CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATION AND EXTENSION OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE

 

AFTER the fall of the Assyrian empire the next most momentous event in the chronicle of ancient history is the rise of Persia, which succeeded Assyria as the great power of western Asia, and during the period covered in this volume the might of the Persian state is the central fact. In this chapter its origins will be discussed, and it will be shown how the foundations of its empire were laid by the conquests of Cyrus and how it was expanded by Cambyses. These conquests meant the disappearance, sooner or later, of four great states—of the two, Media and Babylonia, which had joined forces to pull down Assyria, and of Egypt and Lydia, which had counted for much in the Assyrian period. After these rapid initial successes, which in the lifetime of a generation established her dominion to the shores of the Mediterranean and brought under her yoke the Asiatic Greeks and the Phoenicians, the further expansion of Persia westward was arrested by the Greeks of the motherland. Having turned back to follow the political and commercial development of the Greek states throughout the sixth century, we shall resume the thread of Persian history in the reign of Darius and see how the clash came between his immense monarchy, so much larger in extent than any of its predecessors, and the cities of free Greece. In the perennial debate between East and West this clash is the first of which the story is known in detail, and perhaps it is the most dramatic; it is certainly one of the most important, for it frustrated the probable prospect of Persia controlling the Aegean and becoming the sovran power in south-eastern Europe.

While Persia is casting her shadow over the lands and waters of the eastern Mediterranean, the western Mediterranean is beginning to come within the radius of ‘recorded history,’ and we can discern the rivalries of the three powers which are striving for supremacy in the western seas, the Etruscan, the Carthaginian, and the Greek. The foundations of the Greek cities in Sicily and Italy have already been described, but we shall have to go back to examine the rise of Carthage and the origins and growth of the Etruscan state which in this period reaches the summit of its power.

The Persian wars define an epoch in the history of Greece. After her victory in this conflict she will enter on her great age, the age in which the achievements of her sons as thinkers and artists are the facts that matter most in the history of the world. This volume will close with a review of what her genius had already accomplished in literature, philosophy and art.

 

I.

THE RISE OF CYRUS

 

The Persian is vastly more than a mere successor to the Median empire: with the Medes the Aryans first took a conspicuous place in world-history; but it is their kinsmen the Persians who first became a world-power. The Persian empire was created within the space of a single generation by a series of conquests that followed one another with a rapidity scarcely equalled except by Alexander, and by the Arabs in the first generation after the death of Mohammed. The defeat of Astyages the Mede in 549 BC and of Croesus the Lydian in 546, the capture of Babylon in 538 and the conquest of Egypt in 525, gave to the Persian empire within thirty years an extent exceeding that ever obtained by the greatest of the monarchs of Mesopotamia or the Nile valley, and consequently greater than that of any earlier empire west of China. Confirmed and rounded off by Darius, this empire was maintained by the same family that created it, for two centuries undivided and unbroken, whereas Alexander’s dominions were separated from his family and divided immediately after his death, and within the first century and a half of Islam great dynastic changes occurred and the unity of Arabian rule was broken. It was the house of Achaemenes, which down to 549 BC had enjoyed the simple style and exercised the restricted dominion of kings of Anshan, that created and maintained the empire; it was the people from whom they sprang, the Persians, who were their mainstay, first in conquest and, subsequently, in peaceful administration.

The Persians are all but unknown till with Cyrus, Cambyses and Darius they suddenly became the centre of world-history. If, and this is none too certain, the Persians are twice alluded to by Ezekiel, they contributed soldiers to Tyre at the beginning of the sixth century, and were expected by the prophet to form part of the army of Gog. If, and this again is doubtful, they gave their name to a region known as Parsua by the Assyrians in the ninth century, who mention its inhabitants along with the Madai (Medes), they moved, within a century or so before Cyrus, south from some region south-west of the Caspian to the country to which they permanently gave their name, and whence the family of Achaemenes sprang. Into these or other earlier wanderings of the Persians in particular it is unnecessary to enter further here, but the country named after them may be briefly described.

In modern western usage the term Persia is applied to the whole Iranian plateau stretching from the Caspian in the west to the Hindu Kush (Himalaya Region) in the east, and from the Persian Gulf in the south to the steppes of Turkestan, the region of the Oxus and the Yaxartes in the north. But the name for this vaster district is in modern Persian usage Iran or Eran, while Pars, perpetuating the ancient name Persia, is the name of the south-western corner only. Persia, according to the older usage of the term, or Pars, consists of a long and little-broken coastline with a narrow belt of flat country generally some 15 to 30 miles in width, from the landward edge of which mountains rise abruptly to some 6000 feet, and then an extensive high plateau cut in places by valleys or interrupted by mountain ranges. The coast of Pars, the ancient Persia, is the western end of that long coastline which stretches some 1200 miles from just south-east of the mouth of the Shatt el-Arab (Tigris-Euphrates) to the mouths of the Indus. This entire coast is poor in harbours, and approach is also rendered difficult by shallows and rocks. The maritime plain, moreover, with its stifling heat and soil unfertilised by the mountain torrents, too full and turbulent in the rainy season and then for a longer part of the year dry, was always, as it still is, ill-suited to maintain any strong or considerable population. For these reasons their coast-line never induced the Persians to become a sea-faring people, nor rendered their country easily accessible on this side to others. And as the sea cut them off on the south-west, so did the great deserts of Gedrosia, Carmania and the Sagartii, broken only by infrequent and inconsiderable oases, on the north and east.

In contrast with these inhospitable surroundings, the mountainous interior of Persia, though naturally not thickly populated, was able, in virtue of its many fertile valleys and high plains between the mountain ranges, to sustain a vigorous and healthy race. It was yet in the words of Darius ‘beautiful, possessing good horses, possessing good men’. It is part of that vast mountain mass that stretches south-westwards from Armenia to India; and the main communications of Persia, hindered by the sea on the south and the deserts in the east and north, were north-westwards by mountain roads, of which the chief led to Susa and Babylon along the westerly, and to Ecbatana along the easterly chains. With these none too easy lines of communication even north-westwards, Persia was necessarily retired and relatively inaccessible, capable of producing a race equal to great conquests, but, like Arabia later, unequal to offering a suitable administrative centre for the empire their conquests won. On the other hand, in this high country, and on the bank of a river, the modern Pulwar, the Persian monarchs were well content to build their greatest buildings, though neither ‘Persepolis’ nor Pasargadae as cities ever rivalled the capitals of earlier empires like Babylon and Nineveh.

