Twilight on the Nile
How Ancient Egypt was Conquered by a “Mad King” (Part Two)
In the previous part, we saw the rise of Cambyses “the Mad” to the throne of Persia in 530 BCE and watched him organizing his great plan to invade Egypt, one of the superpowers of the ancient world, known for its scientific knowledge, vast amounts of wealth, and sophisticated culture. In this part, we will explore 6th century Egypt and learn more about its fragile internal status and the struggles that its people had to deal with. Finally, we will see the Persian Invasion taking place in 525 BCE and witness Egypt’s ultimate downfall along with the consequences that followed the Persian conquest.
Regardless of how much attention I have given to Cambyses until now, by picturing him as a sometimes cruel, yet misunderstood military genius, it needs to be clear that he wasn’t the sole mastermind behind this ambitious plan to invade Egypt. In fact, he wasn’t even the first Asia ruler, who thought of attacking the Land of the Pharaohs! About a century earlier the Assyrians attacked Egypt and managed to finally subdue her, after a series of long wars[1]. But the Assyrian rulership was a short-lived one. The Assyrians knew that they couldn’t keep Egypt under their direct rule for long. Their armies couldn’t stay there forever. Eventually, they would have to go home, and then it was a matter of time before rebellions began. Instead, they decided to retreat their forces from Egypt in 664 BCE and in a remarkable demonstration of “divide et impera” strategy, they divided the land into twelve small kingdoms, each one ruled by a native puppet king. One of these rulers was Psamtik I, whose seat of power was centered in the city of Sais, located on the western Nile Delta. Psamtik I managed to unite Egypt, after years of harsh wars and through strategic diplomacy, thus establishing the 26th Dynasty of rulers, known simply as the Saite Dynasty. The Saites were the last native pharaohs of Egypt, a title which has bestowed on them the unfair characterization of corrupted, weak rulers, governing a kingdom in decline, which stranded no chance against Persia.
In reality, however, the Saite period of power was a time of great prosperity, economic growth, and cultural renaissance.
Egypt reunited with its past, rediscovered, and embraced its cultural heritage. Psamtik I and his descendants transformed their kingdom from a mere vassal state into a powerful, independent ally of the Assyrians, with the latter relying frequently on the former’s military aid in times of war. Every Saite pharaoh organized campaigns against their neighbors, expanding the empire in the four corners of the world. They attacked the Libyan tribes and the Greek city-state of Cyrene in the west, the Babylonians and the Phoenicians in the north, and the Ethiopian Nubians in the south. When Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, fell in 612 B.C.E to the hands of the Medes and Babylonians, Egypt controlled the entire eastern Mediterranean coast. Its lands stretched from the island of Cyprus — the empire’s northern bastion — and ended to the First Cataract of the Nile in the south, with Elephantine Island serving as its southern fortress.
The Saite pharaohs admired their ancestors and especially their New Kingdom counterparts, whose culture sought to revive, by bringing back to life their sacrificial and religious practices and forms of art. But these actions weren’t the result of a static copying process, without a hint of differentiation from the original form. The new Dynasty introduced several important innovations and religious reforms, such as the rise of Osiris and Isis, as the supreme gods of the Egyptian pantheon, replacing the former chief god, Amun. But the greatest and most important achievement of the Saites was without a doubt the creation of an Egyptian national identity, combined with the conclusion of trade agreements and the establishment of networks throughout the Mediterranean world. These two achievements were the reason for Egypt’s rise and ultimate fall.
Herodotus tells a story, where Psamtik I received an omen when Egypt was still under Assyrian control and divided into 12 kingdoms. The omen said that he would unify Egypt with the help of “bronze men, who would rise from the sea”. Of course Psamtik did not believe a single word. But a few days after the omen was given, ships appeared in the northern shores of Egypt. They belonged to Anatolian Greek and Carian pirates, who bore iron weapons and bronze armor… Psamtik, accepting his divine destiny, formed an alliance with these pirates, who joined his forces, as elite parts of his army. With their help, he managed to unite Egypt.
This story may be just a myth, but provides us with an important historical fact; the establishment of foreign relations. Ancient Egypt has always been a xenophobic state, which tried to isolate itself from foreign influences, which could alter and distort its people’s way of life, as much as possible. Much like feudal Japan or ancient Sparta, Egypt promoted cultural isolation, allowing only small numbers of picked foreigners to settle in or trade with. This situation changed drastically with the Saites. In their time large numbers of Greeks, Anatolians, and Hebrews settled in Egypt or were allowed to visit the country for economic or academic purposes. As already stated in the previous part, the eastern Mediterranean peoples marveled Egypt for its wealth, highly sophisticated culture, and great scientific knowledge. It was a highly desirable place for people to settle in, have trade relations or simply visit and the Saites were aware of that. They also saw the possible profits of such foreign relationships like the economical growth of their state finances, the acquisition of desirable resources, and finally the empowerment of the army, by recruiting foreign mercenaries in its ranks.
