Chapter I: The Iranian Conquest (5)

They opened the coffin, broke the couch and the table, and finding them too heavy to carry away easily, they contented themselves with stealing the drinking-vessels and jewels. Alexander on his return visited the place, and caused the entrance to be closed with a slight wall of masonry; he intended to restore the monument to its former splendour, but he himself perished shortly after, and what remained of the contents probably soon disappeared. After the death of Cyrus, popular imagination, drawing on the inexhaustible materials furnished by his adventurous career, seemed to delight in making him the ideal of all a monarch should be; they attributed to him every virtue--gentleness, bravery, moderation, justice, and wisdom. There is no reason to doubt that he possessed the qualities of a good general--activity, energy, and courage, together with the astuteness and the duplicity so necessary to success in Asiatic conquest--but he does not appear to have possessed in the same degree the gifts of a great administrator. He made no changes in the system of government which from the time of Tiglath-pileser III. onwards had obtained among all Oriental sovereigns; he placed satraps over the towns and countries of recent acquisition, at Sardes and Babylon, in Syria and Palestine, but without clearly defining their functions or subjecting them to a supervision sufficiently strict to ensure the faithful performance of their duties. He believed that he was destined to found a single empire in which all the ancient empires were to be merged, and he all but carried his task to a successful close: Egypt alone remained to be conquered when he passed away.

His wife Kassandanê, a daughter of Pharnaspes, and an Achæmenian like himself, had borne him five children; two sons, Cambyses* and Smerdis,** and three daughters, Atossa, Roxana, and Artystonê.***

* The Persian form of the name rendered Kambyses by the
Greeks was Kâbuzîyâ or Kambuzîya. Herodotus calls him the
son of Kassandanê, and the tradition which he has preserved
is certainly authentic. Ctesias has erroneously stated that
his mother was Amytis, the daughter of Astyages, and Dinon,
also erroneously, the Egyptian women Nitêtis; Diodorus
Siculus and Strabo make him the son of Meroê.

** The original form was Bardiya or Barzîya, the laudable,
and the first Greek transcript known, in Æschylus, is
Mardos, or, in the scholiasts on the passage, Merdias, which
has been corrupted into Marphios by Hellanikos and into
Merges by Pompeius Trogus. The form Smerdis in Herodotus,
and in the historians who follow him, is the result of a
mistaken assimilation of the Persian name with the purely
Greek one of Smerdis or Smerdies.

*** Herodotus says that Atossa was the daughter of
Kassandanê, and the position which she held during three
reigns shows that she must have been so; Justi, however,
calls her the daughter of Amytis. A second daughter is
mentioned by Herodotus, the one whom Cambyses killed in
Egypt by a kick; he gives her no name, but she is probably
the same as the Roxana who according to Ctesias bore a
headless child. The youngest, Artystonê, was the favourite
wife of Darius. Josephus speaks of a fourth daughter of
Cyrus called Meroê, but without saying who was the mother of
this princess.

Cambyses was probably born about 558, soon after his fathers accession, and he was his legitimate successor, according to the Persian custom which assigned the crown to the eldest of the sons born in the purple. He had been associated, as we have seen, in the Babylonian regal power immediately after the victory over Nabonidus, and on the eve of his departure for the fatal campaign against the Massagetse his father, again in accordance with the Persian law, had appointed him regent. A later tradition, preserved by Ctesias, relates that on this occasion the territory had been divided between the two sons: Smerdis, here called Tanyoxarkes, having received as his share Bactriana, the Khoramnians, the Parthians, and the Carmanians, under the suzerainty of his brother. Cambyses, it is clear, inherited the whole empire, but intrigues gathered round Smerdis, and revolts broke out in the provinces, incited, so it was said, whether rightly or wrongly, by his partisans.* The new king was possessed of a violent, merciless temper, and the Persians subsequently emphasised the fact by saying that Cyrus had been a father to them, Cambyses a master. The rebellions were repressed with a vigorous hand, and finally Smerdis disappeared by royal order, and the secret of his fate was so well kept, that it was believed, even by his mother and sisters, that he was merely imprisoned in some obscure Median fortress.**

* Herodotus speaks of peoples subdued by Cambyses in Asia,
and this allusion can only refer to a revolt occurring after
the death of Cyrus, before the Egyptian expedition; these
troubles are explicitly recorded in Xenophon.

