Mentumehet and the stewards of the ‘Divine Adoratrix’, under the supervision of Simto-Tefnakhte, son of Pediesi. He was the governor of Patoris at Heracleopolis, and also bore the offices of Captain of the fleet and Admiral of the Nile flotilla, in succession to his father. Thebes was reconciled to the Saite rule by the solemn adoption of the king’s daughter, Nitocris, by the High-priestess in 655. She was solemnly escorted from Sais to Thebes by Simto-Tefnakhte and his fleet, the admiral no doubt leading the way in his ‘Great Ship of Sais.’ The king, however, built little at Thebes, and probably was rarely there. Most of the monuments of his reign were in the north, and he was buried at Sais.

II.

EGYPT AND ASIA

We know little of internal events during this reign. In the north the peace was kept by the fear of the foreign guards, and the successors of the Dodekarchs meekly accepted the position of ordinary nobles. In the south the ships of the governor of Heracleopolis probably acted as a police patrol on the Nile, while the still-existing negro police, or Madjoi, and the garrison of Syene were available for the quelling of any local disturbances. Foreign affairs were, however, a matter of moment. The fact of invasion and conquest by the new Hyksos, as the Assyrians must have seemed to be, had burnt itself into the Egyptian brain, and policy as well as military arrangements were directed with the sole aim of keeping out the Asiatics. A revenge upon Asia like that of the Pharaohs of the XVIIIth Dynasty was impossible: Egypt was too weak now, the Asiatics were too strong. Indeed, the policy which had insured to Psammetichus the kingship, and had preserved Egypt from further outrage, was one of subservience, more or less, to Assyria. But as time went on his position in regard to Ashurbanipal must have altered sensibly from one of hardly disguised subject-alliance to one of a frank alliance of equals, in which however the main obligation was on the side of Egypt. The Pharaoh owed his position to Assyria, and he did not forget it. Till the end of his life he was the faithful ally of Assyria, and we have the extremely significant fact that when Asia had been shaken and her political face altered by the Scythian invasion Psammetichus appears as actively intervening in the interest of Assyria.

Certainly, it was to his own interest to bolster up the trembling Assyrian power: from Assyria he could confidently expect peace, but from her successors, what? It is in this sense that the present writer would interpret that mysterious siege of Ashdod, which, according to Herodotus, lasted twenty-nine years: almost the same number—it may be noticed—as that which he assigns to the duration of the Scythian domination of Hither Asia. The Scythians in their retreat from the Egyptian border took Askalon and wrecked the temple of Astarte. It is probable that they did a good deal more than this, and that it was at their hands that Philistia suffered something of the desolation that is referred to at this time by the contemporary prophet Zephaniah. But that the Egyptians were also responsible is definitely indicated by Herodotus, and this story may be regarded as re­ferring to an attempt by Psammetichus to reduce to order either the Scythians in Philistia or the Philistines themselves after the barbarian invasion had abolished Assyrian control. This would be done probably in the nominal interest of Assyria, and certainly in friendly concert with her, though the result would be to restore the old Egyptian control. Ashdod, taken by the Scythians was probably again taken by the Egyptians after a lengthy blockade which, however, can hardly have gone on, as Herodotus reports, for twenty-nine years. The time probably has some reference to the domination of the Scyths; unless it is to be rejected as an absurdity, although allowance must be made for the inexperience of the Ionians and the Egyptians in siege-operations, in contrast to the Assyrians, who had developed siegecraft into an art.

Josiah of Judah now re-established the independence of his kingdom, and although this was to bid defiance to Assyria, he does not seem as yet to have meant hostilities with Egypt: in fact he seems to have sought Egyptian friendship, but without success. Psammetichus, too, did not as yet push his arms beyond Philistia, and Gaza presumably now remained in the possession of Egypt. Accordingly Egypt was secure in the domination of her Palestinian glacis, and did not seek to rule the hill-country, in her own interest or Assyria’s. It was not long before this cautious policy had to be given up. Babylonia, after the deaths of Ashurbanipal and his nominee Kandalanu (626—5), had become not only independent in fact as well as name, but under Nabopolassar rapidly developed into an active and dangerous foe of Assyria. In the north the Umman-manda (Scyths and other associated tribes) were a daily peril to Nineveh itself, and the Medes under their king Uvakhshatra (Cyaxares) were girding themselves up to dispute the inheritance of Ashur with the Babylonians. Assyria was directly threatened now. Psammetichus, under compulsion of his ancient obligation, consequently felt himself bound to assist Assyria and stave off her destruction, and in his old age to muster armies and send them into Asia against the Babylonian.

We now know something of the true story of the destruction of Nineveh and of the part which Egypt took in the events which led up to it from a fragment of a contemporary Babylonian chronicle of Nabopolassar’s reign, copied perhaps a century later under the Persians. Here Egypt appears definitely as the ally of Assyria against Babylonia and the Medes. We now know, too, from a fragment of annals in the British Museum that Nabopolassar began his struggle with dying Assyria as soon as he succeeded Kandalanu, and that ten years later he had not yet finally triumphed over the Assyrian garrisons and partisans. His power, however, increased steadily. In 616, when the newly-discovered record begins to shed its light on this period, he had invaded the region of the middle Euphrates, but the appearance of an Egyptian army moving southwards from Syria along the river caused him to retreat. In the following year he attacked along the Tigris, failed to capture Ashur and retreated to Tekrit, pursued by the Assyrian king Sin-Shar-Ishkun, who endeavoured to storm Tekrit, equally without success. In 614 Cyaxares and the Medes took Ashur, and when Nabopolassar and his army appeared on the scene, as he shortly did, he found the Mede in possession. A treaty of alliance was concluded at Ashur between the two kings, and in 612 Nineveh fell before their joint arms. ‘By the bank of the Tigris they marched against Nineveh: a mighty assault they made upon the city, and in the month of Ab ... a great havoc of the chief men was made. At that time Sin-Shar-Ishkun, king of Assyria ... The spoil of the city, a quantity beyond counting, they plundered, and turned the city into a mound and a ruin’. The fate of Sin-Shar-Ishkun (Sarakos) was no doubt mentioned, but the tablet is here broken away. Very probably the legend that he consumed himself in the fire of his palace, like Shamash-Shum-Ukin at Babylon before him, is true.