Throughout their reign, the Saite pharaohs followed a philhellenic policy, encouraging these relations even more. They allowed Greeks to gain highly respectable and important positions in the royal court, as military leaders. Greek immigrants settled in the most fertile lands of the Nile Delta and were allowed to practice their religion and customs. They even build temples for their gods in order to worship them. It was common for the Egyptian rulers to offer large amounts of treasure to finance the building of temples and monuments in mainland Greece, as a symbolic gesture of their friendship to them. From their part, the Greeks became the primary importers of Egyptian grain, because the infertile mountainous regions of their land could not produce enough supplies to sustain the native population and began to export wine, pottery, and other goods to Egypt. These trade agreements offered large annual boosts to the Egyptian economy and were the main reason behind the Saites’ generous acts of philanthropy towards the Greeks.
Unfortunately, this philhellenic policy along with the rise of trading relations with these foreign peoples had some serious drawbacks. First, the Saites were promoting a foreign-friendly policy, while at the same time encouraging the Egyptians to rediscover and embrace their national identity and pride. Egypt was by the time the oldest living empire in the world with rich history and legacy. Its people were proud of their ancestors’ deeds, but at the same time, there was a great sense of shame always present in their minds, for allowing foreigners, like the Assyrians or the Nubians to invade, conquer and rule Egypt, distorting its culture with their own, alien customs. Foreigners were often considered inferior and the cause of troubles. The fact that the Greeks were gaining high-ranking positions and settled at the Nile’s fertile Delta to form their cities, or that Jews were guarding the strategically important fort-island of Elephantine to the south, led to some serious conflicts between the natives and the foreigners.
The Saites tried to balance this fragile situation, which could easily lead to a civil war, while at the same time hoping to gain the most from the two factions, by using them to promote their own interests. Pharaoh Ahmose II, the man against whom Cambyses campaigned, is the perfect example of such a cunning ruler. He managed to overthrow the previous pharaoh by organizing a native rebellion against him, promising the Egyptians to put an end to foreign-friendly policies and “make Egypt great again”. As soon as he sat on the throne, he used the same foreigners he swore to fight, for his own gain. Herodotus marks Ahmose II as a great man who “loved the Greeks” and did massive charity projects to benefit them. During his reign, he donated large quantities of gold to restore the famous Delphi Oracle, which was destroyed by a fire. He married a Greek noblewoman from the city-state of Cyrene, forging an alliance with them, and also befriended the tyrant of Samos, Polycrates, whose mighty fleet was a valuable tool against Egypt’s naval enemies. At the same time, he tried to reduce foreign influences to specific key territories within his domain. He allowed the Greeks to settle only in the city of Naucratis and to trade within its limits and nowhere else in Egypt. With this act, he secured the loyalty of his native subjects, for having the foreigners stationed in selected places, and simultaneously ensured that he would get the maximum profits from his relations with his trading partners.
Cambyses was aware of all the above information and knew exactly how to take advantage of it. In the previous part, we saw him organizing a great plan to invade and destroy Egypt, by taking advantage of every possible weakness he could find. Now we will see him fulfilling his wishes.
In 526 B.C.E the Persian army, commanded by king Cambyses himself, crossed the Sinai desert with the help of its Arab allies. Pharaoh Ahmosse II was dead at the time, so the new pharaoh, Psamtik III, raised an army and went to meet the invaders in battle. At the same time, the Egyptian fleet sailed to destroy its Persian counterpart. The Egyptian defense plan was simple. They were going to crush the enemy army coming from the north, while their fleet, along with the crucial aid of Polycrates, would attack and destroy the Phoenicians at sea.
But Polycrates never came…
The tyrant of Samos sided with the Persians, leaving Egypt, without his valuable ships. Even worse the Egyptian admiral, Wedjagor Resne, was bribed by Cambyses, and he, along with the entire fleet, deserted to the Persians. Egypt was left defenseless against a naval attack…
But there was still hope if a decisive victory could be gained against the main Persian army. Psamtik III marched to Pelusium. There, the decisive battle took place outside the city’s walls in 525 B.C.E and ended, after a long and fierce battle, in Persian victory. After the fall of Pelusium, Cambyses marched against the empire’s cultural heart, the city of Memphis, where the Egyptians organized their last stand.