** The inscription of Behistun says distinctly that Cambyses
had his brother Bardîya put to death before the Egyptian
expedition; on the other hand, Herodotus makes the murder
occur during the Egyptian expedition and Ctesias after this
expedition. Ctesias version of the affair adds that
Cambyses, the better to dissimulate his crime, ordered the
murderer Sphendadates to pass himself off as Tanyoxarkes, as
there was a great resemblance between the two: Sphendadates
--the historian goes on to say--was exiled to Bactriana,
and it was not until five years afterwards that the mother
of the two princes heard of the murder and of the
substitution. These additions to the story are subsequent
developments suggested by the traditional account of the
Pseudo-Smerdis. In recent times several authorities have
expressed the opinion that all that is told us of the murder
of Smerdis and about the Pseudo-Smerdis is merely a legend,
invented by Darius or those about him in order to justify
his usurpation in the eyes of the people: the Pseudo-Smerdis
would be Smerdis himself, who revolted against Cambyses, and
was then, after he had reigned a few months, assassinated by
Darius. Winckler acknowledges that certainty is impossible
in such a case; and, in reality, all ancient tradition is
against his hypothesis, and it is best to accept Herodotus
account, with all its contradictions, until contemporaneous
documents enable us to decide what to accept and what to
reject in it.

The ground being cleared of his rival, and affairs on the Scythian frontier reduced to order, Cambyses took up the projects against Egypt at the exact point at which his predecessor had left them. Amasis, who for ten years had been expecting an attack, had taken every precaution in his power against it, and had once more patiently begun to make overtures of alliance with the Hellenic cities; those on the European continent did not feel themselves so seriously menaced as to consider it to their interest to furnish him with any assistance, but the Greeks of the independent islands, with their chief, Poly crates, tyrant of Samos, received his advances with alacrity. Polycrates had at his disposal a considerable fleet, the finest hitherto seen in the waters of the Ægean, and this, combined with the Egyptian navy, was not any too large a force to protect the coasts of the Delta, now that the Persians had at their disposition not only the vessels of the Æolian and Ionian cities, but those of Phoenicia and Cyprus. A treaty was concluded, bringing about an exchange of presents and amenities between the two princes which lasted as long as peace prevailed, but was ruptured at the critical moment by the action of Polycrates, though not actually through his own fault. The aristocratic party, whose chiefs were always secretly plotting his overthrow, had given their adherence to the Persians, and their conduct became so threatening about the time of the death of Cyras, that Polycrates had to break his engagements with Egypt in order to avert a catastrophe.*

* Herodotus laid the blame for the breach of the treaty to
the King of Egypt, and attributed to his fear of the
constant good fortune of Polycrates. The lattors accession
to power is fixed at about the year 540 by some, by others
in the year 537, or in the year 533-2; his negotiations with
Amasis must be placed somewhere during the last fifteen
years of the Pharaoh.

He made a treaty with the Persian king, and sent a squadron of forty galleys to join the fleet then being equipped in the Phoenician ports.*

* Herodotus records two opposing traditions: one that the
Samians joined in the Egyptian campaign, the other that they
went only as far as the neighbourhood of Karpathos.

Amasis, therefore, when war at last broke out, found himself left to face the enemy alone. The struggle was inevitable, and all the inhabitants of the eastern coasts of the Mediterranean had long foreseen its coming. Without taking into consideration the danger to which the Persian empire and its Syrian provinces were exposed by the proximity of a strong and able power such as Egypt, the hardy and warlike character of Cambyses would naturally have prompted him to make an attempt to achieve what his predecessors, the warrior-kings of Nineveh and Babylon, had always failed to accomplish successfully. Policy ruled his line of action, and was sufficient to explain it, but popular imagination sought other than the very natural causes which had brought the most ancient and most recent of the great empires of the world into opposition; romantic reasons were therefore invented to account for the great drama which was being enacted, and the details supplied varied considerably, according as the tradition was current in Asia or Africa. It was said that a physician lent to Cyrus by Amasis, to treat him for an affection of the eyes, was the cause of all the evil. The unfortunate man, detained at Susa and chafing at his exile, was said to have advised Cambyses to ask for the daughter of Pharaoh in marriage, hoping either that Amasis would grant the request, and be dishonoured in the eyes of his subjects for having degraded the solar race by a union with a barbarian, or that he would boldly refuse, and thus arouse the hatred of the Persians against himself. Amasis, after a slight hesitation, substituted Nitêtis, a daughter of Apries, for his own child. It happened that one day in sport Cambyses addressed the princess by the name of her supposed father, whereupon she said, I perceive, O king, that you have no suspicion of the way in which you have been deceived by Amasis; he took me, and having dressed me up as his own daughter, sent me to you. In reality I am the daughter of Apries, who was his lord and master until the day that he revolted, and, in concert with the rest of the Egyptians, put his sovereign to death. The deceit which Cambyses thus discovered had been put upon him irritated him so greatly as to induce him to turn his arms against Egypt. So ran the Persian account of the tale, but on the banks of the Nile matters were explained otherwise. Here it was said that it was to Cyrus himself that Nitêtis had been married, and that she had borne Cambyses to him; the conquest had thus been merely a revenge of the legitimate heirs of Psammetichus upon the usurper, and Cambyses had ascended the throne less as a conqueror than as a Pharaoh of the line of Apries. It was by this childish fiction that the Egyptians in their decadence consoled themselves before the stranger for their loss of power. Always proud of their ancient prowess, but incapable of imitating the deeds of their forefathers, they none the less pretended that they could neither be vanquished nor ruled except by one of themselves, and the story of Nitêtis afforded complete satisfaction to their vanity. If Cambyses were born of a solar princess, Persia could not be said to have imposed a barbarian king upon Egypt, but, on the contrary, that Egypt had cleverly foisted her Pharaoh upon Persia, and through Persia upon half the universe.