But Assyria was not dead, though Nineveh and her last king had gone down to Sheol. A certain Ashur-Uballit, who may have been a younger brother of Ashurbanipal, and was high-priest of Harran, was proclaimed king there, and reigned precariously till in 610 the city was taken by the Scyths. Ashur-Uballit escaped across the Euphrates and sought the assistance of Egypt, who, so far as is known, had done nothing to help for six years. Possibly Psammetichus had warily determined to give no more help to a dying cause. At all events at this juncture he died (609). His son and successor Niku (Necho) was of a more warlike temper. He set his troops (probably largely foreign mercenaries) in motion: Ashur-Uballit gathered his remnant together, and an Assyrian-Egyptian army advanced to the recapture of Harran, which, however, was not effected, in spite of the defeat and massacre of a Babylonian garrison (probably at Carchemish: they seem to have been thrown down from the castle bluff into the river). Harran was defended successfully, probably by a Scythian garrison, and the chronicle ends when Nabopolassar is advancing to its relief. In the next year, 608, occurred the personal expedition of Necho, in the course of which the quixotic effort of Josiah of Judah in favour of the rising star of Babylon was defeated at Me­giddo. On his way north after Megiddo, Necho captured Kadesh (Kadytis) on the Orontes and, in token of his gratitude for the aid given by his Ionian mercenaries, dedicated his corselet in the temple of Apollo at Branchidae.

After the fall of Harran (610), Necho could do little more than attempt to succour the remnant of Assyria, especially now that the positions were reversed. Assyria was a suppliant, and there might be a prospect of defeating Babylon, now become too powerful. Necho probably marched himself in 608 BC because in the previous year the army that had advanced to Harran was no doubt eventually defeated by Nabopolassar and thrown back across the Euphrates. Ashur-Uballit had possibly perished, and with him Assyria. The failure at Harran brought Necho himself into the field, apparently with success, for it is probable that the defeat of Josiah at Megiddo was followed by that of Nabopolassar in 608, unless indeed the Babylonian, warned by Josiah’s fate, warily kept aloof until three years later he felt able to strike with success. When the king himself came upon the scene it was no longer to help Assyria, which had ceased to exist, but to secure part of the spoil for himself—there was now a prospect of restoring the Syrian empire of Thutmose and Ramses.

Carchemish was occupied till, in 605, Necho was defeated by the prince Nebuchadrezzar, son of Nabopolassar, and the city fell. Of these events the Babylonian Chronicle does not tell: but we know that it was continued, and should a tablet containing the sequel be discovered we shall have the Babylonian account of them.

In the Egyptian army the ‘brazen men’ from the west probably bore their part. They certainly did under Necho, since unequivocal traces of their presence have been found at Carchemish in the shape of a Greek Gorgoneion-shield (?). The Egyptian chronicler, who eschews detail, makes no mention of them, and it is probable enough that there were others of their kin serving under Nabopolassar, as the brother-in-law of Alcaeus the poet served under Nebuchadrezzar.

Actual relics of the Egyptian occupation have been found in the ruins of Carchemish, in the shape of a house, presumably occupied by an Egyptian officer or official, which contained Egyptian bronze figures, alabaster and blue frit vases, clay-seal impressions with the name of Necho, and a bronze ring with seal-bezel bearing the cartouche of Psammetichus. This house ‘had been destroyed by an enemy, and the burnt ruins were littered with evidence of a desperate struggle. Everywhere, and especially in the doorways, were arrowheads, literally in hundreds, arrowheads in bronze and in iron and of many types ... occasionally a mass would be found all fused or rusted together, the contents of a quiver; sometimes the single points would be bent or broken as if striking on the stones or metal-work of the doors. Javelin-heads were fairly numerous, a sword was found, and a remarkable bronze shield; and in rooms 3 and 4 there were human bones on the floor.’ The shield (?) is the Ionian Gorgoneion-shield mentioned above, which belonged to some Greek warrior of Necho’s army. The house was evidently attacked and destroyed after the defeat. Pharaoh Necho fled in wild rout with all his host through Syria and Palestine, pursued by the arms of Nebuchadrezzar and the barbed taunts of the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah’s prophecy of an immediate invasion of Egypt by Nebuchadrezzar was not fulfilled, for in Palestine the prince heard of the death of his father, Nabopolassar, and returned hastily to Babylon to assume his crown (605). But ‘the king of Babylon had taken, from the brook of Egypt unto the river of Euphrates, all that pertained to the king of Egypt’ (2 Kings XXIV, 7). Gaza even must have fallen to Babylon, and Egypt was reduced to her old limits once again: ‘and the king of Egypt came not again any more out of his land’. Necho did not move when, eight years later, his nominee Jehoiakim, whom he had set on the throne of Judah after the death of Josiah at Megiddo, revolted against Babylon, in spite of the impassioned warnings of Jeremiah, and the first siege and capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar followed with its resulting captivity of part of the population (597). The Egyptian king accepted the situation, and Babylon succeeded undisturbed to the inheritance of Assyria in the west. Nebuchadrezzar, who in spite of his power in war, was naturally a peaceful prince, preferring to spend his time and wealth in erecting magnificent buildings at Babylon rather than carry war throughout the world in Assyrian fashion, made no attempt to interfere with Egypt.

III.