So little does the ancient land of Persia offer a site for the capital of a great empire, that, before the conquests of Cyrus began, the centre even of the small kingdom which he had received from his ancestors seems to have lain outside Persia. Cyrus was the fourth at least of his family to enjoy the title of king of Anshan; none of them so far as we know was called king of Persia, and Cyrus only received this style after his career of conquest began, and because, as may be surmised, he was the first to bring all the Persian tribes under a single sceptre. If Anshan lay outside Persia, it would be possible to explain these facts by the supposition that Cyrus and his ancestors who were kings of Anshan before him, were not Persians, Cyrus first becoming king of Persia, as later of Babylon, by conquest. But this simple supposition requires a complete disregard of other evidence; not only to the Greeks, but to Darius, Cyrus was Persian; for Darius, who lays great stress on his own Persian origin, claims ‘Cambyses, the son of Cyrus’ as ‘of our family’.

For the history of the Persians and the Persian royal house before the time of Cyrus, the monumental evidence has substituted a few certain facts for the vague legends of the Greek writers. But the new evidence raises fresh questions, and leaves various details in uncertainty. We know the names of the Achaemenids in two lines of descent for several generations: we know the title enjoyed by one of these lines, though the significance of it has been much disputed; but we are ignorant of the title, if any, borne by members of the other line before Darius. The facts, monumentally attested, may be conveniently presented in a genealogical table in which everything—the names, the titles and the filiations—is directly attested by the monuments, except the identity of Teispes the ancestor of Cyrus and Teispes the ancestor of Darius: this identity, which, though not unchallenged, is generally admitted, is established if some old Persian inscriptions at Pasargadae (Mashad-i-Murghab, c. 30 miles north-east of Persepolis): ‘I (am) Cyrus the king, the Achaemenian’ are records of a Cyrus that was king, and not, as an alternative theory proposes, of Cyrus the younger, a descendant of Darius I, and son of Darius II, who never was king.

Whether or not the ancestors of Cyrus, without using the title, were in fact kings of Persia, they were kings of Anshan, the title being both used by Cyrus of himself and his ancestors, and applied to Cyrus by his contemporary Nabonidus, the last native king of Babylon. Anshan (or Anzan), which appears both as the name of a city and as that of a country or district, is an ancient term which may in the course of centuries have undergone some modification in its exact application. At all periods, however, in which it can be traced Anshan is closely associated with (though at times clearly distinguished from) Elam, and at times it is more particularly connected with Susa. Gudea in the third millennium refers to ‘the city of Anshan in (or of) Nimki,’ i.e. Elam; the native rulers of Elam towards the end of the twelfth century style themselves king of Susian Anzan (or of Anzan and Susa); and Sennacherib a little more than a century before Cyrus mentions Anzan as one of the lands summoned by the Elamite king to oppose him. To these particulars, which leave in some uncertainty the exact limits of the Anshan which gave to Cyrus his earliest title, the monuments of his own age add nothing. We may dismiss the theory which would identify the Anshan of Cyrus with Media; to identify it with a fart of Persia would no doubt offer an easy explanation of the order in which the three different titles used by or of Cyrus—king of Anshan, king of Persia, king of Babylon—appear; but this seems to depart too widely from the other known usages of the term. It remains, therefore, to identify Anshan with southern Elam and especially perhaps the district around and including Susa.

Cyrus was already king of Anshan in the sixth, if not in the third, year of Nabonidus king of Babylon, i.e, in 550 or 553 BC. His reign began as early as 558 BC. if we may accept, on the authority of Herodotus, twenty-nine years as the total length of his kingship. His great-grandfather, Teispes, is the first of his family known to have been, and probably the first who actually was, king of Anshan. Of the date or manner of the capture of Anshan from the Elamites there is no direct record; but it is possible that the Israelite prophetical writings contain indirect evidence of it; in 588 Ezekiel looks back on a destruction of Elam which was perhaps still anticipated by Jeremiah in 597.

Whether before this Teispes had been king of Persia, or rather of that small part of it that belonged to the Pasargadae, ‘the most noble tribe of the Persians’, and lay in the valley of the Medus (modern Pulwar) in the western part of Persia adjacent to Elam, and if so, whether at his death, while bequeathing the new kingdom which, from its ancient capital of Susa, was indirect connection with the great cities of the ancient world to his eldest son Cyrus, he left the older, smaller and remoter kingdom to his younger son Ariaramnes, is uncertain; though considerations already referred to make some such arrangement not improbable. No advance in dominion is marked by the reigns of the son and grandson of Teispes; on the other hand it is to be inferred that, while they certainly kept the style and title of king of Anshan, they did so as vassals of Cyaxares and Astyages, the rulers of the Median empire; and to this vassalage, as well as to the kingly title of his father Cambyses, Cyrus succeeded; and indeed, according to one interpretation of an ambiguous pronoun, Nabonidus, in his earliest reference to Cyrus, describes him both as king of Anshan and ‘petty vassal’ of the Umman-manda, the people from whom Astyages took the title king of the Umman-manda under which he appears in the inscriptions of Nabonidus.

 

II

CYRUS KING OF MEDIA

CONQUEST OF MEDIA AND LYDIA

 

Born heir to the small kingdom of Anshan, Cyrus was destined for far greater things: as he himself, after his main achievements had been accomplished, states the case, Marduk, god of Babylon, looking about for a righteous prince found such an one in the king of Anshan, whom he accordingly called to lordship over the entire world. His first step in the fulfilment of his destiny was to unite under his sway the Iranian peoples, from Persia in the south to Media in the north, with all others whom the kings of Media or the Umman-manda, and principally Cyaxares and Astyages, had already subjected to themselves. Whether or not there is any substance in the stories perpetuated by Greek writers of the close connection by marriage between Cyrus and Astyages—according to one he was son of Mandane, the daughter of Astyages, according to another he married (though only after the defeat of Astyages) Amytis, the daughter of Astyages—neither family-ties nor his position as vassal hindered Cyrus from overthrowing Astyages.

