Psammetichus. As this prince owed his preservation to the Ionians and Carians, he settled them in Egypt, (from which all foreigners hitherto had been excluded;) and, by assigning them sufficient lands and fixed revenues, he made them forget their native country.[452] By his order, Egyptian children were put under their care to learn the Greek tongue; and on this occasion, and by this means, the Egyptians began to have a correspondence with the Greeks; and from that æra, the Egyptian history, which, till then, had been intermixed with pompous fables, by the artifice of the priests, begins, according to Herodotus, to speak with greater truth and certainty.
As soon as Psammetichus was settled on the throne, he engaged in war against the king of Assyria, on the subject of the boundaries of the two empires. This war was of long continuance. Ever since Syria had been conquered by the [pg 077] Assyrians, Palestine, being the only country that separated the two kingdoms, was the subject of continual discord; as afterwards it was between the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ. They were eternally contending for it, and it was alternately won by the stronger. Psammetichus, seeing himself the peaceable possessor of all Egypt, and having restored the ancient form of government,[453] thought it high time for him to look to his frontiers, and to secure them against the Assyrian, his neighbour, whose power increased daily. For this purpose, he entered Palestine at the head of an army.
Perhaps we are to refer to the beginning of this war, an incident related by Diodorus;[454] that the Egyptians, provoked to see the Greeks posted on the right wing by the king himself, in preference to them, quitted the service, to the number of upwards of two hundred thousand men, and retired into Ethiopia, where they met with an advantageous settlement.
Be this as it will, Psammetichus entered Palestine,[455] where his career was stopped by Azotus, one of the principal cities of the country, which gave him so much trouble, that he was forced to besiege it twenty-nine years before he could take it. This is the longest siege mentioned in ancient history.
This was anciently one of the five capital cities of the Philistines. The Egyptians, having seized it some time before, had fortified it with such care, that it was their strongest bulwark on that side. Nor could Sennacherib enter Egypt, till he had first made himself master of this city,[456] which was taken by Tartan, one of his generals. The Assyrians had possessed it hitherto; and it was not till after the long siege just now mentioned, that the Egyptians recovered it.
In this period,[457] the Scythians, leaving the banks of the Palus Mæotis, made an inroad into Media, defeated Cyaxares, the king of that country, and deprived him of all Upper Asia, of which they kept possession during twenty-eight years. They pushed their conquests in Syria as far as to the frontiers of Egypt. But Psammetichus marching out to meet them, prevailed so far, by his presents and entreaties, that they [pg 078] advanced no farther, and by that means delivered his kingdom from these dangerous enemies.
Till his reign,[458] the Egyptians had imagined themselves to be the most ancient nation upon earth. Psammetichus was desirous to prove this himself, and he employed a very extraordinary experiment for this purpose. He commanded (if we may credit the relation) two children, newly born of poor parents, to be brought up (in the country) in a hovel, that was to be kept continually shut. They were committed to the care of a shepherd, (others say, of nurses, whose tongues were cut out,) who was to feed them with the milk of goats; and was commanded not to suffer any person to enter into this hut, nor himself to speak even a single word in the hearing of these children. At the expiration of two years, as the shepherd was one day coming into the hut to feed these children, they both cried out, with hands extended towards their foster-father, beccos, beccos. The shepherd, surprised to hear a language that was quite new to him, but which they repeated frequently afterwards, sent advice of this to the king, who ordered the children to be brought before him, in order that he himself might be a witness to the truth of what was told him; and accordingly both of them began, in his presence, to stammer out the sounds above mentioned. Nothing now was wanting but to ascertain what nation it was that used this word; and it was found that the Phrygians called bread by this name. From this time they were allowed the honour of antiquity, or rather of priority, which the Egyptians themselves, notwithstanding their jealousy of it, and the many ages they had possessed this glory, were obliged to resign to them. As goats were brought to these children, in order that they might feed upon their milk, and historians do not say that they were deaf, some are of opinion that they might have learnt the word bec, or beccos, by mimicking the cry of those creatures.
Psammetichus died in the 24th year of Josias, king of Judah, and was succeeded by his son Nechao.
A.M. 3388. Ant. J.C. 616.
Nechao.[459] This prince is often mentioned in Scripture under the name of Pharaoh-Necho.[460]