THE SAITE REVIVAL

Necho’s activity also turned itself to works of peace. The famous canal that he sought to build (or more probably repair) from the Nile to the Red Sea, and his equally famous despatch of Phoenician sailors to circumnavigate Africa, an expedition that undoubtedly seems to have been successful, are evidences of an active and constructive mind. The Saite princes were commercially inclined and gave much attention to the furtherance of trade, and consequently Egypt was rapidly becoming wealthy again and the arts of peace began to flourish anew. A new style of art had now arisen, the beginnings of which we already see under the Ethiopians, characterized by an imitation or rather adaptation of the style of the Old Kingdom: it is thus a consciously archaizing style. It is seen in most branches of art from the decoration of scarabs to the style of the hieroglyphs and relief sculpture; we know it as the ‘Saite’ style. It varied as to the extent of the faithfulness of its imitation of the old models. In statuary it was rather adaptive than imitative. More will be said as to its characteristics later.

It is interesting to find the same archaistic spirit prevalent in other matters besides art. Costume was perhaps modified in accordance with ancient fashion, though it is probable that it was considered good taste to represent great men in ancient costume, which they did not actually wear. Ranks and titles also now followed ancient models. The priesthoods of the ancient pyramid-kings that had been forgotten for ages were revived. Men wished to feel nearer to the ancient Memphite kings than to the Ramessids. This spirit “set in apparently, as a fashion of protest against the outworn and vulgarized culture and art of the Empire. The imperial tradition had not in the long run served Egypt, who had lost her empire and seen her own land overrun by conquerors. In the bitterness of subjection the Egyptians turned from the Empire towards the simple old days, as they seemed, of the Pyramid­builders. Names and titles of that period reappeared, a kind of archaistic crusade sprang up, and eventually when Psamatik I restored the rule of the pharaohs over the whole land, the archaistic mode was officially adopted by the state. It was as if a degenerate and worn-out England of the future, tired of imperial pomp, were to go back for her inspiration to the Anglo- Saxon period, were to imitate that period in every way, in art, in costume, and in manners, to replace the dignitaries of the present day by “ealdormen,” “jarls” and “thegns,” and substitute for the imperial Parliament an English comic-opera Witanagemot”.

This archaistic fashion is one of the most curious and interesting characteristics of the new age in Egypt; and it is instructive to compare it with the not dissimilar temper in Babylonia under Nabonidus.

Necho died in 593 BC, and was succeeded by his son Psamatik II, who reigned till 588; his last recorded year being the seventh. In 591 he visited Phoenicia in state, in all probability by sea, apparently on a peaceful progress, as he was accompanied by a retinue of priests, and took with him ‘the votive-wreaths of Amon’. No doubt this was a purely religious visit or pilgrimage to the ancient Egyptian shrine at Byblus. The relationship of the Phoenician princes to Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon was merely that of tribute-payers: otherwise they were independent, so that their reception of the Egyptian king on a religious visit could hardly be regarded as treasonable at Babylon. The reign of Psamatik is only notable otherwise for an expedition to Nubia shortly before his death (probably, therefore, in 589), which reached Abu Simbel, where Potasimto (Pedihorsamtoui) the Egyptian commander of the foreign guard, Amasis the commander of the Egyptians, and a number of the Greek mercenaries cut the famous Greek inscription on the leg of one of the colossi of Ramses II:

‘When king Psamatichos came to Elephantine, those who sailed with Psamatichos son of Theokles wrote this; now they came above Kerkis as far as the river let them go; and Potasimto led the foreigners, Amasis the Egyptians; and Archon son of Amoibichos and Pelekos son of Oudamos (or, Axe son of Nobody) wrote us’ (i.e. the letters), Archon cut them with his axe. Follow the signatures of ‘Helesibios the Teian,’ ‘Telephos the Ialysian wrote me, ... Pabis (?) the Kolophonian ... with Psamatichos ... what time the king sent the army for the first time’.

The name of the Greek Psamatichos son of Theokles is interesting, as he must have been the son of a Greek mercenary of Psamatik I who named his son after his master. The style of the writing can hardly be dated so early as the reign of Psammetichus I, to which otherwise we should have to refer it, and it no doubt belongs to that of Psammetichus II, in whose reign a military expedition to Nubia is recorded in an inscription at Karnak. We hear of no resistance by the Ethiopians. From the inscription it is evident that the expedition went no farther than Abu Simbel.

The dependence of the king on the Greek mercenaries is well exemplified by this inscription, and Herodotus tells us that he was so much a Philhellene that the Eleans sent a deputation to him to ask his judgment as to the fairness of their administration of the Olympic games. This philhellenism, which had a natural origin in the indebtedness of the Saite monarchs to Greek trade for much of their wealth, was becoming by no means popular in Egypt, and a steady reaction was setting in which came to a point in the reign of the son and successor of Psamatik, Haaib-Re Uahibre (Apries or Uaphris, the Pharaoh Hophra of the Bible), 588—566 BC. Apries was entirely in the hands of his Greeks. All accounts of him show that he was very young indeed; a head­strong and unwise person with neither the political wisdom of the elder Psammetichus nor the ordered energy of Necho. In fact he was the typical young king of the ancient world, full of energy, without the sagacity or cunning of his seniors, and liable to be supported in foolish courses by an ignorant public opinion (if it can be so called) largely of priestly inspiration. Immediately on his accession he went to war in the wildest fashion, and in the most dangerous quarter, supporting the Jews under Zedekiah in their revolt against Babylon, and attacking Phoenicia from the sea. He held Phoenicia till 586, when Nebuchadrezzar took Jerusalem, razed it, and carried off the rest of its people into captivity. Later on, when the small remnant migrated to Egypt after the murder of Gedaliah, the governor installed by Nebuchadrezzar, he established them in the ‘king’s house at Tahpanhes’, the fortress of Daphnae. It was the least he could do: he had abandoned the Jews to their fate, and if he ever risked a battle with Nebuchadrezzar, he tamely evacuated Palestine and Phoenicia without a blow, leaving Tyre to sustain a siege which was carried on by the Babylonians in a desultory fashion for thirteen years, till 573, when Ethbaal the king, receiving no help from Egypt, submitted to Nebuchadrezzar.