At this point we need to point out some interesting information, regarding Cambyses’ superior military strategy and cunning. According to Polyaenus, an ancient Greek historian, prior to the battle of Pelusium, Cambyses ordered his men to gather as many cats as they could find and paint their shields with the emblem of the Egyptian cat-headed goddess, Bastet. According to Egyptian religion, Bastet was the protector of Lower Egypt and the pharaoh himself, and her sacred animal was the cat, which the people were not allowed to hurt, for they would risk her divine wrath. When the battle started, the Persians placed the cats in front of their ranks to act as meat shields against enemy projectiles. The Egyptians weren’t willing to risk harming the animals and so the Persians marched unharmed against them. Even if this story is a myth, it shows us, how well informed Cambyses was about his enemy’s customs and culture. It was a well-known fact that the Egyptians were highly religious people and took superstitions very seriously. By putting their sacred animals in danger and painting the symbol of the protector goddess of Egypt in his warriors’ shields, Cambyses waged a kind of psychological warfare against them. When the battle was won, it was certain that many Egyptians saw the outcome as a result of divine punishment, and that Bastet, their holy protector, favored the invaders.
Cambyses also knew how important, but also hated, were the Greeks, the Carians, and the other Anatolian foreigners to Egypt. Prior to the battle, the foreign mercenaries, who served the pharaonic army slew the kids of Phanes — the Greek former mercenary we saw in the first part, who sided with Cambyses — and drunk their blood as an act of revenge. This action proves that the foreigners knew very well, who their benefactors were, and remained loyal to them till the very end. When the Persians began to siege Memphis, Cambyses sent a group of Greek emissaries from the island of Lesbos to negotiate the city’s surrender, hoping to put an end to his campaign without further casualties. When the group reached Memphis, however, the Egyptians — who were already psychologically shocked by the outcome of the invasion — killed them instantly by tearing their bodies apart. This terrible act shocked Cambyses, who knew that the Egyptians used to show great respect towards their enemy’s envoys and also had strong relations with the Greeks. In retaliation, he executed ten noble Egyptian captives for every Greek envoy. Cambyses ignored the fact that the Egyptians always showed great distrust and sometimes even aversion towards the Greeks. The survivors of Pelusium who fled to Memphis would surely have informed its inhabitants about the betrayal of Polycrates and the fact that the Ionian Greeks were marching with the Persians against them. To the eyes of the Egyptians, the Greeks were traitors, who betrayed the great hospitality shown to them by the pharaohs and marched against their benefactors.
The fall of Memphis ended the thousand year’s existence of the pharaonic Egyptian Empire. Of course, the Egyptians were not going to simply surrender to another foreign ruler. There were many acts of organized resistance, against Persian occupation. Initially, Cambyses tried to bridge the gap between him and his subjects. He respected their temples, participated in their rituals, allowed the Greek wife of the former pharaoh Ahmose II and mother of Psamtik III to return to Cyrene, and even adopted the title of pharaoh. But when he realized that his methods were worthless, he began to suppress his subjects and hunted down relentlessly the ones who kept resisting his rule. In the prosecutions that followed, the Egyptian priesthood was the primary target. The priests held vast amounts of power and knowledge. They were the guardians of Egyptian culture, and their power could even dethrone pharaohs. So he tried to reduce their power and influence, in order to stabilize the powder keg that began to form. We already know from the previous part that Cambyses could be extremely harsh when he sensed that his power was being questioned. Wedjagor Resne, the Egyptian admiral, who sided with him and became his counselor, mentions that his people truly suffered under Cambyses’s reign. But he wasn’t the mad tyrant, who the history books tend to describe. The dark stories about the killing of the Apis Bull, the whipping of mummies, and the banning of religious celebrations were most likely Egyptian propaganda, created by the priests, whose power Cambyses reduced. Besides, so far there have not been found any ruined sites mass graves, or looted tombs, dated to the time of Cambyses’ rule. There are no signs of mass destruction and pillaging, which usually accompanies the reign of a “mad tyrant”.
Besides his successful campaign against Egypt, Cambyses is remembered as a weak ruler, a mad sadist, hated by both Egyptians and Persians alike. He was seen as a failure, compared to his father. His next campaigns against Nubia and an unknown Egyptian resistance center, known as Oasis, failed miserably. After these failures, there was a coup back in Persia. Cambyses died under mysterious circumstances while returning to Persia to put an end to the coup. Herodotus tells that he accidentally injured himself in the thigh, the same spot where he stabbed Apis Bull and that his death was an act of divine justice. Darius Inscription simply tells that “he lived his own death”. This mysterious laconic phrase might imply that he was assassinated or committed suicide, after his failed campaigns. It is worth noting that Darius, the next Persian King, who started the Greco-Persian Wars, wasn’t a close relative of the Achaemenid family. Cambyses had no children. In order to secure the throne without being a close relative of the noble Achaemenid family, Darius, needed to undermine Cambyses’ legacy. If the former king was seen as a failure, he had more chances to secure his power.