One obstacle still separated the two foes--the desert and the marshes of the Delta. The distance between the outposts of Pelusium and the fortress of Ænysos* on the Syrian frontier was scarcely fifty-six miles, and could be crossed by an army in less than ten days.** Formerly the width of this strip of desert had been less, but the Assyrians, and after them the Chaldæans, had vied with each other in laying waste the country, and the absence of any settled population now rendered the transit difficult. Cambyses had his head-quarters at Gaza, at the extreme limit of his own dominions,*** but he was at a loss how to face this solitary region without incurring the risk of seeing half his men buried beneath its sands, and his uncertainty was delaying his departure when a stroke of fortune relieved him from his difficulty.

* The Ænysos of Herodotus is now Khân Yunes.

** In 1799, Napoleons army left Kattiyeh on the 18th of
Pluviôse, and was at Gaza on the 7th of Ventose, after
remaining from the 21st to the 30th of Pluviôse before El-
Arîsh besieging that place.

*** This seems to follow from the tradition, according to
which Cambyses left his treasures at Gaza during the
Egyptian campaign, and the town was thence called _Gaza_,
the treasury. The etymology is false, but the fact that
suggested it is probably correct, considering the situation
of Gaza and the part it must necessarily play in an invasion
of Egypt.

Phanes of Halicarnassus, one of the mercenaries in the service of Egypt, a man of shrewd judgment and an able soldier, fell out with Amasis for some unknown reason, and left him to offer his services to his rival. This was a serious loss for Egypt, since Phanes possessed considerable authority over the mercenaries, and was better versed in Egyptian affairs than any other person. He was pursued and taken within sight of the Lycian coast, but he treated his captors to wine and escaped from them while they were intoxicated. He placed Cambyses in communication with the shêkh of the scattered tribes between Syria and the Delta. The Arab undertook to furnish the Persian king with guides, as one of his predecessors had done in years gone by for Esar-haddon, and to station relays of camels laden with water along the route that the invading army was to follow. Having taken these precautions, Cambyses entrusted the cares of government and the regulation of his household to Oropastes,* one of the Persian magi, and gave the order to march forward.

* Herodotus calls this individual Patizeithes, and Dionysius
of Miletus, who lived a little before Herodotus, gives
Panzythes as a variant of this name: the variant passed into
the Syncellus as Pauzythes, but the original form
Patikhshâyathiya is a title signifying _viceroy, regent, or
minister_, answering to the modern Persian _Padishah_:
Herodotus, or the author he quotes, has taken the name of
the office for that of the individual. On the other hand,
Pompeius Trogus, who drew his information from good sources,
mentions, side by side with Comètes or Gaumata, his brother
Oropastes, whose name Ahura-upashta is quite correct, and
may mean, _Him whom Ahura helps_. It is generally admitted
that Pompeius Trogus, or rather Justin, has inverted the
parts they played, and that his Comètes is the Pseudo-
Smerdis, and not, as he says, Oropastes; it was, then, the
latter who was the usurpers brother, and it is his name of
Oropastes which should be substituted for that of the
Patizeithes of Herodotus.

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph of the original in the
Louvre.

On arriving at Pelusium, he learned that his adversary no longer existed. Amasis had died after a short illness, and was succeeded by his son Psammetichus III.

This change of command, at the most critical moment, was almost in itself, a disaster. Àmasis, with his consummate experience of men and things, his intimate knowledge of the resources of Egypt, his talents as a soldier and a general, his personal prestige, his Hellenic leanings, commanded the confidence of his own men and the respect of foreigners; but what could be expected of his unknown successor, and who could say whether he were equal to the heavy task which fate had assigned to him? The whole of the Nile valley was a prey to gloomy presentiment.*

* Psammetichus III. has left us very few monuments, which is
accounted for by the extreme shortness of his reign. For the
same reason doubtless several writers of classical times
have ignored his existence, and have made the conquest of
Egypt take place under Amasis. Ctesias calls the Pharaoh
Amyrtseus, and gives the same name to those who rebelled
against the Persians in his own time, and he had an account
of the history of the conquest entirely different from that
of Herodotus.

