But the victorious career of Nekôs was completely checked by the defeat which he experienced at Carchemisch, or Circesium, on the Euphrates, from Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians, who not only drove him out of Judæa and Syria, but also took Jerusalem, and carried away the king and the principal Jews into captivity.[625] Nebuchadnezzar farther attacked the Phenician cities, and the siege of Tyre alone cost him severe toil for thirteen years. After this long and gallant resistance, the Tyrians were forced to submit, and underwent the same fate as the Jews: their princes and chiefs were dragged captive into the Babylonian territory, and the Phenician cities became numbered among the tributaries of Nebuchadnezzar. So they seemed to have remained, until the overthrow of Babylon by Cyrus: for we find among those extracts, unhappily, very brief, which Josephus has preserved out of the Tyrian annals, that during this interval there were disputes and irregularities in the government of Tyre,[626]—judges being for a time substituted in the place of kings; while Merbal and Hirom, two princes of the regal Tyrian line, detained captive in Babylonia, were successively sent down on the special petition of the Tyrians, and reigned at Tyre; the former four years, the latter twenty years, until the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus. The Egyptian king Apriês, indeed, the son of Psammis, and grandson of Nekôs, attacked Sidon and Tyre both by land and sea, but seemingly without any result.[627] To the Persian empire, as soon as Cyrus had conquered Babylon, they cheerfully and spontaneously submitted,[628] whereby the restoration of the captive Tyrians to their home was probably conceded to them, like that of the captive Jews.
Nekôs in Egypt was succeeded by his son Psammis, and he again, after a reign of six years, by his son Apriês; of whose power and prosperity Herodotus speaks in very high general terms, though the few particulars which he recounts are of a contrary tenor. It was not till after a reign of twenty-five years, that Apriês undertook that expedition against the Greek colonies in Libya,—Kyrênê and Barka,—which proved his ruin. The native Libyan tribes near those cities, having sent to surrender themselves to him, and entreat his aid against the Greek settlers, Apriês despatched to them a large force composed of native Egyptians; who, as has been before mentioned, were stationed on the north-western frontier of Egypt, and were, therefore, most available for the march against Kyrênê. The Kyrenean citizens advanced to oppose them, and a battle ensued in which the Egyptians were completely routed with severe loss. It is affirmed that they were thrown into disorder from want of practical knowledge of Grecian warfare,[629]—a remarkable proof of the entire isolation of the Grecian mercenaries (who had now been long in the service of Psammetichus and his successors) from the native Egyptians.
This disastrous reverse provoked a mutiny in Egypt against Apriês, the soldiers contending that he had despatched them on the enterprise with a deliberate view to their destruction, in order to assure his rule over the remaining Egyptians. The malcontents found so much sympathy among the general population, that Amasis, a Saïtic Egyptian of low birth, but of considerable intelligence, whom Apriês had sent to conciliate them, was either persuaded or constrained to become their leader, and prepared to march immediately against the king at Saïs. Unbounded and reverential submission to the royal authority was a habit so deeply rooted in the Egyptian mind, that Apriês could not believe the resistance to be serious. He sent an officer of consideration named Patarbêmis to bring Amasis before him, and when the former returned, bringing back from the rebel nothing better than a contemptuous refusal to appear except at the head of an army, the exasperated king ordered his nose and ears to be cut off. This act of atrocity caused such indignation among the Egyptians round him, that most of them deserted and joined the revolters, who thus became irresistibly formidable in point of numbers. There yet remained to Apriês the foreign mercenaries,—thirty thousand Ionians and Karians,—whom he summoned from their stratopeda on the Pelusiac Nile to his residence at Saïs; and this force, the creation of his ancestor Psammetichus, and the main reliance of his family, still inspired him with such unabated confidence, that he marched to attack the far superior numbers under Amasis at Momemphis. Though his troops behaved with bravery, the disparity of numbers, combined with the excited feeling of the insurgents, overpowered him: he was defeated and carried prisoner to Saïs, where at first Amasis not only spared his life, but treated him with generosity.[630] Such, however, was the antipathy of the Egyptians, that they forced Amasis to surrender his prisoner into their hands, and immediately strangled him.