Discontent at this useless adventure was not long in showing itself. There was a revolt of the army at Syene which was put down by the governor Nesuhor, and finally the wild and unsuc­cessful expedition to Cyrene, which is described by Herodotus, brought matters to a head. We are told that the Egyptian military class, chafing against the continual favour shown to the foreign mercenaries—it would appear that Apries went so far as to wear Greek armour—clamoured to be sent against the Greeks of Cyrene, who had oppressed a Libyan chief named Adikran, who appealed to Egypt for protection. The complete defeat of the expedition caused the outbreak of a nationalist and anti-foreign revolution, which placed at its head an Egyptian general, Lahmase or Amasis, who had been sent against the rebels by the king. Amasis, who thus played the part of Arabi to Ismail, was pro­claimed king by priests and people and made co-regent with Apries (569). To depose a Pharaoh was a serious matter, and had Apries submitted to his sentence he might have died in his seclusion at Sais. In 567—566 (Amasis’s third year), however, he fled secretly from his palace, summoned the mercenaries to his aid, and a battle ensued at Momemphis, in which he was defeated. According to the official inscription of Amasis recording the event, he was afterwards slain by his own men when he was sleeping in the cabin of his dahablyah. He was then buried with full regal pomp by Amasis, ‘that the enmity of the gods might be removed from him’. Like Ikhnaton before him, Apries was the enemy of the gods. But he was absolved at his death.

Amasis ascended the throne as the enemy of the Greeks, but he was too clever either to retain this character wholly, or to become too friendly to them, at all events at first. He chose a middle way. In order to placate popular sentiment he abolished the freedom which the Greeks had possessed of going where they liked in the country, and confined them to the ‘treaty port’ of Naucratis, abolishing Daphnae, transferring its civil inhabitants to Naucratis, and making a synoikismos there of all the Greeks in Egypt (about 566—565). The act was exactly parallel to that by which the Tokugawa shoguns in the seventeenth century A.D. solved a similar difficulty in Japan, confining the Dutch traders to the island of Deshima, off Nagasaki, which thus became a Japanese Naucratis. But Amasis was inclined really to be more complaisant to the Greeks than Iyeyasu was to the Dutch in similar circumstances. He was not in the strong position of the Japanese ruler; he knew his countrymen, and he knew that he might have to depend for his personal safety on the fidelity of a foreign guard, and that the Greeks knew more of the outer world than the Egyptians did. So, after the death of Apries, instead of abolishing the mercenaries at Daphnae, he brought them to Memphis, where they were probably added to those of Apries’s guard who survived, and had murdered their master to ensure the favour of the new king (566). Amasis now had a formidable ‘Swiss Guard’ of his own, but they remained a palace-guard, and probably the king did not intend to use them in foreign war as the former kings had done.

His personal friendliness to the Greeks and other foreigners, merchants, soldiers and princes, who could keep him informed as to foreign political developments of importance to Egypt, and were generally so much more intelligent than his own people, became more and more marked during the course of his reign. Herodotus tells us of his friendship with Polycrates and Croesus, and his gifts of statues, linen robes, and other things to the temples of Athena at Lindus and Hera at Samos, and also to Cyrene and Sparta, not forgetting the curious present of 1000 talents of alum for the rebuilding of the temple of Delphi by the Athenian Alcmaeonids after its destruction in 548. The great Greek oracle was already acquiring an international reputation for political sagacity. In Egypt only Buto in the Delta was likely to know anything of foreign politics; Amon of Thebes would certainly have been useless on the subject, nor perhaps would his branch establishment at Siwah in the Libyan desert know much more of the matter. Harshafi of Heracleopolis, he of ‘the terrible face’’ would have been as fierce and bellicose as a Chinese war-god, but not more intelligent, and probably quite as unintelligible.

Finally, Amasis married a Cyrenaean Greek, Ladice. Policy dictated to the king friendship with the Greeks. Egypt was admittedly too weak to defend herself unaided against the Asiatic enemy except by means of bribery and foreign arms. After the revolution of 569, but probably before the removal of the garrison of Daphnae, there seems to have been some trouble on the eastern frontier, caused by aggression on the part of the Egyptians (568—567).

“In the 37th year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon (the troops) of Egypt to do battle came ... (Ama)su, king of Egypt his troops (levied) ... ku of the city of Putuyawan ... a distant land which is in the midst of the sea ... many ... which were in Egypt... arms, horses, and ... he levied for his assistance ... before him ... to do battle”.

Then the fragmentary inscription gives us the hint that Marduk encouraged the spirits of the Babylonian troops, and the enemy mercenaries were defeated and fled. ‘Putuyawan’ must be intended for an Ionian city from which mercenaries came. But we have no warrant from this to suppose that the Babylonian king, who was now growing old, ever carried out great warlike operations against Amasis, far less that he conquered or even entered Egypt either personally or by proxy. It does not seem probable that Jeremiah’s prophecy that he should pitch his royal tent before the entry of Pharaoh’s house at Tahpanhes, a prophecy made in the excitement of the year 605, was ever fulfilled, probable though such an event must necessarily have appeared at the time, judging by Assyrian precedents. But if Nebuchadrezzar, or his generals, had actually invaded, there could hardly be any doubt of the outcome. And Amasis knew it.