In this first step he was assisted, while his own troops were relatively few, by dissatisfaction among the subjects and treachery in the army of Astyages, facts which underlie the elaborate legends in Herodotus, and are briefly recorded in the contemporary Babylonian Chronicle. Astyages, who appears to have been attacked by Cyrus as much as three years previously, now anticipated Cyrus’ designs, and took the initiative in the final campaign (550—49 BC) which ended so disastrously for him: ‘he assembled his troops,’ as the mutilated text of the Chronicle appears to say, ‘and marched against Cyrus, king of Anshan, to conquer him; and Astyages’ troops mutinied, and he was captured, and they gave him over to Cyrus.’ Cyrus brought him a prisoner to his country (Anshan), but spared his life, as Herodotus directly asserts, and as the silence of the Babylonian Chronicle allows us to believe. Where the battles, if any, were fought is not stated in these sources; a picturesque legend preserved by Ctesias asserts that the last conflict took place at Pasargadae.

Having captured Astyages, Cyrus proceeded to the Median capital Ecbatana, entered it apparently without serious opposition, and transferred its treasures to Anshan; otherwise Ecbatana does not appear to have suffered, except indirectly from the fact that Susa, which had been the capital of the kings of Anshan from Teispes to Cyrus, continued to be the capital of the rulers of the Persian empire, who however maintained Ecbatana as a summer residence.

A change in the centre of government, a change in the ruling house, a certain increase in the number of southern Iranian officers, but not to the exclusion of the Medes, in the army and the state—these are the principal changes, so far as the Iranian peoples were concerned, occasioned by the fall of Astyages. For the house of Astyages was substituted the house of Cyrus, but the Medes became thereby a conquered people scarcely more than the English, when the house of Orange was substituted for the house of Stuart. The new state, the nucleus of the greater empire which Cyrus was yet to create and Darius to solidify, consisted of the Medes and Persians; the greater empire itself, in the words of Darius, of ‘Persia and Media and the other lands.’ Whether under Cyrus the Persians obtained even so much ascendancy' as later under Darius is not clear, and is scarcely to be inferred from t he fact that, soon after his overthrow of Astyages, Cyrus appears in the Babylonian Chronicle no longer as king of Anshan but in a single passage as 'King of Persia’ (548 BC), a title which he was soon to exchange for others of greater antiquity and wider significance.

In what precise circumstances and for what reasons Cyrus assumed—if, from the fact that it is once used of him, we may infer that he did—the title King of Persia, and whether he ever also—as Xerxes for a few years did later—employed the style King of Persia and Media, and whether his assumption of the title meant depriving of it, or of some other less wide royal title, the younger branch of the family of Teispes, are unknown or matters of uncertain speculation. Herodotus seems to say that Cyrus at the time of his conflict with Astyages could influence only three of the many Persian tribes—the Maraphians and the Maspians in addition to his own tribe of the Pasargadae. The extension of his influence and the establishment of his dominion over the remaining Persian tribes, agricultural and nomadic, may in this case have formed part of his task in establishing and enlarging the position which the defeat of Astyages had won for him.

Between his conquest of Media and his attack on Lydia two years later (547 BC) the movements and activities of Cyrus cannot be followed in any detail. In spite of the assistance he had received from some of the Medes and part of the Median army, many districts which had been subject to Astyages may have refused allegiance to the new ruler and reared military operations on his part. In 547 according to the Babylonian Chronicle he was engaged in northern Mesopotamia; ‘in Nisan (April) Cyrus, King of Persia, levied his troops and crossed (?) the Tigris below Arbela.’ In the following month he opened hostilities against a country whose name is mutilated on the cylinder, and whose king he finally captured and put to death. Though complete certainty cannot be attained, there is very strong probability that the country concerned was Lydia and that Croesus was the unhappy king.

The peril to themselves involved in the rise of Cyrus had already been perceived in the neighbouring states, particularly by Croesus. He had no confidence that Cyrus would respect the boundary of the Halys which, since 585, had divided Asia Minor among the Lydians to the west of it and the Medes to the east of it, or that the peaceful relations which had been cemented by marriage between the royal houses of the Lydians and the Medes could be maintained with the new ruler. Accordingly, in the year 547 he secured alliances with Egypt, Babylonia and the Spartans. In the spring of the next year, persuaded by the ambiguous replies of the oracles that he would be victorious, he crossed the Halys into Cappadocia, and besieged and captured Pteria. Cyrus, according to Herodotus, first attempted to parry this invasion of his territory by soliciting the Ionians to revolt from Lydia. Failing in this, he himself began the campaign to which the Babylonian Chronicle refers, and fought a severe but indecisive action near Pteria. Cyrus showed no sign of immediately renewing the attack, and, as it was late in the year, Croesus, expecting to be left alone till the spring, retired to Sardes and disbanded his mercenaries; but immediately despatched envoys to his allies, bidding them prepare for united action in the spring. Cyrus, however, instead of waiting for the spring, quickly advanced to Sardes; and in the plain outside the city defeated Croesus, who opposed him stubbornly with his Lydian cavalry. After a short siege he succeeded in capturing the city, before the Egyptians and Babylonians, to whom Croesus renewed his appeals and this time for immediate assistance, had had time to respond, or the Spartans, to whom he also sent, had despatched their ships. Thus the kingdom of Lydia passed out of history and, if we may believe the contemporary Babylonian evidence against the tales later current among the Greeks, with it went Croesus its king.

With the overthrow of the kingdom of Lydia (546 BC) the dominion of Cyrus was extended over nearly the whole of the interior of Asia Minor. Within the next year or two the hold on what Croesus had directly ruled or influenced was strengthened, and the remainder—i.e. principally the coasts—of Asia Minor actually incorporated in the Persian empire or, as in the case of Miletus, which had agreed with Cyrus that the same relations as had existed between Miletus and the Lydians should be maintained between Miletus and Cyrus, brought within the sphere of its commanding influence. Cyrus left this work of completion in Asia Minor to his representatives and generals. The city of Sardes he left at first in the hands of Tabalus a Persian and Pactyas a Lydian—giving to the latter, according to Herodotus, charge of the finances. Pactyas used his position to lead a revolt of the Lydians: this was put down by a Median general, Mazares, and the population was entirely disarmed. Mazares also commenced the subjection of the Ionian cities; and after his death Harpagus, formerly the leader of the revolting Medes who helped Cyrus to secure his victory over Astyages, completed the subjection of the Ionian cities of the mainland and received the submission of the Ionian islands. He then turned to the subjection of the southern coast of Asia Minor, actually raising for this purpose troops from among the Ionians.

