* It was to oppose the march of Necho against the King of
Assyria that Josiah fought the battle of Megiddo (2 Kings
xxiii. 29, 30; cf. 2 Chron. xxxv. 20-24, where the mention
of the King of Assyria is suppressed).
** This is what the Ten Thousand did when they passed
before Larissa and Mespila. The name remained famous, and
later on the town which bore it attained a relative
importance.
It is true that Egypt, Chaldæa, and the other military nations of the East, had never, in their hours of prosperity, shown the slightest consideration for their vanquished foes; the Theban Pharaohs had mercilessly crushed Africa and Asia beneath their feet, and had led into slavery the entire population of the countries they had subdued. But the Egyptians and Chaldaeans had, at least, accomplished a work of civilization whose splendour redeemed the brutalities of their acts of reprisal. It was from Egypt and Chaldæa that the knowledge and the arts of antiquity—astronomy, medicine, geometry, physical and natural sciences—spread to the ancestors of the classic races; and though Chaldæa yields up to us unwillingly, with niggard hand, the monuments of her most ancient kings, the temples and tombs of Egypt still exist to prove what signal advances the earliest civilised races made in the arts of the sculptor and the architect. But on turning to Assyria, if, after patiently studying the successive centuries during which she held supreme sway over the Eastern world, we look for other results besides her conquests, we shall find she possessed nothing that was not borrowed from extraneous sources. She received all her inspirations from Chaldæa—her civilisation, her manners, the implements of her industries and of agriculture, besides her scientific and religious literature: one thing alone is of native growth, the military tactics of her generals and the excellence of her soldiery. From the day when Assyria first realised her own strength, she lived only for war and rapine; and as soon as the exhaustion of her population rendered success on the field of battle an impossibility, the reason for her very existence vanished, and she passed away.
Two great kingdoms rose simultaneously from her ruins. Cyaxares claimed Assyria proper and its dependencies on the Upper Tigris, but he specially reserved for himself the yet unconquered lands on the northern and eastern frontiers, whose inhabitants had only recently taken part in the political life of the times. Nabopolassar retained the suzerainty over the lowlands of Elam, the districts of Mesopotamia lying along the Euphrates, Syria, Palestine, and most of the countries which had hitherto played a part in history;* he claimed to exert his supremacy beyond the Isthmus, and the Chaldæan government looked upon the Egyptian kings as its feudatories because for some few years they had owned the suzerainty of Nineveh.**
* There was no actual division of the empire, as has been
often asserted, but each of the allies kept the portion
which fell into his power at the moment of their joint
effort. The two new states gradually increased in power by
successive conquests, each annexing by degrees the ancient
provinces of Assyria nearest to its own frontier.
** This seems to be implied by the terms in which Berosus
speaks of Necho: he considers him as a rebel satrap over the
provinces of Egypt, Coele-Syria, and Phoenicia, and
enumerates Egypt in conjunction with Syria, Phoenicia, and
Arabia among the dependencies of Nabopolassar and
Nebuchadrezzar. Just as the Egyptian state documents never
mentioned the Lotanu or the Kharu without entitling them
Children of Rebellion, so the Chaldæan government, the
heir of Assyria, could only look upon the kings of Syria,
Arabia, and Egypt as rebellious vassals.