Luckily, however, the death of Nebuchadrezzar in 562 removed a lion from his path; the immediate successors of the great Babylonian were weak and characterless monarchs, though Nabonidus when he succeeded in 556 was to prove by no means a negligible quantity. The archaeologist-king, as he has been called, has been perhaps somewhat maligned so far as his practical efficiency is concerned. Nabonidus seems to have been particularly active in the lands of Edom and Midian (Teima), and near the border of Egypt, where he essayed to control the trade-routes across the desert, so that he probably kept Amasis in a state of lively anxiety. Moreover, Astyages, the Mede, was also an unpleasant possibility. And in the background already loomed the threatening figure of Cyrus the Persian.

IV.

THE PERSIAN THREAT

About 550 Media was absorbed by the Persians, and with it the Anatolian dominion won by Cyaxares from Urartu and Lydia in 585. Egypt, Babylonia and Lydia no doubt conferred anxiously as to the situation. Here was a very real and common foe. The three kings allied themselves together against him, and even Sparta, small in size but perhaps already great in warlike renown, joined their league. But Croesus rashly provoked his fate. Events moved so quickly that neither Egypt nor Babylonia had time to move, even if they really had the will to do so, which in the case of Egypt was, in the circumstances, extremely doubtful. Amasis would certainly prefer the work to be attempted by Lydia and Babylonia, so that he could escape the consequences if things went wrong. Only four years later (546) came the final battle that deprived Croesus of his throne and placed western Anatolia and Ionia in the power of the Persian. Intrigues might increase, but help came neither from the east nor from the west. In 539 fell Babylon and the whole of Syria and Palestine passed from Babylonian to Persian rule, as they had previously passed from Assyria to Babylonia. If Amasis had any further combinations in view, they could only depend on Phoenician and Syrian rebels, and on doubtful aid from Polycrates of Samos and from little Sparta. The Ionians were conquered, and their military prestige had suffered a crushing blow by the easy capture of their cities by Cyrus, who inherited the Assyrian art of siege-craft. Polycrates dared not move; Sparta was too slow. Submission to the blow when it came seemed inevitable. Happily for himself Amasis died peacefully in his bed (526 BC) before it did come, and it was left to his successor to face the inevitable.

Amasis had never moved a man into Palestine, totally eschewing all adventures on the mainland after the unfortunate episode at the beginning of his reign. On the other hand, Cyrene, where nobody could interfere with him but the Carthaginians (with whom his relations were probably friendly), became tributary to him, and, at some unspecified period of his reign, he occupied Cyprus, which submitted to him. The Phoenicians, in accordance with old tradition, would probably have preferred Egyptian to Babylonian or Persian overlordship, but the weakness of Apries had shown that this was incapable of realization in the present state of the world. In Cyprus, where the Egyptians could act with some prospect of immunity, so long as the predominant Asiatic power did not consider it worth while to mobilize a great Phoenician fleet against them, they were no doubt received peacefully by both Greeks and Phoenicians. The evidently very strong influence of Saite models on Cypriote art at this time points to a comparatively long occupation; and it is probable that Amasis took Cyprus early in his reign, perhaps in the period of Babylonian weakness immediately after the death of Nebuchadrezzar. This period seems more probable than a later one. Egyptian influence must have ceased after the Persian conquest of Egypt in 525. After the fall of Babylon in 539, Amasis, with the fear of Persia on him, was in no mood to pick up ‘unconsidered trifles’ of Babylonian dominion, nor would he have found the Cyprians, under the same fear, so ready to submit to him; moreover, his Ionian troops would have been discouraged by their disasters at home. Thirteen years would be too short a time for the Egyptian artistic influence to develop in Cyprus as it did, and accordingly the seizure of Cyprus by Amasis may be dated roughly about 560 BC.

At so catastrophic a period in the history of the world as the sixth century BC the interrelations of the different states and the affairs of their foreign offices naturally attract the attention of the historian, ancient or modern, rather than their internal affairs. Of the home government of Amasis, leaving out of account the gossiping stories of the king’s personal habits and peculiarities (which were not merely tales told to the Greeks), we know little save the fact that, as Herodotus says, the kingdom under his rule attained a high state of wealth and prosperity and populousness. The Mediterranean trade in corn, wine and oil flourished, as also did that across the desert from Babylonia and from Yemen with lapis, incense, and other products of the East; and from Cush came ivory and gold in barter. According to the Greek historian, Egypt had twenty thousand towns in his time. We see that Amasis was able to build temples to the gods on the great scale, rivalling that of the older Pharaohs; and here again Herodotus is confirmed by the monuments. Several are dated in the joint reign of Amasis and Apries, who had himself been no incon­siderable builder. The Saite kings were wealthy; themselves deriving, no doubt, much profit from the corn-trade, like the Cyrenaeans with their silphium.

The whole land was peaceful under the rule of Amasis. The Ethiopians never troubled him, and Thebes was long ago reconciled to northern rule by the continued policy of adoption of the kings’ daughters by the priestess-ruler of the city of Amon. Nitocris, the daughter of Psammetichus I, had succeeded her adopted mother, Shepenopet II, as ‘Divine Adoratrix’, when her time came, and had in turn adopted Ankhnesneferibre, the daughter of Psamatik II, whose sarcophagus is in the British Museum. This Nitocris bore a name fashionable at the time (‘Neith is victorious’), since Neith the warrior goddess was the chief divinity of Sais. Herodotus tells a story of a queen Nitocris who used to be placed at the end of the VIth Dynasty, but certainly never reigned then and may be purely legendary; he uses the name merely because it was one well known in his time.