Whereas Cyrus, in obtaining the empire of the Medes, had extended his dominion over a state of which the nucleus consisted of peoples kindred to his own, of similar customs, culture and religion, his conquest of Lydia, which had become intimately connected with Greece, and deeply affected by Greek ideas and culture, and of the Greek cities of Asia Minor, brought him into relation with a totally different civilization and religion, and with other conceptions of life and government. Some aspects of the action and reaction of Persia on Greece and Greece on Persia may be left to be referred to in the sequel; but among the points on which Herodotus touches in narrating the conquest of Lydia and Ionia are the contempt of Cyrus for the commercial habits of the Greeks, and his rejection of the proposal of the Spartans when, unwilling to give more material help for the Ionian cities, they put forward a kind of Monroe doctrine in behalf of Greek city life. His accommodation to Greek religious institutions—anticipating his policy in Babylon—can be seen in the use made by him of the Greek oracles, as may be inferred from the way in which, after Cyrus had so remarkably revealed his power by the defeat of Croesus, the oracular replies were in favour of Persia.

III

CONQUEST OF BABYLON

 

Though neither Babylon nor Egypt actually assisted Croesus in his distress, the alliance between the three must have been well known; and must have sharpened the intention of Cyrus to deal with the remaining members of it. The expectation of an Iranian attack on Babylon, probably before Cyrus defeated Astyages, can be traced in the poem of a Jewish exile in Babylon, who anticipates the complete destruction of the city by the Medes. Certainly, at any time after 546 Babylon had good cause for anxiety in the Perso-Median Empire under its new and successful ruler. Egypt, till Babylon had fallen, or Cyrus could threaten the command of the Mediterranean, may have feltmore secure.

Yet the attack on Babylon was not made for a few years after the fall of Lydia. Of the reasons for this delay, and of Cyrus’ activities during the interval, we are ignorant; he may have had to direct his energies to the Far East. Herodotus speaks of the Bactrians and Sacae in addition to Babylon and Egypt dividing his attention. But when he acted he acted decisively, and the conquest of Babylon, begun only in 540, was completed by the late summer of 539. The army he now led was large; and, as formerly in Media, so now in Babylon, Cyrus was assisted by divisions within the empire he was attacking. Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, himself, unlike the kings of the Chaldean house of Nebuchadrezzar, a native of Babylonia, had been raised to the throne as the result of a conspiracy, and, in contrast to the short reigns—three in six years—of Nebuchadrezzar’s immediate successors, maintained it for 18 years. But he failed to maintain internal union and content; possibly by his personal indifference to national security—for a good part of his reign military affairs seem to have been handed over to his son Belshazzar—and clearly to some extent by his religious policy as well, he provoked much discontent, of which Cyrus availed himself in his rapid conquest and occupation of the country. The course of this conquest can be traced in considerable detail. It was probably in the year 540 BC that Cyrus opened his Babylonian campaign. Whether he approached from the east, descending through the Zagros gates, or (as seems more probable in view of the presence of the governor of Gutium) from the north, which also had long been his, along the Tigris, is not stated, but the first notable success to which the operations led was the capture, after hard fighting, of Opis, which lay on the Tigris to the north of Babylon. This secured northern Babylonia for Cyrus, who seems now to have divided his forces. He himself at the head of one army within a fortnight captured Sippar, near the Euphrates and 50 miles nearer the capital, without having to strike a blow. Two days later the second army, under Ugbaru (Gobryas) the governor of Gutium, marched unresisted into Babylon, and took Nabonidus prisoner before he had time to escape. Gutium was a district north of Opis, enclosed between the Tigris, the Diyala, the lower Zab and the mountains to the east; but about Gobryas, its governor, there is some doubt. Though it is clear that he is not the same as the conspirator of that name who helped Darius seventeen years later to overthrow the Magian pretender, complete certainty cannot be claimed for the attractive conjecture which would identify him with an important officer of the Babylonian army who held high positions even before the death of Nebuchadrezzar.

If the two are identical, we must conclude that Cyrus had secured the allegiance of Ugbaru before moving south, and that the rapidity of his conquest was greatly accelerated by the amount of sympathy which the revolting Babylonian general commanded within the Babylonian empire. Ugbaru forced his way into Babylon on the 16th day of the month Tishri (October), on the third of the following month, Markheshwan, Cyrus himself entered the city; and eight days later (if a somewhat mutilated passage is so to be understood), Ugbaru overcame the last remnant of opposition by killing the king’s son. The month Markheshwan marks the transition in Babylon from the reign of Nabonidus to that of Cyrus.

Making all allowance for the natural bias in Cyrus’s own inscriptions, and for the Nabonidus-Cyrus Chronicle written and completed after his success was achieved and he had become king of Babylon, it is clear that Cyrus obtained the throne and empire of Babylon with the acquiescence, not to say on the invitation, of a large part of the population. He came to free them from a ruler who had forfeited their adhesion: he accepted the throne as the gift of their own god Marduk: ‘Nabonidus, the king who did not fear him (Marduk), he delivered into his (Cyrus’) hand. All the people of Babylon, Sumer and Akkad, princes and governors, fell down before him and kissed his feet. They rejoiced in his sovereignty, their faces shone.’ Bel and Nebo loved the rule, rejoiced in the sovereignty of Cyrus. He was the founder of a new dynasty over a willing people, not a foreign conqueror indifferent to them and their interests. Such at least was the light in which Cyrus put himself forward, and he made it his first concern to secure peace and freedom from hostile attack, and to care for the needs of ‘Babylon and all its cities.’