Egypt was threatened not only, as in the previous century, by the nations of the Tigris and Euphrates, but all Asia, from the Indus to the Hellespont, was about to fall on her to crush her. She was destitute of all human help and allies, and the gods themselves appeared to have forsaken her. The fellahin, inspired with vague alarm, recognised evil omens in all around them. Rain is rare in the Thebaid, and storms occur there only twice or three times in a century: but a few days after the accession of Psammetichus, a shower of fine rain fell at Thebes, an event, so it was stated with the exaggeration characteristic of the bearers of ill news, which had never before occurred.*

* The inhabitants of the Said have, up to our own time,
always considered rain in the valley as an ill-omened event.
They used to say in the beginning of the nineteenth century,
when speaking of Napoleons expedition, We knew that
misfortune threatened us, because it rained at Luxor shortly
before the French came. Wilkinson assures us that rain is
not so rare at Thebes as Herodotus thought: he speaks of
five or six showers a year, and of a great storm on an
average every ten years. But even he admits that it is
confined to the mountain district, and does not reach the
plain: I never heard of rain at Luxor during the six winters
that I spent in Upper Egypt.

Pharaoh hastened to meet the invader with all the men, chariots, and native bowmen at his disposal, together with his Libyan and Cyrenoan auxiliaries, and the Ionians, Carians, and Greeks of the isles and mainland. The battle took place before Pelusium, and was fought on both sides with brave desperation, since defeat meant servitude for the Egyptians, and for the Persians, cut off by the desert from possible retreat, captivity or annihilation. Phanes had been obliged to leave his children behind him, and Pharaoh included them in his suite, to serve, if needful, as hostages. The Carians and Ionians, who felt themselves disgraced by the defection of their captain, called loudly for them just before the commencement of the action. They were killed immediately in front of the lines, their father being a powerless onlooker; their blood was thrown into a cask half full of wine, and the horrible mixture was drunk by the soldiers, who then furiously charged the enemys battalions. The issue of the struggle was for a long time doubtful, but the Egyptians were inferior in numbers; towards evening their lines gave way and the flight began.* All was not, however, lost, if Psammetichus had but followed the example of Taharqa, and defended the passage of the various canals and arms of the river, disputing the ground inch by inch with the Persians, and gaining time meanwhile to collect a fresh army. The king lost his presence of mind, and without attempting to rally what remained of his regiments, he hastened to take refuge within the White Wall. Cambyses halted a few days to reduce Pelusium,** and in the mean time sent a vessel of Mitylene to summon Memphis to capitulate: the infuriated populace, as soon as they got wind of the message, massacred the herald and the crew, and dragged their bleeding limbs through the streets.

* According to Herodotus, eighty years later the battle-
field used to be shown covered with bones, and it was said
that the Egyptians could be distinguished from the Persians
by the relative hardness of their skulls.

** Polysenus hands down a story that Cambyses, in order to
paralyse the resistance of the besieged, caused cats, dogs,
ibises, and other sacred animals to march at the head of his
attacking columns: the Egyptians would not venture to use
their arms for fear of wounding or killing some of their
gods.

The city held out for a considerable time; when at length she opened her gates, the remaining inhabitants of the Said who had hesitated up to then, hastened to make their submission, and the whole of Egypt as far as Philae became at one stroke a Persian province. The Libyans did not wait to be summoned to bring their tribute; Cyrene and Barca followed their example, but their offerings were so small that the conquerors irritation was aroused, and deeming himself mocked, he gave way to his anger, and instead of accepting them, he threw them to his soldiers with his own hand (B.C. 525).*

* The question as to the year in which Egypt was subdued by
Cambyses has long divided historians: I still agree with
those who place the conquest in the spring of 525.

