The Pharaohs and Their People: Scenes of old Egyptian life and history

by E. Berkley

Amasis, who had been raised to the throne by so unexpected a stroke of fortune, was a genial and pleasure-loving man—fond of the wine-cup and the merry jest, but he governed Egypt well and prudently during a reign of more than forty years. When he died he bequeathed to his son Psammetichus iii. ‘the inheritance of a lost kingdom.’[100] The Persians entered Egypt, and in a desperate battle at Pelusium the Egyptians were defeated; Memphis was then captured with great slaughter. The unfortunate Psammetichus, who had only reigned six months, was taken prisoner; it is said that he was put to death later on upon a charge of conspiracy. Cambyses assumed an Egyptian title, and reigned over the land as the first monarch of the twenty-seventh, or Persian dynasty. He appears at first to have treated his new subjects with forbearance; he visited the celebrated temple at Sais, inquired into the rites and mysteries of the worship of Neith, and redressed certain grievances of which the priests complained.[101] But to the passionate ambition of Cambyses, the possession of Egypt was only a stepping-stone to the accomplishment of other and far-reaching schemes. He designed to march westward against the rising city of Carthage; to occupy the oasis of Amen, and to conquer the kingdom of Ethiopia. But his Phœnician mercenaries refused to be led against their kinsmen at Carthage; the army, 50,000 strong, which he despatched across the desert, was lost in the burning sands, and the forces which he himself led against Ethiopia were repulsed, and suffered terribly on the retreat from the ravages of famine. The survivors appear to have vented some of their ill-will upon the monuments and statues of Thebes as they passed through on the way to Memphis. The mood in which Cambyses entered that city may be imagined; mortified and exasperated as he was, he found the whole city given up to festivities and rejoicings, and concluded that they must be celebrating his disastrous defeat. Thereupon his fury turned to madness; and when he heard that the people were celebrating the finding of an Apis, he ordered the priests to be scourged, and the chief men of the city to be slain. Then he ordered the sacred bull to be brought into his presence, and stabbed him with his own dagger. There can be little doubt that in an excess of madness, Cambyses wrought terrible havoc on the temples and monuments of the land, though he may not have been guilty of all that was laid to his charge by a people who execrated his memory, and regarded his madness as the just visitation of Heaven. But suddenly there came news of an insurrection in Persia, and Cambyses instantly started for his capital. At Ecbatana, as he was mounting his horse, he stabbed himself (voluntarily or accidentally) with his own dagger—with the same weapon with which he had killed the Apis, the awe-struck Egyptians told Herodotus, and in the very same part of the body.

The short but terrible tyranny of Cambyses was over, and Darius, who succeeded in 522 b.c., proved a mild and forbearing ruler. But after his defeat by the Athenians at Marathon, the Egyptians rose in revolt; Xerxes had to put down this insurrection before he too went against Greece.

During the two centuries when hostilities were so often renewed between Persians and Greeks, there was friendship between Egypt and Greece, and not unfrequently alliance against the Persian kings. The relations between these two countries had long been of a friendly character. Egypt representing all that was wisest and greatest in the long æon that was closing, Greece representing all that was brightest and fairest in the era that was opening. Homer already knew, concerning Egypt, that it was a fertile and a wealthy land—a land especially famed for the skill of its physicians; he tells of its ‘god-descended stream,’ and of the Isle of Pharos, with the safe anchorage by it afforded to storm-tossed mariners. Nor was he ignorant of Thebes in the far south, and her imperial magnificence—Egyptian Thebes, the ‘treasure-house of countless wealth, who boasts her hundred gates—through each of which with horse and car two hundred warriors march.’[102]

To the Egyptians of Homer’s time, the Greeks were probably known as roving pirates of the Mediterranean; afterwards, by a natural transition, as mercenary troops—later on, as busy and successful merchants. Greeks, however, visited Egypt on nobler errands than the mere pursuit of wealth. In the reign of Amasis, Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, resided for a while both at the ‘city of the Sun,’ the most ancient seat of Egyptian learning, and at Sais, the sanctuary of the goddess of wisdom. To him it was that an old Egyptian priest, who was his friend, addressed the memorable words—‘O Solon! Solon! you Greeks are ever children; having no ancient opinion nor any discipline of long standing.’ The earliest Greek philosophers, Pythagoras of Samos, and Thales of Miletus, were believed to have visited Egypt, and no doubt their eager restless inquiries also seemed to the Egyptians like those of ‘children,’ who can so easily ask more than the wisest man can ever answer.

Nothing could be more natural, or indeed inevitable, than that the awakening intellectual and artistic life of Greece should be strongly attracted towards the ancient wisdom and civilisation of Egypt.[103] Geometric and other scientific ideas they certainly carried home from the Land of the Pyramids, and the rudiments of their own civilisation and learning were always said by the Greeks to have come from Egypt.

Persia had conquered Egypt, and was threatening Greece, but the invasion of Xerxes was triumphantly repulsed, and the Athenians subsequently sent aid to the Egyptians in their renewed attempt to cast off the yoke of the common foe.

The revolt was at first successful, but on the arrival of Persian reinforcements the Athenians were driven from Memphis, and forced to retire to an island on the Nile. Here they were blockaded for eighteen months; the foe then, diverting the river from its course, took the Athenian camp by storm, and a fleet of fifty Athenian ships, which entered the Nile in ignorance of the disastrous turn of events, fell into the hands of the Persians. Amyrtæus, who had been proclaimed king, took flight, and sought refuge in the inaccessible marshes of the Delta.

Thus Egypt passed once more under the Persian yoke, but the Persian power itself was declining, and Amyrtæus of Sais (the grandson of the Amyrtæus who fled to the marshes) made himself King of Egypt. His reign of six years constitutes the twenty-eighth dynasty.

This was succeeded by the twenty-ninth (of Mendes), and the thirtieth (of Sebennytus). Under these, her last native dynasties, Egypt maintained her recovered independence for sixty years, during which period she sent aid both to the Lacedæmonians and to the king of Cyprus, in the long-protracted conflict with Persia. Art also revived once more, and was distinguished by a grace and finish that seem to speak of Grecian influences.