The Pharaoh, however, did not long tolerate this pretension, and far from looking forward to bend the knee before a Chaldæan monarch, he believed himself strong enough to reassert his ancestral claims to the possession of Asia. Egypt had experienced many changes since the day when Tanuatamanu, returning to Ethiopia, had abandoned her to the ambition of the petty dynasties of the Delta. One of the romances current among the people of Sais in the fifth century B.C. related that at that time the whole land was divided between twelve princes. They lived peaceably side by side in friendly relations with each other, until an oracle predicted that the whole valley would finally belong to that prince among them who should pour a libation to Phtah into a brazen cup, and thenceforward they jealously watched each other each time they assembled to officiate in the temple of Memphis. One day, when they had met together in state, and the high priest presented to them the golden cups they were wont to use, he found he had mistaken their number, and had only prepared eleven. Psammetichus was therefore left without one, and in order not to disarrange the ceremonial he took off his brazen helmet and used it to make his libation; when the rest perceived this, the words of the oracle came to their remembrance, and they exiled the imprudent prince to the marshes along the sea-coast, and forbade him ever to quit them. He secretly consulted the oracle of Isis of Buto to know what he might expect from the gods, and she replied that the means of revenge would reach him from the sea, on the day when brazen soldiers should issue from its waters. He thought at first that the priests were mocking him, but shortly afterwards Ionian and Carian pirates, clad in their coats of mail, landed not far from his abode. The messenger who brought tidings of their advent had never before seen a soldier fully armed, and reported that brazen men had issued from the waves and were pillaging the country. Psammetichus, realising at once that the prediction was being fulfilled, ran to meet the strangers, enrolled them in his service, and with their aid overthrew successively his eleven rivals.*
* The account given by Diodorus of these events is in
general derived from that of Herodotus, with additional
details borrowed directly or indirectly from some historian
of the same epoch, perhaps Hellanicus of Mitylene: the
reason of the persecution endured by Psammetichus is,
according to him, not the fear of seeing the prediction
fulfilled, but jealousy of the wealth the Saite prince had
acquired by his commerce with the Greeks. I have separated
the narrative of Herodotus from his account of the Labyrinth
which did not originally belong to it, but was connected
with a different cycle of legends. The original romance was
part of the cycle which grew up around the oracle of Buto,
so celebrated in Egypt at the Persian epoch, several other
fragments of which are preserved in Herodotus; it had been
mixed up with one of the versions of the stories relating to
the Labyrinth, probably by some dragoman of the Fayyûm. The
number twelve does not correspond with the information
furnished by the Assyrian texts, which enumerate more than
twenty Egyptian princes; it is perhaps of Greek origin, like
the twelve great gods which the informants of Herodotus
tried to make out in Egypt, and was introduced into the
Egyptian version by a Greek interpreter.
A brazen helmet and an oracle had dethroned him; another oracle and brazen men had replaced him on his throne. A shorter version of these events made no mention of the twelve kings, but related instead that a certain Pharaoh named Tementhes had been warned by the oracle of Amon to beware of cocks. Now Psammetichus had as a companion in exile a Carian named Pigres, and in conversing with him one day, he learned by chance that the Carians had been the first people to wear crested helmets; he recalled at once the words of the oracle, and hired from Asia a number of these “cocks,” with whose assistance he revolted and overthrew his suzerain in battle under the walls of Memphis, close to the temple of Isis. Such is the legendary account of the Saite renaissance; its true history is not yet clearly and precisely known. Egypt was in a state of complete disintegration when Psammetichus at length revived the ambitious projects of his family, but the dissolution of the various component parts had not everywhere taken place in the same manner.
In the north, the Delta and the Nile valley, as far as Siut, were in the power of a military aristocracy, supported by irregular native troops and bands of mercenaries, for the most part of Libyan extraction, who were always designated by the generic name of Mashauasha. Most of these nobles were in possession of not more than two or three cities apiece: they had barely a sufficient number of supporters to maintain their precarious existence in their restricted domains, and would soon have succumbed to the attacks of their stronger neighbours, had they not found a powerful protector to assist them. They had finally separated themselves into two groups, divided roughly by the central arm of the Nile. One group comprised the districts that might be designated as the Asiatic zone of the country—Heliopolis, Bubastis, Mendes, Tanis, Busiris, and Seben-nytos—and it recognised as chief the lord of one or other of those wealthy cities, now the ruler of Bubastis, now of Tanis, and lastly Pakruru of Pisaptit. The second group centred in the lords of Sais, to whom the possession of Memphis had secured a preponderating voice in the counsels of the state for more than a century.*