This sudden collapse of a power whose exalted position had defied all attacks for centuries, and the tragic fate of the king who had received his crown merely to lose it, filled contemporary beholders with astonishment and pity. It was said that, ten days after the capitulation of Memphis, the victorious king desired out of sport to test the endurance of his prisoner. Psammetichus beheld his daughter and the daughters of his nobles pass before him, half naked, with jars on their shoulders, and go down to the Nile to fetch water from the river like common slaves; his son and two thousand young men of the same age, in chains and with ropes round their necks, also defiled before him on their way to die as a revenge for the murder of the Mitylenians; yet he never for a moment lost his royal imperturbability. But when one of his former companions in pleasure chanced to pass, begging for alms and clothed in rags, Psammetichus suddenly broke out into weeping, and lacerated his face in despair. Cambyses, surprised at this excessive grief in a man who up till then had exhibited such fortitude, demanded the reason of his conduct. Son of Cyrus, he replied, the misfortunes of my house are too unparalleled to weep over, but not the affliction of my friend. When a man, on the verge of old age, falls from luxury and abundance into extreme poverty, one may well lament his fate. When the speech was reported to Cambyses, he fully recognised the truth of it. Croesus, who was also present, shed tears, and the Persians round him were moved with pity. Cambyses, likewise touched, commanded that the son of the Pharaoh should be saved, but the remission of the sentence arrived too late. He at all events treated Pharaoh himself with consideration, and it is possible that he might have replaced him on the throne, under an oath of vassalage, had he not surprised him in a conspiracy against his own life. He thereupon obliged him to poison himself by drinking bulls blood, and he confided the government of the Nile valley to a Persian named Aryandes.

No part of the ancient world now remained unconquered except the semi-fabulous kingdom of Ethiopia in the far-off south. Cities and monarchies, all the great actors of early times, had been laid in the dust one after another--Tyre, Damascus, Carchemish, Urartu, Elam, Assyria, Jerusalem, Media, the Lydians, Babylon, and finally Egypt; and the prey they had fought over so fiercely and for so many centuries, now belonged in its entirety to one master for the first time as far as memory could reach back into the past. Cambyses, following in the footsteps of Cyrus, had pursued his victorious way successfully, but it was another matter to consolidate his conquests and to succeed in governing within the limits of one empire so many incongruous elements--the people of the Caucasus and those of the Nile valley, the Greeks of the Ægean and the Iranians, the Scythians from beyond the Oxus and the Semites of the banks of the Euphrates or of the Mediterranean coast; and time alone would show whether this heritage would not fall to pieces as quickly as it had been built up. The Asiatic elements of the empire appeared, at all events for the moment, content with their lot, and Babylon showed herself more than usually resigned; but Egypt had never accepted the yoke of the stranger willingly, and the most fortunate of her Assyrian conquerors had never exercised more than a passing supremacy over her. Cambyses realised that he would never master her except by governing her himself for a period of several years, and by making himself as Egyptian as a Persian could be without offending his own subjects at home. He adopted the titles of the Pharaohs, their double cartouche, their royal costume, and their solar filiation; as much to satisfy his own personal animosity as to conciliate the Egyptian priests, he repaired to Sais, violated the tomb of Amasis, and burnt the mummy after offering it every insult.*

* Herodotus gives also a second account, which declares that
Cambyses thus treated the body, not of Amasis, but of some
unknown person whom he took for Amasis. The truth of the
story is generally contested, for the deed would have been,
as Herodotus himself remarks, contrary to Persian ideas
about the sanctity of fire. I think that by his cruel
treatment of the mummy, Cambyses wished to satisfy the
hatred of the natives against the Greek-loving king, and so
render himself more acceptable to them. The destruction of
the mummy entailing that of the soul, his act gave the
Saitic population a satisfaction similar to that experienced
by the refined cruelty of those who, a few centuries ago,
killed their enemies when in a state of deadly sin, and so
ensure not only their dismissal from this world, but also
their condemnation in the next.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph: the head and
hands are a restoration of the eighteenth century, in the
most inappropriate Græco-Roman style.