It is not difficult to trace in these proceedings the outbreak of a long-suppressed hatred on the part of the Egyptian soldier-caste towards the dynasty of Psammetichus, to whom they owed their comparative degradation, and by whom that stream of Hellenism had been let in upon Egypt, which doubtless was not witnessed without great repugnance. It might seem, also, that this dynasty had too little of pure Egyptianism in them to find favor with the priests. At least Herodotus does not mention any religious edifices erected either by Nekôs or Psammis or Apriês, though he describes much of such outlay on the part of Psammetichus,—who built magnificent propylæa to the temple of Hephæstos at Memphis,[631] and a splendid new chamber or stable for the sacred bull Apis,—and more still on the part of Amasis.
Nevertheless, Amasis, though he had acquired the crown by this explosion of native antipathy, found the foreign adjuncts both already existing and eminently advantageous. He not only countenanced, but extended them; and Egypt enjoyed under him a degree of power and consideration such as it neither before possessed, nor afterwards retained,—for his long reign of forty-four years (570-526 B. C.) closed just six months before the Persian conquest of the country. He was eminently phil-Hellenic, and the Greek merchants at Naukratis,—the permanent settlers, as well as the occasional visitors,—obtained from him valuable enlargement of their privileges. Besides granting permission to various Grecian towns, to erect religious establishments for such of their citizens as visited the place, he also sanctioned the constitution of a formal and organized emporium or factory, invested with commercial privileges, and armed with authority exercised by presiding officers regularly chosen. This factory was connected with, and probably grew out of, a large religious edifice and precinct, built at the joint cost of nine Grecian cities: four of them Ionic,—Chios, Teôs, Phôkæa, and Klazomenæ; four Doric,—Rhodes, Knidus, Halikarnassus, and Phasêlis; and one Æolic,—Mitylênê. By these nine cities the joint temple and factory was kept up and its presiding magistrates chosen; but its destination, for the convenience of Grecian commerce generally, seems revealed by the imposing title of The Hellênion. Samos, Milêtus, and Ægina had each founded a separate temple at Naukratis, for the worship of such of their citizens as went there; probably connected—as the Hellênion was—with protection and facilities for commercial purposes. But though these three powerful cities had thus constituted each a factory for itself, as guarantee to the merchandise, and as responsible for the conduct, of its own citizens separately,—the corporation of the Hellênion served both as protection and control to all other Greek merchants. And such was the usefulness, the celebrity, and probably the pecuniary profit, of the corporation, that other Grecian cities set up claims to a share in it, and falsely pretended to have contributed to the original foundation.[632]
Naukratis was for a long time the privileged port for Grecian commerce with Egypt. No Greek merchant was permitted to deliver goods in any other part, or to enter any other of the mouths of the Nile except the Kanôpic. If forced into any of them by stress of weather, he was compelled to make oath that his arrival was a matter of necessity, and to convey his goods round by sea into the Kanôpic branch to Naukratis; and if the weather still forbade such a proceeding, the merchandise was put into barges and conveyed round to Naukratis by the internal canals of the delta. Such a monopoly, which made Naukratis in Egypt, something like Canton in China, or Nangasaki in Japan, no longer subsisted in the time of Herodotus.[633] But the factory of the Hellênion was in full operation and dignity, and very probably he himself, as a native of one of the contributing cities, Halikarnassus, may have profited by its advantages. At what precise time Naukratis first became licensed for Grecian trade, we cannot directly make out; but there seems reason to believe that it was the port to which the Greek merchants first went, so soon as the general liberty of trading with the country was conceded to them; and this would put it at least as far back as the foundation of Kyrênê, and the voyage of the fortunate Kôlæus, who was on his way with a cargo to Egypt, when the storms overtook him,—about 630 B. C., during the reign of Psammetichus. And in the time of the poetess Sapphô, and her brother Charaxus, it seems evident that Greeks had been some time established at Naukratis.[634] But Amasis, though his predecessors had permitted such establishment, may doubtless be regarded as having given organization to the factories, and as having placed the Greeks on a more comfortable footing of security than they had ever enjoyed before.