Cyrus immediately reversed the religious policy of Nabonidus, which had provoked great resentment, and in other respects in his attitude to the Babylonian gods he put himself right with the people. Whereas Nabonidus, especially apparently under threat of invasion, had gathered into the capital the images of the gods from various outlying temples—with the exception of Borsippa, Cuthah and Sippar—to the annoyance not only of the gods thus removed, but or Marduk also whose city they overcrowded, Cyrus sent back the gods and human beings, also, who had been exiled, to their own cities and re-established them there. Among the districts to which he sent back the gods was western Elam from which they could hardly have been removed by Nabonidus, but by some predecessor of his. He does not mention any cities or districts of the west which Nebuchadrezzar had incorporated in the Babylonian empire, but the Jewish tradition, that Cyrus fulfilled the expectations of the prophet of the Exile that he would rebuild the cities or Judah and re-erect the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, only ascribes to him what his general policy might well have led him to do. This restoration of the gods was begun in the month (Kislew) after Cyrus entered Babylon, and continued till the month of Adar (March) following. The care now shown by Cyrus for the national religion had already been anticipated by Ugbaru, while Cyrus tarried at Sippar; the Chronicle relates that ‘to the end of the month (viz. in which Ugbaru entered Babylon) the shield-bearers of the country of Gutium guarded the gates of E-sagil (the temple of Marduk at Babylon); no one’s spear approached E-sagil or came within the sanctuaries, nor was any due rite transgressed.’ In another inscription Cyrus describes himself, presumably in reference to some work of reparation or extension such as Nabonidus had earned on freely in other cities near Babylon, as ‘builder of E-sagil and E-zida’ (the temple of Nebo in Borsippa).

Cyrus adopted the palace of the Babylonian kings as his own, and Babylon became one of the capitals of his now vast empire. Certainly he did not degrade Susa, nor abandon Ecbatana; but in Babylon, whose dominion since the time of Nebuchadrezzar had extended westward to the Mediterranean, he received the tribute and the homage of ‘all the kings dwelling in palaces of all the quarters of the earth, from the Upper to the Lower Sea—all the kings of the West-land dwelling in tents.’ Yet he appointed Ugbaru governor of Babylon, and Ugbaru appointed sub-governors under himself. And further, perhaps in view of the necessity for his own absence from Babylon, after the first few months, in the first month of the first full year of his reign, he for a time made his son Cambyses king of Babylon, keeping for himself the more comprehensive title of King of the Lands; but before the close of his first year he had, for reasons unknown, resumed for himself the double title ‘King of Babylon, King of the Lands,’ which is henceforward attested for every year down to the ninth and last, though occasionally during this period one or other of the two titles is used alone.

The capture of Babylon gave Cyrus a claim to the countries of the west—to Phoenicia and Syria down to the borders of Egypt. As his first conquest of Media threatened Babylon, so his last threatened Egypt; but as the threat hung for ten years and more in suspense over Babylon, so now Egypt, though exposed to attack and the object of military preparations entrusted by Cyrus to Cambyses, remained untouched by Cyrus during the last ten years of his life; and the last great conquest of the Persians was left for his son Cambyses. Even so, Cyrus, by uniting under his single sway what had been the dominions of the Medes, the Lydians, and the Babylonians, became master of the whole of western Asia, sovereign in Asia Minor which none of the greatest conquerors of Assyria or Babylon had brought under their sway, and at the same time sovereign in the east far beyond the farthest limits to which these conquerors had penetrated.

Between the years of active conquest and between 538 and his death in 529, Cyrus must have had enough and more than enough to occupy his attention in organizing and securing his rapidly increasing empire. In this, as in the actual acquisition of it, he must have been assisted by the readiness of large parts of the populations to receive him, and, also, by his tolerance. Even if religion was one of the vital factors in the rapid rise of Persia, Cyrus, unlike Mohammed and his successors, made no attempt to impose his own religion on his new subjects; on the other hand in his newly-won countries, at least in Babylon, he publicly appears as the devotee and servant of the religion of the country. He made no attempt to continue the Assyrian and Babylonian methods of transporting conquered populations to distant parts of his empire, largely perhaps because the earlier Assyrian and Babylonian treatment had broken the national spirit of the peoples of whom he had become the ruler, and because, in any case, in these countries the resistance offered was less general and less obstinate than that offered to the earlier conquerors: on the other hand he in certain cases at least reversed that policy and restored exiles to their countries. The administration of the empire through satraps, and much more belonging to the form or spirit of the government was the work of Cyrus, but it will be more convenient to describe this policy later.

In spite of the extent of conquest already achieved by Cyrus ten years before his death, and the thoroughness with which he had established his authority in great kingdoms or empires which he had overcome, Cyrus died fighting. In details and even in naming the people with whom he was fighting the various stories, of which that given by Herodotus was but one of several known to him, differ widely; but that the last war of Cyrus was on the far eastern confines of his empire they are agreed. His opponents were the Massagetae, a savage race who occupied the great plain to the east of the Caspian, according to Herodotus; the Derbices assisted by the Indians, according to Ctesias; and the Dahae, a term meaning ‘robbers’ applied by the Persians to the wild desert tribes, according to Berosus. It is significant of the importance attached to securing the eastern frontier and subduing the wild peoples about it that Cyrus undertook this campaign himself, leaving Cambyses to carry forward the preparations for the attack on Egypt.

 

IV

THE CONQUEST OF EGYPT BY CAMBYSES

 

The opening years (529-526 BC) of the reign of Cambyses, like the closing years of Cyrus, are involved in considerable obscurity; the one conspicuous achievement of his reign is the conquest of Egypt (525). Of this Cambyses himself left no record that has yet been discovered, and, apart from an inscription, written in the reign of Darius, of an Egyptian, Uzahor-resenet, who received Cambyses on his visit to Sais, the history of this king and of his conquest of Egypt in particular must be constructed almost entirely from Greek sources, especially Herodotus, who drew mainly on a Persian and an Egyptian source, both alike hostile to the king.

Merely as successors to the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, the Persians, apart from any special provocation, would probably have sought to add Egypt to their empire; and certainly, as a matter of fact, in establishing their authority in that country for over a century (with one or two brief interruptions) they far surpassed the achievements of the Assyrians who, under Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal, conquered and for a few years held it, and even more that of Nebuchadrezzar who, barely forty years before the accession of Cambyses, attacked Egypt, but proceeded to no permanent occupation of it.

Egypt had, immediately before the Persian conquest, passed through a period of considerable activity and prosperity, which concealed, however, the seeds of its decay. This was during the long reign of Amasis, to which native records and Herodotus agree in assigning a length of 44 years. Since Amasis died just before the Persian invasion, his accession, which he owed to a revolt of the native Egyptian troops against Apries, is to be placed in 569/8 BC. Amasis, who was not of low birth, but born of parents highly placed at the court of Apries, found himself obliged, in the opening years of his reign, to secure the country from the mercenaries who had supported Apries, and also to withstand the Babylonian attack. This, as a contemporary Babylonian inscription records, took place in the thirty-seventh year of Nebuchadrezzar. Whether Nebuchadrezzar’s attack was merely a revenge for the help which Egypt had given in the past to the tottering Assyrian empire against its Babylonian enemies, or whether, coinciding with the recent change of dynasty in Egypt, it was intended to utilize the distractions and weakness of the country to establish a permanent occupation such as the Assyrians had attempted in the previous century, it proved as a matter of fact but a passing menace, and for the remainder of the reign of Amasis Egypt remained, on the one hand, free from attack and even, till the menace of Persia became obvious, from fear of attack, and, on the other, abstained from any attempt at annexation, except in the case of Cyprus which was conquered and made tributary.