He removed his troops from the temple of Nît, which they had turned into a barrack to the horror of the faithful, and restored at his own expense the damage they had done to the building. He condescended so far as to receive instruction in the local religion, and was initiated in the worship of the goddess by the priest Uzaharrîsnîti. This was, after all, a pursuance of the policy employed by his father towards the Babylonians, and the projects which he had in view necessitated his gaining the confidence of the people at all costs. Asia having no more to offer him, two almost untried fields lay open to his ambition--Africa and Europe--the Greek world and what lay beyond it, the Carthaginian world and Ethiopia. The necessity of making a final reckoning with Egypt had at the outset summoned him to Africa, and it was therefore in that continent that he determined to carry on his conquests. Memphis was necessarily the base of his operations, the only point from which he could direct the march of his armies in a westerly or southerly direction, and at the same time keep in touch with the rest of his empire, and he would indeed have been imprudent had he neglected anything which could make him acceptable to its inhabitants. As soon as he felt he had gained their sympathies, he despatched two expeditions, one to Carthage and one to Ethiopia. Cyrene had spontaneously offered him her homage; he now further secured it by sending thither with all honour Ladikê, the widow of Amasis, and he apparently contemplated taking advantage of the good will of the Cyrenians to approach Carthage by sea. The combined fleets of Ionia and Phonicia were without doubt numerically sufficient for this undertaking, but the Tyrians refused to serve against their own colonies, and he did not venture to employ the Greeks alone in waters which were unfamiliar to them. Besides this, the information which he obtained from those about him convinced him that the overland route would enable him to reach his destination more surely if more slowly; it would lead him from the banks of the Nile to the Oases of the Theban desert, from there to the Ammonians, and thence by way of the Libyans bordering on the Syrtes and the Liby-phoenicians. He despatched an advance-guard of fifty thousand men from Thebes to occupy the Oasis of Ammon and to prepare the various halting-places for the bulk of the troops. The fate of these men has never been clearly ascertained. They crossed the Oasis of El-Khargeh and proceeded to the north-west in the direction of the oracle. The natives afterwards related that when they had arrived halfway, a sudden storm of wind fell upon them, and the entire force was buried under mounds of sand during a halt. Cambyses was forced to take their word; in spite of all his endeavours, no further news of his troops was forthcoming, except that they never reached the temple, and that none of the generals or soldiers ever again saw Egypt (524). The expedition to Ethiopia was not more successful. Since the retreat of Tanuatamanu, the Pharaohs of Napata had severed all direct relations with Asia; but on being interfered with by Psammetichus I. and II., they had repulsed the invaders, and had maintained their frontier almost within sight of Philæ.* In Nubia proper they had merely a few outposts stationed in the ruins of the towns of the Theban period--at Derr, at Pnubsu, at Wady-Halfa, and at Semneh; the population again becoming dense and the valley fertile to the south of this spot. Kush, like Egypt, was divided into two regions --To-Qonusît, with its cities of Danguru,** Napata, Asta-muras, and Barua; and Alo,*** which extended along the White and the Blue Nile in the plain of Sennaar: the Asmakh, the descendants of the Mashauasha emigrants of the time of Psammetichus I., dwelt on the southern border of Alo.

* The northern boundary of Ethiopia is given us
approximately by the lists of temples in the inscriptions of
Harsiatef and of Nastosenen: Pnubsu is mentioned several
times as receiving gifts from the king, which carries the
permanent dominion of the Ethiopian kings as far as the
second cataract.

** Now Old Dongola.

*** Berua is the Meroê of Strabo, Astaboras the modern Ed-
Dameîr, and Alo the kingdom of Aloah of the mediæval Arab
geographers.

Drawn by Boudier, from the photograph by Berghoff.

A number of half-savage tribes, Maditi and Bohrehsa, were settled to the right and to the left of the territory watered by the Nile, between Darfur, the mountains of Abyssinia, and the Red Sea; and the warlike disposition of the Ethiopian kings found in these tribes an inexhaustible field for obtaining easy victories and abundant spoil. Many of these sovereigns--Piônkhi, Alaru, Harsiatef, Nastosenen--whose respective positions in the royal line are still undetermined, specially distinguished themselves in these struggles, but the few monuments they have left, though bearing witness to their military enterprise and ability, betray their utter decadence in everything connected with art, language, and religion. The ancient Egyptian syllabary, adapted to the needs of a barbarous tongue, had ended by losing its elegance; architecture was degenerating, and sculpture slowly growing more and more clumsy in appearance. Some of the work, however, is not wanting in a certain rude nobility--as, for instance, the god and goddess carved side by side in a block of grey granite. Ethiopian worship had become permeated with strange superstitions, and its creed was degraded, in spite of the strictness with which the priests supervised its application and kept watch against every attempt to introduce innovations. Towards the end of the seventh century some of the families attached to the temple of Am on at Napata had endeavoured to bring about a kind of religious reform; among other innovations they adopted the practice of substituting for the ordinary sacrifice, new rites, the chief feature of which was the offering of the flesh of the victim raw, instead of roasted with fire. This custom, which was doubtless borrowed from the negroes of the Upper Nile, was looked upon as a shameful heresy by the orthodox. The king repaired in state to the temple of Anion, seized the priests who professed these seditious beliefs, and burnt them alive.

The use of raw meat, nevertheless, was not discontinued, and it gained such ground in the course of ages that even Christianity was unable to suppress it; up to the present time, the _brindê_, or piece of beef cut from the living animal and eaten raw, is considered a delicacy by the Abyssinians.

