But it was not for long. The Egyptians returned to “their own land,” and the siege of Jerusalem was recommenced. At last, in b.c. 588, the city was taken, its king and most of its inhabitants led into captivity, and its temple and palace burned with fire. Judah was placed under a Babylonian governor, and the authority of the Babylonians acknowledged as far as Gaza.
Psammetikhos ii. had died in the preceding year, and his son Uahabra, the Apries of the Greeks, the Hophra of the Old Testament, occupied his place. The army which had gone to the help of Zedekiah had doubtless been sent by him. He had recaptured Gaza, and marched along the coast to Sidon, which he captured, and Tyre, which was in rebellion against the Chaldæans, while his fleet defeated the combined forces of the Cyprians and Phœnicians, and held the sea. A hieroglyphic inscription, erected by a native of Gebal and commemorative of the invasion, has recently been found near Sidon. But the Egyptian conquests were again lost almost as quickly as they had been made.
Palestine became a Babylonian province up to the frontiers of Egypt. Many of the Jews who had been left in it fled to Egypt. Their numbers were reinforced by a band of outlaws, of whom Johanan was the leader, who had murdered the Babylonian [pg 129] governor and had dragged into Egypt with them the prophet Jeremiah and his scribe Baruch. Jeremiah in vain protested against their conduct, and predicted that Hophra should be slain by his enemies, and that Nebuchadrezzar should set up his throne on that very pavement “at the entry of Pharaoh's house in Tahpanhes” where the prophet was then standing. Tahpanhes is almost certainly Tel ed-Defneh, the Daphnæ of Greek geography, which stands in the mid-desert about twelve miles to the west of Kantara on the Suez Canal, and where Professor Flinders Petrie made excavations for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1886. There he found the remains of a great fortress and camp, which had been built by Psammetikhos i. for his Greek mercenaries. The walls of the camp were forty feet in thickness, and the ruins of the fortress still go by the name of the “Castle of the Jew's Daughter.” In front of it is a brick pavement, just like that described by Jeremiah.
Daphnæ, in fact, was one of the chief fortresses of Egypt on the side of Asia, and it was accordingly the chief station of the Greek mercenaries. It commanded the entrance to the Delta, and was almost the first place in Egypt that the traveller from Palestine who came by the modern caravan road would approach. It was, therefore, the first [pg 130] settlement at which Jewish fugitives who wished to avoid the Babylonian garrison at Gaza would be likely to arrive. And it was also the first object of attack on the part of an invader from the East. Its possession opened to him the way to Memphis.
That Nebuchadrezzar actually invaded Egypt, as Jeremiah had predicted, we now know from a fragment of his annals. In his thirty-seventh year (b.c. 567) he marched into Egypt, defeating the Pharaoh Amasis, and the soldiers of “Phut of the Ionians,” “a distant land which is in the midst of the sea.” The enemies, therefore, into whose hands Hophra was to fall were not the Babylonians. They were, in fact, his own subjects.
He had pursued the Hellenising policy of his predecessors with greater thoroughness than they had done, and had thus aroused the jealousy and alarm of the native population. The Greek mercenaries alone had his confidence, and the Egyptians accused him of betraying the native troops whom he had sent to the help of the Libyans against the Greek colony of Kyrênê. Amasis (or Ahmes), his brother-in-law, put himself at the head of the rebels. A battle was fought near Sais between the Greek troops of Hophra on the one side and the revolted Egyptians on the other, which ended in the defeat of the Greeks and the capture of Hophra himself. [pg 131] Amasis was proclaimed king (b.c. 570), and though the captive Pharaoh was at first treated with respect, he was afterwards put to death.
The change of monarch made little difference to the Greeks in Egypt. They were too valuable, both as soldiers and as traders, for the Pharaoh to dispense with their services. The mercenaries were removed from Daphnæ to Memphis, in the very heart of the kingdom, and fresh privileges were granted to the merchants of Naukratis. The Pharaoh married a Greek wife, and a demotic papyrus, now at Paris, even describes how he robbed the temples of Memphis, On and Bubastis of their endowments and handed them over to the Greek troops. “The Council” which sat under him ordered that “the vessels, the fuel, the linen, and the dues” hitherto enjoyed by their gods and their priests should be given instead to the foreigner. In this act of sacrilege the Egyptians of a later day saw the cause of the downfall of their country. The invasion of Nebuchadrezzar had passed over it without producing much injury; indeed, it does not seem to have extended beyond the eastern half of the Delta. But a new power, that of Cyrus, was rising in the East. Amasis had foreseen the coming storm, and had occupied Cyprus in advance. If Xenophon is to be believed, he had also sent troops to the aid [pg 132] of Krœsus of Lydia. But all was of no avail. The power of Cyrus steadily increased. The empires of Lydia and Babylonia went down before it, and when his son Kambyses succeeded him in July, b.c. 529, the new empire extended from the Mediterranean to India and from the Caspian to the borders of Egypt. It was clear that the fertile banks of the Nile would be the next object of attack.
Greek vanity asserted that the actual cause of the invasion was the Greek mercenary Phanês. He had deserted to Kambyses, and explained to him how Egypt could be entered. That Phanês was a name used by the Egyptian Greeks we know from its occurrence on the fragment of a large vase discovered by Professor Petrie at Naukratis. Here we read: “Phanês the son of Glaukos dedicated me to Apollo of Naukratis.” But the invasion of Egypt by Kambyses was the necessary consequence of the policy which had laid the whole of the oriental world at his father's feet.
Amasis died while the army of Kambyses was on its march (b.c. 526), and his son Psammetikhos iii. had to bear the brunt of the attack. A battle was fought near Pelusium, and though the Greek and Karian auxiliaries did their best, the invading forces gained the day. The Pharaoh fled to Memphis, which was thereupon besieged by Kambyses. The [pg 133] siege was a short one. The city of “the White Wall” was taken, Psammetikhos made a prisoner, and his son, together with two thousand youths of the leading Egyptian families, was put to death. For a while Psammetikhos himself was allowed to live, but the fears of the conqueror soon caused him to be executed, and with his death came the end of the twenty-sixth dynasty and the independence of Egypt.