From the circumstances, already referred to and related in detail elsewhere (in which Amasis became king, it might have been anticipated that his policy would have led him to react against the reliance of recent kings on foreign and particularly Greek mercenaries, and to rely more upon the native troops. But whether because Amasis perceived the inadequacy of the latter, or for other reasons, his reign is marked by no such reaction, but rather by more intimate relations with the Greeks. He was pre-eminently Philhellene: in addition to connecting himself with the dynasty he had overthrown by marrying the daughter of Psammetichus II, he married also Laodicea, a Greek lady of Cyrene. He made rich presents to various Greek shrines' after the destruction of the temple at Delphi (548 BC) he contributed a thousand talents weight of alum for its rebuilding; he presented a gold-covered image of Athene to Cyrene, and made gifts also to the temples at Lindus and Samos. With Polycrates of Samos in particular he established close and friendly relations.

In one respect, indeed, Amasis may have given satisfaction to Egyptian anti-foreign feeling by appearing to restrict the freedom of Greek merchants, and actually limiting the points of contact between Greeks and Egyptians: he made Naucratis the sole Greek emporium in the Delta, even compelling cargoes driven by weather to any other point on the coast to be transported thither. But the restriction proved no serious hindrance to Greek trade, and the new city, situated on the Canopic arm of the Nile and not very far from Amasis’ capital, Sais, continued to flourish as an almost exclusively Greek city, in close touch with and engaging the interest of the whole Greek world, which contributed to the building of its Greek temples.

 But while the prosperity of this important Greek city on Egyptian soil is one of the distinctive features of the reign of Amasis, the king may have appealed to Egyptian feelings by his numerous activities in the building or restoration of Egyptian temples, notably at Sais and Memphis; and the Serapeum stele states that he buried the Apis which was born in the fifth and died in the twenty-third year of his reign with pomp unsurpassed before. By nature, if he may be judged by the impressions received by Herodotus from the stories current in the next century, he would have done all that was possible to secure the attachment both of the native and the foreign elements in his country; for in these stories he appears as a man of resource and versatility and industry, as one who had largely broken away from the court conventions that had greatly restricted the Egyptian kings, and who yet had the wit and good humour to turn aside as far as possible the offence which his liberalism tended to occasion.

But in the course of his reign, and as we may believe under the pressure of events in the east, Amasis was compelled to lean heavily on his mercenaries. Herodotus significantly records that he removed the Ionians and the Carians whom Psammetichus had settled in encampments below Bubastis and ‘established them at Memphis, making them into a guard for himself against the Egyptians.’ In spite of the prosperity of the country the cost of these mercenaries proved burdensome, and Amasis appears to have drawn for their support on the revenues of the temples. Thus when from about 550 BC onward the danger lurking in the rising power of Persia became clear, and to meet it Amasis was seeking or acquiescing in alliances with Croesus of Lydia, Polycrates of Samos, and Nabonidus of Babylon, he had two causes of weakness or insecurity at home: (a) there was always the possibility that the mercenaries, bound to him by no patriotic ties but on whom he relied for the effectiveness of his army and his fleet, would fail him at the crucial moment, and (b) the discontent among the Egyptians occasioned by his reliance on these foreigners and the means he was compelled to use in order to support them.

Though the rapidity or Cyrus’s movements in 546 prevented Amasis from actually supporting his ally Croesus, his opposition to Persia, as implied by the alliance, would be sufficient occasion for Persia to mark down Egypt for conquest in due time. Babylon, however, naturally came first, and Babylon was not occupied by the Persians till 539; and with the inclusion of this ancient empire in his already vast domains and with warfare on the troublesome far eastern frontier the last ten years of Cyrus were sufficiently engaged. With Babylon, the Babylonian provinces in Syria, which however had not remained entirely quiescent under Nabonidus, fell to Persia. In this way the Phoenicians would come under Persian control—according to Herodotus, ‘the Phoenicians had delivered themselves over to the Persians of their own accord’—and Persia gained possession of an important means to the subjugation of Egypt—the Phoenician fleet. The value of this can be easily guessed from the fact that Cambyses was tempting the Cyprians to throw off the yoke of Egypt and constitute a contingent in his forces, and was persuading Polycrates of Samos to abandon his understanding with Egypt and to place his fleet at the disposal of the Persian king.

It was not till four years after his accession that Cambyses found himself ready to attack Egypt. His first task must have been, if not to pursue the offensive in prosecuting which Cyrus had died, at least to make secure the conquests of Cyrus in Asia. He may also have been called upon to defend the sovereignty over the dominions which passed from Cyrus to himself. Cyrus, indeed, had indicated Cambyses, his eldest son by Cassandane, the daughter of Pharnaspis, an Achaemenid, as his successor, and had thus so far as possible freed the empire from the dangers of a disputed succession. But there are some uncertain indications of conflicts within the realm, and even of the connection of these with dissension between Cambyses and his brother Smerdis (Bardiya). Herodotus speaks incidentally of Cyrus, and again afterwards of Cambyses, ‘having subdued’ Asia; and, in spite of its romantic character, the Cyropaedeia of Xenophon may preserve a good historical tradition when its author says that after the death of Cyrus ‘immediately his sons quarrelled and immediately cities and nations revolted, and everything took a turn for the worse.’ Darius in the Behistun Inscription directly asserts that before proceeding to Egypt Cambyses had his brother murdered, keeping the death concealed from the people. It is reasonable to find a cause for the murder, not in the fable of Herodotus which assumes that Smerdis had accompanied Cambyses to Egypt, but in suspicions of Cambyses of the loyalty of his brother and a desire to have him out of the way before undertaking the conquest of Egypt.