The isolation of the Ethiopians had rather increased than lowered their reputation among other nations. Their transitory appearance on the battle-fields of Asia had left a deep impression on the memories of their opponents. The tenacity they had displayed during their conflict with Assyria had effaced the remembrance of their defeat. Popular fancy delighted to extol the wisdom of Sabaco,* and exalted Taharqa to the first rank among the conquerors of the old world; now that Kush once more came within the range of vision, it was invested with a share of all these virtues, and the inquiries Cambyses made concerning it were calculated to make him believe that he was about to enter on a struggle with a nation of demigods rather than of men. He was informed that they were taller, more beautiful, and more vigorous than all other mortals, that their age was prolonged to one hundred and twenty years and more, and that they possessed a marvellous fountain whose waters imparted perpetual youth to then-bodies. There existed near their capital a meadow, perpetually furnishing an inexhaustible supply of food and drink; whoever would might partake of this Table of the Sun, and eat to his fill.**

* The eulogy bestowed on him by Herodotus shows the esteem
in which he was held even in the Saite period; later on he
seems to have become two persons, and so to have given birth
to the good Ethiopian king Aktisanes.

** Pausanias treats it as a travellers tale. Heeren thought
that he saw in Herodotus account a reference to intercourse
by signs, so frequent in Africa. The Table of the Sun
would thus have been a kind of market, whither the natives
would come for their provisions, using exchange to procure
them. I am inclined rather to believe the story to be a
recollection, partly of the actual custom of placing meats,
which the first comer might take, on the tombs in the
necropolis, partly of the mythical Meadow of Offerings
mentioned in the funerary texts, to which the souls of the
dead and the gods alike had access. This divine region would
have transferred to our earth by some folk-tale, like the
judgment of the dead, the entrance into the solar bark, and
other similar beliefs.

Gold was so abundant that it was used for common purposes, even for the chains of their prisoners; but, on the other hand, copper was rare and much prized. Canibyses despatched some spies chosen from among the Ichthyophagi of the Bed Sea to explore this region, and acting on the report they brought back, he left Memphis at the head of an army and a fleet.* The expedition was partly a success and partly a failure. It followed the Nile valley as far as Korosko, and then struck across the desert in the direction of Napata;** but provisions ran short before a quarter of the march had been achieved, and famine obliged the invaders to retrace their steps after having endured terrible sufferings.***

* Herodotus text speaks of an army only, but the accounts
of the wars between Ethiopia and Egypt show that the army
was always accompanied by the necessary fleet.

** It is usually thought that the expedition marched by the
side of the Nile as far as Napata; to support this theory
the name of a place mentioned in Pliny is quoted, Cambusis
at the third cataract, which is supposed to contain the name
of the conqueror. This town, which is sometimes mentioned by
the classical geographers, is called Kambiusit in the
Ethiopie texts, and the form of the name makes its
connection with the history of Cambyses easy. I think it
follows, from the text of Herodotus, that the Persians left
the grassy land, the river-valley, at a given moment, to
enter the sand, i.e. the desert. Now this is done to-day at
two points--near Korosko to rejoin the Nile at Abu-Hammed,
and near Wady-Halfah to avoid the part of the Nile called
the Stony belly, Batn el-Hagar. The Korosko route, being
the only one suitable for the transit of a body of troops,
and also the only route known to Herodotus, seems, I think,
likely to be the one which was followed in the present
instance; at all events, it fits in best with the fact that
Cambyses was obliged to retrace his steps hurriedly, when he
had accomplished hardly a fifth of the journey.

*** Many modern historians are inclined to assume that
Cambyses expedition was completely successful, and that its
result was the overthrow of the ancient kingdom of Nepata
and the foundation of that of Meroê. Cambyses would have
given the new town which he built there the name of his
sister Meroê. The traditions concerning Cambusis and Meroê
belong to the Alexandrine era, and rest only on chance
similarities of sound. With regard to the Ethiopian province
of the Persian empire and to the Ethiopian neighbours of
Egypt whom Cambyses subdued, the latter are not necessarily
Ethiopians of Napata. Herodotus himself says that the
Ethiopians dwelt in the country above Elephantine, and that
half of what he calls the island of Takhompsô was inhabited
by Ethiopians: the subjugated Ethiopians and their country
plainly correspond with the Dodekaschênos of the Græco-Roman
era.

Cambyses had to rest content with the acquisition of those portions of Nubia adjoining the first cataract--the same, in fact, that had been annexed to Egypt by Psammetichus I. and II. (523). The failure of this expedition to the south, following so closely on the disaster which befell that of the west, had a deplorable effect on the mind of Cambyses. He had been subject, from childhood, to attacks of epilepsy, during which he became a maniac and had no control over his actions. These reverses of fortune aggravated the disease, and increased the frequency and length of the attacks.*

* Recent historians admit neither the reality of the illness
of Cambyses nor the madness resulting from it, but consider
them Egyptian fables, invented out of spite towards the king
who had conquered and persecuted them.

