Drawn by Boudier, from
the bronze statuette
in the Louvre Museum.
His name is met with everywhere on the banks of the Nile—at Karnak, where he completed the decoration of the great columns of Taharqa, at Abydos, at Heliopolis, and on the monuments that have come from that town, such as the obelisk set up in the Campus Martius at Borne. The personal influence of the young sovereign did not count for much in the zeal thus displayed; but the impulse that had been growing during three or four generations, since the time of the expulsion of the Assyrians, now began to have its full effect. Egypt, well armed, well governed by able ministers, and more and more closely bound to Greece by both mercantile and friendly ties, had risen to a very high position in the estimation of its contemporaries; the inhabitants of Elis had deferred to her decision in the question whether they should take part in the Olympic games in which they were the judges, and following the advice she had given on the matter, they had excluded their own citizens from the sports so as to avoid the least suspicion of partiality in the distribution of the prizes.* The new king, probably the brother of the late Pharaoh, had his prenomen of Uahibn from his grandfather Psammetichus I., and it was this sovereign that the Greeks called indifferently Uaphres and Apries.**
* Diodorus Siculus has transferred the anecdote to Amasis,
and the decision given is elsewhere attributed to one of the
seven sages. The story is a popular romance, of which
Herodotus gives the version current among the Greeks in
Egypt.
** According to Herodotus, Apries was the son of Psammis.
The size of the sarcophagus of Psammetichus II., suitable
only for a youth, makes this filiation improbable.
Psammetichus, who came to the throne when he was hardly more
than a child, could have left behind him only children of
tender age, and Apries appears from the outset as a prince
of full mental and physical development.
He was young, ambitious, greedy of fame and military glory, and longed to use the weapon that his predecessors had for some fifteen years past been carefully whetting; his emissaries, arriving at Jerusalem at the moment when the popular excitement was at its height, had little difficulty in overcoming Zede-kiah’s scruples. Edoni, Moab, and the Philistines, who had all taken their share in the conferences of the rebel party, hesitated at the last moment, and refused to sever their relations with Babylon. Tyre and the Ammonites alone persisted in their determination, and allied themselves with Egypt on the same terms as Judah.
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Pognon. The figures
have been carefully defaced with the hammer, but the outline
of the king can still be discerned on the left; he seizes
the rampant lion by the right paw, and while it raises its
left paw against him, he plunges his dagger into the body of
the beast.
Nebuchadrezzar, thus defied by three enemies, was at a loss to decide upon which to make his first attack. Ezekiel, whose place of exile put him in a favourable position for learning what was passing, shows him to us as he “stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the liver.” Judah formed as it were the bridge by which the Egyptians could safely enter Syria, and if Nebuchadrezzar could succeed in occupying it before their arrival, he could at once break up the coalition into three separate parts incapable of rejoining one another—Ammon in the desert to the east, Tyre and Sidon on the seaboard, and Pharaoh beyond his isthmus to the south-west. He therefore established himself in a central position at Eiblah on the Orontes, from whence he could observe the progress of the operations, and hasten with his reserve force to a threatened point in the case of unforeseen difficulties; having done this, he despatched the two divisions of his army against his two principal adversaries. One of these divisions crossed the Lebanon, seized its fortresses, and, leaving a record of its victories on the rocks of the Wady Brissa, made its way southwards along the coast to blockade Tyre.*
* The account of this Phoenician campaign is contained in
one of the inscriptions discovered and commented on by
Pognon. Winckler, the only one to my knowledge who has tried
to give a precise chronological position to the events
recorded in the inscription, places them at the very
beginning of the reign, after the victory of Carchemish,
about the time when Nebuchadrezzar heard that his father had
just died. I think that this date is not justified by the
study of the inscription, for the king speaks therein of the
great works that he had accomplished, the restoration of the
temples, the rebuilding of the walls of Babylon, and the
digging of canals, all of which take us to the middle or the
end of his reign. We are therefore left to choose between
one of two dates, namely, that of 590-587, during the Jewish
war, and that from the King’s thirty-seventh year to 568
B.C., during the war against Amasis which will be treated
below. I have chosen the first, because of Nebuchadrezzar’s
long sojourn at Riblah, which gave him sufficient time for
the engraving of the stelse on Lebanon: the bas-reliefs of
Wady. Brissa could have been cut before the taking of
Jerusalem, for no allusion to the war against the Jews is
found in them. The enemy mentioned in the opening lines is
perhaps Apries, whose fleet was scouring the Phoenician
coasts.
The other force bore down upon Zedekiah, and made war upon him ruthlessly. It burnt the villages and unwalled towns, gave the rural districts over as a prey to the Philistines and the Edomites, surrounded the two fortresses of Lachish and Azekah, and only after completely exhausting the provinces, appeared before the walls of the capital. Jerusalem was closely beset when the news reached the Chaldæans that Apries was approaching Gaza; Zedekiah, in his distress, appealed to him for help, and the promised succour at length came upon the scene. The Chaldæans at once raised the siege with the object of arresting the advancing enemy, and the popular party, reckoning already on a Chaldean defeat, gave way to insolent rejoicing over the prophets of evil. Jeremiah, however, had no hope of final success. “Deceive not yourselves, saying, The Chaldæans shall surely depart from us; for they shall not depart. For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Chaldeans that fight against you, and there remained but wounded men among them, yet should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city with fire.” What actually took place is not known; according to one account, Apries accepted battle and was defeated; according to another, he refused to be drawn into an engagement, and returned haughtily to Egypt.*