As Cyrus in his conquest first of Media and then of Babylon, so Cambyses in his conquest of Egypt found his task lightened by treachery within the country he was attacking. How far this may have been the result of definite overtures on his part cannot be said; but Polycrates at the crucial moment transferred his support from Egypt to Persia, and Phanes who had held an important position among the mercenaries of Amasis on the eve of war fled from Egypt and placed his skill and knowledge of Egyptian conditions at the service of Cambyses. Of treachery on the part of the priests there is no direct record, but the inscription of Uzahor-resenet gives some ground for suspicion of disaffection, and has even given rise to the suspicion that he had used his position as Admiral to keep the Egyptian fleet out of action. Amasis died before the Persian attack developed, and his son Psamatik or Psammetichus III, a man at that time in middle life, succeeded him.

One important detail in the preparations for the invasion of Egypt was, according to the picturesque narrative of Herodotus, worked out on the suggestion of Phanes. Whether on this point Cambyses actually needed the advice of the Greek renegade from Egypt, or was otherwise acquainted, as Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal before him had been, with the essentials to a successful passage of the desert lying between Palestine and Egypt, he secured the water-supply for his army by establishing good relations with the Arabs. Of the action of the fleet, which supported the land army, no details are known; its base was at Acre.

Cambyses led his army by the coast road from Gaza to the confines of Egypt where, at the city of Pelusium, he found the Egyptian army, including the Ionian and Carian mercenaries, awaiting him. Here he decisively defeated them, the garrison in Pelusium itself for some time offered a stubborn resistance before capitulating; but the defeated troops retired in disorder to Memphis, and there endured a siege of some duration. With the capture of that city and, together with it, of the Egyptian king Psammetichus III, who had reigned but six months, Cambyses found Egyptian resistance at an end, Heliopolis alone of the other cities offering any opposition. By the end of May 525 BC he was recognized as king of Egypt.

 

V.

THE WORK OF CAMBYSES AND DARIUS IN EGYPT

 

But the plans of Cambyses had not been limited to the conquest of Egypt alone: he aimed at an African empire as extensive as his Asian dominion. Libya and Cyrene avoided attack by making their submission. In three directions he planned to extend his conquest so as to bring within his empire Carthage, Ethiopia and the oasis of Ammon. But for the conquest of Carthage a fleet was required, and the Phoenicians who formed the main naval strength of Cambyses proved so reluctant to operate against their kinsmen that this plan had to be abandoned. Cambyses undertook the conduct of the Ethiopian campaign himself, detaching at Thebes a force of 50,000 men (according to Herodotus) for the expedition to the west. These troops reached the seven-days’ distant city of Oasis (el-Khargah), which, perhaps as the result of the initial success of this expedition, was tributary to Cambyses’ successor Darius, but in their further march west towards the oasis of Jupiter Ammon they were overtaken by disaster, being, according to the story, buried under a sand-storm.

The Ethiopian campaign undertaken to the south from Thebes, probably closely following the Nile, also failed to achieve all that was intended. But it is probable that it was far from being the complete failure that Herodotus represents it to have been, nor was the measure of ill-success that attended it due to the fact that the capacity for organization displayed by Cambyses in the invasion of Egypt itself had given place to the folly of a madman allowing his troops to undertake the difficult marches through the southern deserts unprovided with supplies. On the other hand, unless the name of a place near the third cataract recorded by Strabo and others is merely due to Greek confusion with some similarly sounding Egyptian name, the storehouse of Cambyses is evidence of the Persian king’s commissariat department at four-fifths of the distance from Thebes to Napata, the sacred city of the Ethiopians which had served as their capital, and two-thirds of the distance to distant Meroe to which the capital had been transferred.

Complete subjugation of Ethiopia would have involved the capture of Meroe, and this Cambyses failed to achieve, in spite of statements of some late Greek writers which might seem to imply that he did. Circumstances still unknown to us compelled Cambyses to retire, his troops now suffering from lack of supplies, though scarcely to the extent implied in the highly coloured Egyptian story preserved by Herodotus. The measure of success achieved by Cambyses south of Thebes, whence this campaign was undertaken, is to be seen in the securing of the southern boundary of Egypt—Elephantine continued for more than a century to be held by a strong Persian garrison—and the establishing of some degree of Persian authority extending from Elephantine over northern Ethiopia, i.e. the countiy immediately to the south of Elephantine, the southern gate or Egypt. It is significant that Herodotus, while in his narrative of the Ethiopian campaign he speaks of unqualified failure, elsewhere not only mentions Ethiopians as the subjects of Persia in the time of Darius, but actually refers to ‘the Ethiopians who border upon Egypt whom Cambyses subdued as he marched against the long-lived Ethiopians,’ and who, he further asserts, were still tributary to Persia under Darius: he also speaks of ‘Ethiopians who dwell above Egypt’ forming a part of Xerxes’ army against Greece under Arsames the son of Darius. The result of Cambyses’ campaign, then, was that, though it failed to reach Meroe and to enable the Persian king to overthrow the Ethiopian as he had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy, it earned the Persian arms and finally established Persian authority much farther south than any previous Asiatic conqueror had come; the success of Cambyses far exceeded in this direction that of the Assyrians in the previous century.

In another important respect Egyptian contemporary sources have corrected the one-sided Egyptian stories concerning the activity of Cambyses current a century later and preserved by Herodotus. According to these he from the first outraged Egyptian sensibilities by desecration and sacrilege; immediately after the fall of Memphis he proceeded to Sais, and there violated the corpse of Amasis; after his return to Memphis from Ethiopia he slew Apis the sacred calf and openly mocked at the religious customs of Egypt, treated the priests with violence and contumely, desecrated temples, destroyed images and freely interfered with the observance of religious festivals. This policy or conduct, contrasting so strikingly with that of Cyrus towards the Babylonian gods and religious customs, cannot be altogether the invention of a conquered people: the destruction of Egyptian temples, for example, is not only attributed to Cambyses in hostile Egyptian tradition, but is neutrally attested by the tradition current a century-later among the Jews of Elephantine, according to which ‘when Cambyses came into Egypt the temples of the gods of the Egyptians were all of them overthrown,’ while the Jewish temple at Elephantine was left unharmed.