The wealth, refinement and architectural and artistic capacity which we see at this time by no means indicated a really strong and self-respecting nation, such as the Persians now were. We have seen how the kings deemed it necessary to protect themselves against their own subjects by means of foreign guards. The Egyptians were united only in their national religious fanaticism. The strongly-marked classes of the population of which Herodotus tells us—giving us the wrong impression that they were castes of the Indian type—did not make for real unity. The Kalasiries (Khalshere, ‘Young Syrians,’ a name derived from the Syrian warrior-mercenaries of the time of the XIXth and XXth Dynasties), who were the warrior-class, were probably few of them of genuine Egyptian blood, being descended largely from the Libyan ‘Chiefs of Ma’, whom we have met under the XXIInd Dynasty, and their retainers. They had now degenerated into a privileged ‘warrior’ class as pretentious and as inefficient as their predecessors the original so-called ‘Young Syrians,’ the Mediterranean Shardina and the Libyan Kehek, who enjoyed their ease, laying aside spear and bow, in the piping times of Ramses III. Kalasiris was later a common Egyptian proper name. The other Herodotean name for the soldiers, Hermotybies, may be explained as ‘spearmen.’

The priests certainly also formed another privileged class apart, as Herodotus states. They subsisted everywhere on the contributions of the countryside to the local temples, and though they may not have tolerated fish or beans, they undoubtedly lived on the fat of the land otherwise, and swarmed in the temples where each priestly family had its ‘place’, which could be bought and sold, as also could the priestly office itself. Save that they were not celibate, they must have greatly resembled the Lamas of Tibet. Their influence on the body politic was probably no better than that of the ‘soldiers’. The scribes went with them. They were themselves torn by intertemplar jealousies, but probably united in approving foreign warlike enterprises, which, they hoped, would bring the plunder of Asia into the coffers of their gods—or rather of themselves—as in the brave days of old.

Whereas the younger priests were about as turbulent and fanatical as any Lamas, at the same time they had a great veneration for their own ancient written records and religious writings, which were studied in ‘colleges’ that must have resembled much the modern el-Azhar at Cairo. Much learning and comfortable circumstances made the older Egyptian priest a most dignified ecclesiastic, here again resembling the Tibetan. But he was not very intelligent, except as an antiquary, and was stupidly vain of his antiquity. His learning was mostly futile, his religion was now more than ever a welter of conflicting beliefs, which the puzzled Greeks at first took to be profound philosophy, and later the Romans and the moderns have dignified with the name of Mysticism. We may doubt whether Greek philosophers like Thales and Pythagoras, who were said to have visited Egypt at this time, derived much that was of real value to them in the realms of speculation in religious matters. Most of the Pre-Socratics were said to have visited Egypt, but it is questionable whether this was so. Thales probably did, and it is likely enough that he got his idea of water as the cosmogonic principle from Egypt. But his chief acquisition there was the knowledge of geometry and arithmetic. The Egyptians were probably the fathers of Greek geometry, and possibly of chemistry (pharmacology) as well, though here Babylon, according to the cuneiform scholars, can claim her share. In astronomy Babylonian influence is more probable. Thales was a Milesian, so that his visit, by way of Naucratis, is probable enough. It is difficult to say, from the evidence of their ideas, whether Pherecydes or Pythagoras ever really visited Egypt. The Pythagorean metempsychosis, if he derived it from Egypt, has been remarkably changed en route, as the Egyptian certainly never believed that the soul of his grandfather might haply inhabit a bird. Xenophanes seems to have lectured the Egyptians on their superstitions. One is in doubt about Heraclitus and Anaxagoras. Plato’s visit is of course possible enough, and Democritus seems to have owed a good deal to Egypt. As to details, it is probable that the Greek picture of the soul as a human-headed bird is directly derived from Egypt. The name of the witch-goddess Hecate is probably Egyptian (hike, magic). Other small derivations from Egypt might be traced, but there is nothing important till the Ptolemaic identification of Hades with Osiris-Apis of Sinopion, near Memphis. This place was confused by the Greeks with Sinope on the Black Sea, so that classical scholars ignorant of Egyptian lore often continue to talk of Sarapis as if he were a Hellenistic Anatolian deity from ‘Sinope’. In Orphic religion, of course, there was probably much that was Egyptian.

Neither the passion and powerful earnestness of Hebrew religion nor the intelligence and clarity of Greek thought are to be found in Egypt. We can scarcely expect more sense from these confused and visionary ecclesiastics than from the corrupt and lazy military mandarins, and Amasis evidently found sane counsels only among the Greeks and the great merchants, whom he loved. His nobles and priests, though they may have despised the ‘traders’, were probably not above deriving profit from association in their commercial adventures. The rest of the nation, the ordinary townsmen and the fellahin, the hemtiu and the sekhtiu as of old, worked and ultimately paid for all in labour and in blood.

Such was the nation, old, degenerate, vain and corrupt, in spite of a fair-seeming exterior, and ill-organized for defence in spite of the lessons of the past, that now confronted the vigorous juvenility of Persia. Cyrus himself may not have contemplated the conquest of Egypt unless Amasis attacked him as Croesus had done, and that was not to be expected. But after his death in the wild Bactrian expedition, his son Kambujiya, or Cambyses—a Rehoboam succeeding to a David rather than a Solomon—brought up in the atmosphere of empire, determined to possess himself of Egypt. The Herodotean account of the casus belli, and the pretext sought by the Persian in respect of his demand for a wife, and the substitution of Nitetis the daughter of Apries for Amasis’ own, may not be untrue. Amasis now died and was suc­ceeded by his son Psamatik III (Psammenitos). Cambyses’ army, supplied by the Arabian sheikhs with camel-loads of water, and led by the treacherous mercenary Phanes of Halicarnassus, advanced across the desert by the coast-route to Pelusium, where he found the new Egyptian king encamped with his army of Egyptians and Greek and Carian mercenaries. In the battle which ensued he was completely victorious, and Psammenitos fled to Memphis, which was invested. A Persian herald whom he sent to demand surrender on a Mitylenean ship was murdered: when the ship made fast to the quay-wall, the enraged crowd boarded it pell-mell and tore the herald and the crew limb from limb. Surrender was inevitable and the last Saite king was deposed and placed among the king’s nobles, according to the Persian custom. Here he would have lived in honour had he not been discovered plotting against the Persians, and he paid the penalty with his life.

V.