Egypt never stopped trying to regain its independence. Their multiple rebellions were always chocked in blood. Their relations with the Greeks never reached a friendly status again, at least until the conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great and the rise of a Hellenized Egypt under the Ptolemies. With the loss of Egypt, Greece also lost its primary grain source, which was a serious problem for them. During the classical era, Egypt belonged to the Persians, who put an end to the trade with the Greek world. This led to the discovery of new trading routes, particularly with Sicily and the huge grain market of the Crimean Peninsula. In times of peace Greeks were allowed to trade and visit Egypt, although their numbers were smaller, compared to those before the Persian conquest. Herodotus was among the lucky ones, who visited Egypt. Like many others, he had multiple conversations with the native priests, hoping to gain vast amounts of scientific knowledge. The priests were always open in spreading their knowledge, but they were also openly hostile towards the Greeks. As Herodotus informs us, the Egyptians forbade the adoption of any Greek custom. They kept seeing them as inferiors, who copied them in every possible way, adopting their scientific knowledge and even their gods, to whom they changed names. In his “Critias” work, Plato, also notes that the Egyptian priests thought of the Greeks as a “young race, not knowing the true nature of the world”. The Ionian Greeks (Herodotus was one of them), always admired Egypt. Their greatest philosophers and scientists had all studied there. Perhaps many saw with guilt the fact that they participated in the Egyptian conquest, on the Persian side. This might be the reason, Herodotus strongly emphasizes in his works that the Ionians were forced against their will to fight the Egyptians. But his words could not undo the harm that has been done. For the Egyptians, the worst-case scenario has been verified. The foreigners betrayed them and were to blame for Egypt’s fall.
This was the story of the conquest of Egypt. This is how the glorious empire, we all know today, the builders of the pyramids and the creators of mummies, the oldest kingdom in the world, was destroyed in just a single year by a Persian “Mad” king. This was also the story of Cambyses, the misunderstood military genius, who kneeled his enemies, after years of careful planning, in a single, decisive blow. Cyrus created the first global superpower by establishing the Persian Empire. His son expanded it towards the right direction. He gave his people access to the vast Mediterranean Sea, collected vast amounts of treasure, and inherited the Egyptian cultural legacy. He formed the mighty Persian fleet by successfully absorbing the Phoenicians and provided Persia its most prosperous satrapy, after Mesopotamia. It was thanks to his efforts, that Darius was able to organize the invasion of Greece. And to show his gratitude, Darius ensured that History will remember Cambyses II, son of Cyrus the Great and Pharaoh of Egypt, as the “Mad King”, the Black Sheep of the glorious Achaemenid family, hated by gods and mortals alike…
[1] Historically, the infamous Hyksos, an Asian group of people, held the title of the “first foreign monarchs of Egypt”, who gained control of the kingdom in 1782 BCE. However, it is yet unclear whether this invasion was a foreign military intervention or a civil war since it has been stated that the first Hyksos were actually immigrants and their descendants had fully embraced the Egyptian culture. So, the rise of the Hyksos to power could have been the result of a civil war between native Egyptians and the “Asian-Egyptian” Hyksos and not a foreign invasion similar to the Assyrian or Persian ones.
SOURCHES
Allen, James, and Marsha Hill., (2004), “Egypt in the Late Period (ca. 664–332 B.C.).”, available at https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/lapd/hd_lapd.htm
Herodotus, (2005), Η Ιστορία των Περσικών Πολέμων, Athens, Oceanida publications
Joshua J. Mark, (2019), Behistun Inscription, available at https://www.ancient.eu/Behistun_Inscription/
Joshua J. Mark, (2016), Bastet, available at https://www.worldhistory.org/Bastet/
Joshua J.Mark, (2016), Late Period of Ancient Egypt, available at https://www.worldhistory.org/Late_Period_of_Ancient_Egypt/
Livius, (2020), ABC 7 (Nabonidus Chronicle), available at https://www.livius.org/sources/content/mesopotamian-chronicles-content/abc-7-nabonidus-chronicle/
Matt Waters, (2014), Ancient Persia; a Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire 550–330 BCE, Cambridge University Press