The violation of the corpse of Amasis may be doubted, and, in any case, Cambyses at first adopted a very different policy towards the Egyptian religion, and indeed a policy precisely similar to that of Cyrus in Babylon. Immediately after he had obtained effective possession of the country he came to Sais, the seat of the dynasty which he had just overthrown, and there, according to the statement of Uzahor, who received him in the temple of Neith, he sought by acquiescence in Egyptian religious custom and rites to give to the crown he had won by conquest the sanction of the native religion. As king of Egypt he received the name Re-mesuti, born of Re; he worshipped and made offering to Neith and all the great gods in Sais, as all good Egyptian kings had done before him. In particular he granted to Uzahor authority to eject the foreigners, presumably foreign mercenaries, from the precincts of the temple, and to restore the temple revenues.

Later in the inscription—it was not written till the reign of Darius—Uzahor refers to ‘the heavy misfortune which had befallen the whole land, such as this country had never experienced before,’ in which he is perhaps alluding with a discreet vagueness to a change of policy on the part of Cambyses, of which a severe treatment of the priesthood and a less tolerant attitude to the Egyptian religion were characteristic. Apart from the violation of the corpse of Amasis, even in Herodotus the charges of sacrilege all relate to what was done by Cambyses after his return from Ethiopia. Herodotus attributes this later conduct to a mental breakdown of Cambyses, and some, accepting this, have traced the madness to the hardships and ill-success of the Ethiopian campaign. Possibly it was due to political plots in which priests and officials of the temples were conspicuously involved.

Be this as it may, before he died—by his own hand, on his way to Persia, whither he was recalled, in the spring of 522—Cambyses appears to have been able to establish Persian rule in Egypt with the same thoroughness with which he had achieved the initial conquest of the country. The Egyptians took no part in the revolts against the Achaemenids which broke out at the end of his reign and took Darius many months to quell. Babylon at this time produced more than one brief occupant of the throne of Babylon, but no Egyptian disputed with Cambyses or—till the very end of his reign—with Darius the throne of Egypt. The Persian Aryandes, whom Cambyses had appointed governor of Egypt unchallenged by the native population, maintained his position till Darius himself deprived him of his office and life on the ground or suspicion of arrogating to himself royal prerogatives. It was not till 485, more than thirty years after the death of Cambyses, that an Egyptian revolt led to the enthronement of a native chief, a break, brief even then, in the rule of Persian monarchs of Egypt. Thus for a generation the Persian dominion over Egypt established by Cambyses remained unchallenged.

So far, then, as Egypt was concerned the main task of Darius was to maintain what Cambyses had won. In one direction, indeed, viz. westwards, the African dominions of Persia were enlarged under Darius, while they suffered contraction in none. Aryandes the governor of Egypt utilized dissensions in Cyrene and Barca to extend Persian control as far west as Euhesperides, west of Barca. Pheretime of Cyrene having appealed to Aryandes against Barca, Aryandes despatched the Persian army under Amasis (or Arsames) the Maraphian, and the Persian fleet under Badres the Pasargadan to attack Barca. The expedition was completely successful and a large part of the population was deported to the other end of the Persian Empire, to Bactria. It is possible that the independence of Aryandes’ action in this matter may have been one of the counts against him with Darius—another was that he had struck a peculiarly pure silver coinage; but in any case the ultimate result was an enlargement of Darius’ dominions: included in the satrapy of Egypt were the Libyans bordering on Egypt and Cyrene and Barca.

The country won by conquest had to be maintained by force, though Darius tempered the force it was necessary to employ by resuming and perhaps enlarging the conciliatory policy of Cambyses’ early months in Egypt. The army commanded by a Persian general and the fleet commanded by a Persian admiral at the disposal of the government in Egypt have just been mentioned. Strong garrisons were established in the central city of Memphis, at Daphnae at the eastern extremity and (in all probability) Marea at the western extremity of the Delta, and at Elephantine the frontier town between Egypt and Ethiopia. The support of the troops was maintained by contributions in kind from the Egyptians. The troops largely consisted of Persians, but far from exclusively: Herodotus speaks also of others at Memphis; and at Elephantine Jews and other Semites formed part of the garrison, and indeed (at least in 411 BC) Egyptians. Egyptians also served in Xerxes’ fleet against Greece. Nor were the officers entirely drawn from the Persians, though it is noticeable that, at any rate somewhat later than the reign of Darius, native Egyptians occupy no offices in the Persian army in Egypt. Military considerations, the need for facilitating at all times the movements to and fro of Persian troops, may have had much to do with the systematic provisioning with water of the desert road from Palestine to Egypt: this was secured by a service organized at Memphis.

Darius was not concerned to conceal the fact that he held Egypt as a conquered country: in an inscription erected by the side of the canal which he re-opened he describes himself as Persian and relates that ‘from Persia he seized Egypt.’ Yet by his attitude towards the Egyptian religion and by his care for the economic prosperity of the country, he must have done much to soften the hardness of alien rule and to correct the ill-feeling engendered by the later policy of Cambyses. Like Cambyses, Darius adopted as king of Egypt a name, Stitu-Re, that proclaimed his devotion to the god Re. He repaired the temple of Ptah at Memphis, and built the great temple in the oasis of Khargah. He made offerings to the god and gifts to the priests. Uzahor in his inscription at Sais describes how Darius commanded him to re-establish the Temple-school there, and concludes eulogistically ‘all this the king did because he knew that such was the best means of awakening to new life all that was falling into ruin, in order to uphold the name of all the gods, their temples, their revenues, and the ordinances of their feasts forever.’ Later in his reign, in the thirtieth year, the architect Khnum-ab-Re who carried out much work for Darius speaks of him as ‘the friend of all the gods.’

Among the measures known to have been taken by Darius for the economic welfare of the country the chief was the completion of the canal connecting the Nile (a little above Bubastis) with the Red Sea (near Suez) which Necho nearly a century before had attempted and abandoned. The careful measures for keeping in repair the great dam at Memphis, attested by Herodotus for his own days as one of the activities of the Persian government, may also go back to the time of Darius.

The tribute exacted from the entire satrapy of Egypt was 700 talents (rather under a quarter of a million sterling) and the yield of the fish taken from Lake Moeris, which was estimated at a talent a day for six months in the year and 20 minae for the other six months. The country had also to supply corn for the troops. Next to Babylon with Assyria, which paid 1000 talents yearly, Egypt yielded the largest tribute of the Persian satrapies, but in proportion to the population and prosperity of the country it can scarcely have weighed very heavily on the taxpayers, even though the large priestly element was exempt from payment.