THE PERSIAN INVASION

We have an interesting reference to the conquest of Egypt in a Minaean (South Arabian) inscription which records the gratitude of certain Arab merchants to ‘Athtar (the Arabian male form of Ishtar-Astarte) and other gods for having protected their camel-caravans during the war between Madai (Media) and Misr (Egypt), also referred to as the war between the Lord of the North and the Lord of the South. The Lord of the North had conquered; all Egypt had surrendered; Cambyses had proceeded to Sais, where he tore the mummy of Amasis from its sarcophagus and burnt it (thereby, as Herodotus says, outraging the religious sensibilities of the fire-worshipping Persians as well as those of the Egyptians). And now he ascended the throne of the Pharaohs as king.

This next step of Cambyses caused an immediate detente in the political situation. Other foreigners had taken it before; even the Hyksos eventually took it. But the Assyrians never had. If they had the story of their conquest of Egypt might have been different. They might call themselves ‘kings of the kings of Egypt,’ or even ‘kings of Musri and Kusi,’ but they never had legitimized themselves in the eyes of their new ‘subjects’ by taking the Egyptian royal name and titulary, wearing in Egypt the Egyptian royal costume, and mounting the Egyptian throne. On the contrary, they took the exasperating line of considering that they conferred a benefit on an Egyptian noble by giving him an Assyrian name and no doubt making him use it. They treated Egypt absolutely de haut en bas, they did not really wish close contact with her. They had to conquer and occupy her for their own safety, but they took as little interest in her as possible and certainly did not put themselves out for the purpose of gaining her loyalty. Cambyses, however, was not an Assyrian, and would have no scruple about paying reverence to strange gods or wearing strange costume. And, very probably, an unusually intelligent Egyptian, who was commander of the fleet and lay-warden of the temple of Neith at Sais, Uzahor-resenet by name, had something to do with the Persian’s assumption of the royal dignity. After the death of Psammenitos to do this would jump with the tyrant’s humour, and Uzahor probably saw that as a matter of fact his doing so would bring comparative contentment to Egypt under the foreign rule, which would seem less impressive if it were exercised in the name of a duly crowned and enthroned Pharaoh, foreign and absentee though he might be.

Accordingly Uzahor-Resenet, so he tells us in his funerary inscription, carried out the ceremonies of the coronation of Cam­byses, as later he did those for Darius also. In his inscription, cut in the reign of Darius, he tells us also something of the outrages that Egypt had endured at the hands of Cambyses, ‘the very great calamity that came to pass on the whole land, of which no one has seen the like in this land,’ including the discontinuance of the divine offerings of Neith at Sais and the ruin of the school of the sacred scribes, which Uzahor was afterwards commissioned by Darius to restore. Also we know from a demotic record that Cambyses reduced the temple revenues in all Egypt by one half: they were not restored till the time of the Sebennytites. We have no reason to suspect Herodotus’s account of the obvious madness of Cambyses, to doubt that he burnt the mummy of Amasis, or that he wounded Apis; the fact that the only death of an Apis recorded in his reign took place in his sixth or last year (521) does not contradict the story, as we are expressly told that the bull did not die at once but lingered for some time, and the outrage was not committed until after the defeat of the Nubian and Ammonian expeditions, which seems to have caused a dangerous recrudescence of his madness. We have no right to suppose, as a recent historian has done, that the tales are a wicked concoction of the Egyptians and the Greeks to take away the character of a virtuous Iranian. We have no reason to suppose that Cambyses was in the least virtuous, and neither he nor Cyrus can be described as genuine Iranians: the first really Iranian king of kings was Darius Hystaspis. As a matter of fact, therefore, we need have no hesitation in accepting the story of the two mad expeditions which Cambyses despatched from Thebes; one to Siwah and the Oasis of Ammon by way of the southern Oasis of el-Khargah, and the other to the third Cataract in Nubia. Both were wild and mismanaged, and both came to utter grief, the first being overwhelmed by the moving sand-dunes between Farafrah and Siwah, and the other starving and dying amid the hot black rocks between Wadi Haifa and Sarras.

Until lately it has been supposed that there was definite con­firmation of this last story in the record on the stele found at Napata of an Ethiopian king named Nastosenen, or Nastesen, who says that he routed ‘the man Kambasauden,’ and took all the flocks and herds which his soldiers had brought with them for his sustenance. Hitherto this has been supposed to refer to Cambyses, but Reisner, who has excavated the pyramids of the Nubian kings of this period at Nure and Kurru, near Jebel Barkal (Napata), has recently arranged the probable order of these kings, as indicated by purely archaeological evidence from style, in such a way as to bring Nastesen down much later in time, at the earliest to the fifth century and most probably to the end of the fourth century BC, thus making him a contemporary of the earlier Ptolemies. To the present writer, however, such an argument, while naturally of the highest value in the absence of historical indications, seems to lose its value when there are indications which do not tally with it. And in the present case there is firstly the remarkable reference to ‘Kambasauden’ and his loss of his army’s commissariat-train, which naturally would bring about the starvation of which Herodotus tells us; and secondly, the style of the stele itself, which in the writer’s opinion cannot possibly be as late as the fourth, or perhaps even the fifth century. Until further information is available, therefore, he continues to believe that Nastesen was the contemporary of Cambyses and refers to him in his inscription. Of the history of Nubia during this period it must suffice to say that soon after the ethiopization of the kings the Egyptian colonial culture there started upon its downward course, hardly arrested by the influence of Greek culture on intelligent kings such as Irkamon or Ergamenes (who was educated in Egypt), until at length the capital was removed from Napata to Meroe, and the Egyptian tradition is lost in the sands of the Sudan.