This Egyptian king manifested several other evidences of his phil-Hellenic disposition, by donations to Delphi and other Grecian temples, and he even married a Grecian wife from the city of Kyrênê.[635] Moreover, he was in intimate alliance and relations of hospitality both with Polykratês despot of Samos, and with Crœsus king of Lydia.[636] He conquered the island of Cyprus, and rendered it tributary to the Egyptian throne: his fleet and army were maintained in good condition, and the foreign mercenaries, the great strength of the dynasty which he had supplanted, were not only preserved, but even removed from their camp near Pelusium to the chief town Memphis, where they served as the special guards of Amasis.[637] Egypt enjoyed under him a degree of power abroad, and prosperity at home—the river having been abundant in its overflowing—which was the more tenaciously remembered on account of the period of disaster and subjugation immediately following his death. And his contributions, in architecture and sculpture, to the temples of Saïs[638] and Memphis, were on a scale of vastness surpassing everything before known in lower Egypt.
APPENDIX.
The archæology of Egypt, as given in the first book of Diodorus, is so much blended with Grecian mythes, and so much colored over with Grecian motive, philosophy, and sentiment, as to serve little purpose in illustrating the native Egyptian turn of thought. Even in Herodotus, though his stories are in the main genuine Egyptian, we find a certain infusion of Hellenism which the priests themselves had in his day acquired, and which probably would not have been found in their communications with Solon, or with the poet Alkæus, a century and a half earlier. Still, his stories (for the tenor of which Diodorus unduly censures him, i, 69) are really illustrative of the national mind; but the narratives coined by Grecian fancy out of Egyptian materials, and idealizing Egyptian kings and priests so as to form a pleasing picture for the Grecian reader, are mere romance, which has rarely even the merit of amusing. Most of the intellectual Greeks had some tendency thus to dress up Egyptian history, and Plato manifests it considerably; but the Greeks who crowded into Egypt under the Ptolemies carried it still further. Hekatæus of Abdêra, from whom Diodorus greatly copied (i, 46), is to be numbered among them, and from him, perhaps, come the eponymous kings Ægyptus (i, 51) and Neileus (i, 63), the latter of whom was said to have given to the river its name of Nile, whereas it had before been called Ægyptus (this to save the credit of Homer, who calls it Αἴγυπτος ποταμὸς, Odyss. xiv, 258): also Macedon, Prometheus, Triptolemus, etc., largely blended with Egyptian antiquities, in Diodorus, (i, 18, 19, etc.). It appears that the name of king Neilos occurred in the list of Egyptian kings in Dikæarchus (ap. Schol. Apoll. Rhod. iv, 272; Dikæarch. Fragment, p. 100, ed. Fuhr).
That the ἀναγραφαὶ in the temples of Egypt reached to a vast antiquity and contained a list of names, human, semi-divine, and divine, very long indeed,—there is no reason to doubt. Herodotus, in giving the number of years between Dionysus and Amasis as 1500, expressly says that “the priests told him they knew this accurately, since they always kept an account, and always wrote down the number of years,”—καὶ ταῦτα Αἰγύπτιοι ἀτρεκέως φασὶν ἐπίστασθαι, αἰεί τε λογιζόμενοι καὶ αἰεὶ ἀπογραφόμενοι τὰ ἔτεα (ii. 145): compare Diodor. i, 44. He tells us that the priests read to him out of a manuscript of papyrus (ἔκ βύβλου, ii, 100) the names of the 330 successive kings from father to son, between Mên or Menês and Mœris; and the 341 colossal statues of chief priests, each succeeding his father, down to Sethos priest of Hephæstos and king (ii, 142), which were shown to him in the temple of Hephæstos at Memphis, afford a sort of monumental evidence analogous in its nature to a written list. So also the long period of 23,000 years given by Diodorus, from the rule of Hêlios down to the expedition of Alexander against Asia, 18,000 of which were occupied by the government of gods and demigods (i, 26, 24, 44,—his numbers do not all agree with one another), may probably be drawn from an ἀναγραφή. Many temples in Egypt probably had such tablets or inscriptions, some differing from others. But this only shows us that such ἀναγραφαὶ or other temple monuments do not of themselves carry any authority, unless in cases where there is fair reason to presume them nearly contemporary with the facts or persons which they are produced to avouch. It is plain that the temple inscriptions represent the ideas of Egyptian priests (of some unknown date anterior to Herodotus) respecting the entire range of Egyptian past history and chronology.