The revolt of the Magians against the Zoroastrian religious revolution, the setting-up by them as king of the false Smerdis, and the suicide of Cambyses at Harran (522), brought the sternly Zoroastrian Darius (Dariyavaush), son of Hystaspis (Vishtaspa) to the throne of Egypt. In dealing with Egypt he showed the same highmindedness and sagacity that elsewhere marks a reign which, but for the wild Scythian expedition in pursuit of the mocking Idanthyrsos—an episode worthy of Charles XII—would seem curiously modern in its record of far-thinking statesmanship and intelligent organizing power. In 517, after the suppression of the presumptuous satrap of Egypt, Aryandes, who had carried the Persian arms to Benghazi and struck his own coinage, the new king came to Egypt, to be received by Uzahor-resenet, who devised the king’s new protocol (Stitu-Re, ‘the Sun-god hath begotten him’), as he had done for Cambyses, and superintended the ceremonies of his induction as Pharaoh. These the serious Zoroastrian Darius went through with all attention and intention. He was determined to be, so far as possible, a well-meaning and well-doing Pharaoh of Egypt, and he seems to have succeeded: ‘the land obeyed him on account of the goodness of his heart,’ says the demotic papyrus recording his command that the laws of Egypt should be collected and codified up to the forty-fourth year of Amasis. Egypt was organized as the sixth satrapy (Mud-raya) of his empire, and paid the usual taxes to Susa with the usual occasional addition of contributions in kind, which would naturally be in corn. Then as king of Egypt the Great King had the usual Pharaonic dues, of which, among others, Herodotus mentions the profit on the fish caught in Lake Moeris. Coined money was for the first time introduced into Egypt by him or by the satrap Aryandes, in the shape of the daric, but never seems to have been popular with the people: it was a foreign thing, there was probably no Egyptian coinage till the time of the Ptolemies.

The most conspicuous relic of his reign in Egypt is the temple of Hibis in the Oasis of el-Khargah. Probably the natural conditions of the Oases interested Darius, as recalling those of parts of his own country; and we certainly find that there was installed in the Oasis, no doubt by him, a peculiarly Persian system of irrigation unknown elsewhere in Egypt. He completed the un­finished canal of Necho from the Nile to the Red Sea along the line of the modern Wadi Tumilat, and erected five monumental stelae, each inscribed on the one side in Persian, Elamite and Babylonian, and on the other in Egyptian, the last of which survived to our own day, when it was destroyed. The style of these stelae, on which appeared on one side the winged and eagle­tailed figure of Ahuramazda, in form derived from the Assyrian Ashur, curiously repeating the lines of the winged Egyptian sun-disk on the other, with kidaris-crowned Persian nobles upholding the name of the king in Persian cuneiform but enclosed within a plumed Egyptian cartouche, is a remarkable example of the conscious eclecticism necessitated by the novel regime. At Edfu Darius endowed the temple of Horus of the South, and at Sai’s he restored that of Neith, and, as we have seen, refounded the destroyed school of scribes also; all more or less at the suggestion of Uzahor-Resenet, judging from the latter’s own statements.

He deserved well of Egypt, but he was a foreigner after all, and probably his khshatrapas or satraps, who were always Persians of noble or royal birth, were not so wise as he. When he was visibly declining, and there seemed to be a chance of a renewed national revolt succeeding, the oracle of Buto in the Delta pronounced for rebellion in 485 (possibly in collusion with the Athenians or other miso-Mede Greeks); and a chief named Khababesha was made king. The Persian garrison was destroyed and the new king reigned for about a year in Memphis, where an inscription of his second year has been found. In that year, 484, Xerxes (Khshayarsha), son of Darius, himself came to Egypt to restore Persian authority. Khababesha was easily crushed, and heavy fines were laid on the temple of Buto and other fanes whose priests had foolishly challenged the great king. Hakhamanish (Achaemenes), the king’s brother, was left as satrap, and “reduced all Egypt to a far worse state of servitude than it had been under Darius”. Buto did not recover its confiscated lands till nearly two centuries later, when Ptolemy Soter restored to the priests the grants of Khababesha.

Achaemenes took two hundred Egyptian ships to swell the Armada which in 481 set out to crush Greece. The Egyptian sailors fought well at Artemisium, capturing five Greek ships with their crews; and at Salamis Aeschylus specially mentions ‘the dwellers in the fens, skilful rowers of galleys’. Among the leaders of the Persian fleet he signalizes Susiskanes (Susinkanes, Sheshenk; a name common in Egypt, as Sesonchosis, till the Roman period), Psammis and Arcteus the Ethiopian (Etearchos, Taharka), who bear Libyan-Egyptian names, as also does possibly Pegastegon. But they can hardly be regarded as genuine historical persons, since Arcteus is elsewhere called a Lydian, and the lords of ‘ancient Thebes’and ‘holy Memphis’, who are mentioned, bear respectively the Persian names of Ariomardus and Arsames. Probably all are fictitious names invented as giving a general idea of the appellations of the barbarian leaders. But, nevertheless, the prominence of Egyptian names is remarkable, and probably significant of the prominent part taken by the Egyptians in the naval fighting. We possibly possess an Egyptian record of the battle in the inscription of a chief of the Egyptian college of physicians, named Simto-tefnakhte (he bore the same name as the admiral a century and a half before), who ascribes his safety in a great defeat of the Asiatics by the Greeks to the intervention of Harshafi in favour of his worshipper. It is known from other evidence that the Egyptians were by no means such bad sailors and such avoiders of the sea as used to be thought. This can never have been true of the Delta­folk: but naturally the men of Upper Egypt knew less of the sea than ‘the dwellers in the fens.’

At this point the story of Egypt under Persian domination may be conveniently broken off. Her subsequent fortunes will be more fitly resumed when, in a later volume, we come to deal with her relations with Persia and Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries, up to the time of her conquest by Alexander, and then look back in retrospect over seven hundred years to the days of the priest-kings.

CHAPTER XV

ORIENTAL ART OF THE SAITE PERIOD