The bull Apis had died shortly before the close of the Ethiopian campaign, and the Egyptians, after mourning for him during the prescribed number of weeks, were bringing his successor with rejoicings into the temple of Phtah, when the remains of the army re-entered Memphis. Cambyses, finding the city holiday-making, imagined that it was rejoicing over his misfortunes. He summoned the magistrates before him, and gave them over to the executioner without deigning to listen to their explanations. He next caused the priests to be brought to him, and when they had paraded the Apis before him, he plunged his dagger into its flank with derisive laughter: Ah, evil people! So you make for yourselves divinities of flesh and blood which fear the sword! It is indeed a fine god that you Egyptians have here; I will have you to know, however, that you shall not rejoice overmuch at having deceived me! The priests were beaten as impostors, and the bull languished from its wound and died in a few days*1 its priests buried it, and chose another in its place without the usual ceremonies, so as not to exasperate the anger of the tyrant,** but the horror evoked by this double sacrilege raised passions against Cambyses which the ruin of the country had failed to excite.

* Later historians improved upon the account of Herodotus,
and it is said in the _De Iside_, that Cambyses killed the
Apis and threw him to the dogs. Here there is probably a
confusion between the conduct of Cambyses and that
attributed to the eunuch Bagoas nearly two centuries later,
at the time of the second conquest of Egypt by Ochus.

** Mariette discovered in the Serapseum and sent to the
Louvre fragments of the epitaph of an Apis buried in Epiphi
in the sixth year of Cambyses, which had therefore died a
few months previously. This fact contradicts the inference
from the epitaph of the Apis that died in the fourth year of
Darius, which would have been born in the fifth year of
Cambyses, if we allow that there could not have been two
Apises in Egypt at once. This was, indeed, the usual rule,
but a comparison of the two dates shows that here it was not
followed, and it is therefore simplest, until we have
further evidence, to conclude that at all events in cases of
violence, such as sacrilegious murder, there could have been
two Apises at once, one discharging his functions, and the
other unknown, living still in the midst of the herds.

The manifestations of this antipathy irritated him to such an extent that he completely changed his policy, and set himself from that time forward to act counter to the customs and prejudices of the Egyptians. They consequently regarded his memory with a vindictive hatred. The people related that the gods had struck him with madness to avenge the murder of the Apis, and they attributed to him numberless traits of senseless cruelty, in which we can scarcely distinguish truth from fiction. It was said that, having entered the temple of Phtah, he had ridiculed the grotesque figure under which the god was represented, and had commanded the statues to be burnt. On another occasion he had ordered the ancient sepulchres to be opened, that he might see what was the appearance of the mummies. The most faithful members of his family and household, it was said, did not escape his fury. He killed his own sister Roxana, whom he had married, by a kick in the abdomen; he slew the son of Prexaspes with an arrow; he buried alive twelve influential Persians; he condemned Croesus to death, and then repented, but punished the officers who had failed to execute the sentence pronounced against the Lydian king.*

* The whole of this story of Croesus is entirely fabulous.

He had no longer any reason for remaining in Egypt, since he had failed in his undertakings; yet he did not quit the country, and through repeated delays his departure was retarded a whole year. Meanwhile his long sojourn in Africa, the report of his failures, and perhaps whispers of his insanity, had sown the seeds of discontent in Asia; and as Darius said in after-years, when recounting these events, untruth had spread all over the country, not only in Persia and Media, but in other provinces. Cambyses himself felt that a longer absence would be injurious to his interests; he therefore crossed the isthmus in the spring of 521, and was making his way through Northern Syria, perhaps in the neighbourhood of Hamath,* when he learned that a revolution had broken out, and that its rapid progress threatened the safety of his throne and life.

* Herodotus calls the place where Cambyses died Agbatana
(Ecbatana). Pliny says that the town of Carmel was thus
named at first; but the place here mentioned cannot well
have been in that direction. It has been identified with
Batansea in the country between the Orontes and the
Euphrates, but the most likely theory is the one suggested
by a passage in Stephen of Byzantium, that the place in
question is the large Syrian city of Hamath. Josephus makes
him die at Damascus.

Tradition asserted that a herald appeared before him and proclaimed aloud, in the hearing of the whole army, that Cambyses, son of Cyrus, had ceased to reign, and summoned whoever had till that day obeyed him to acknowledge henceforth Smerdis, son of Cyrus, as their lord. Cambyses at first believed that his brother had been spared by the assassins, and now, after years of concealment, had at length declared himself; but he soon received proofs that his orders had been faithfully accomplished, and it is said that he wept at the remembrance of the fruitless crime. The usurper was Gaumâta, one of the Persian Magi, whose resemblance to Smerdis was so remarkable that even those who were cognisant of it invariably mistook the one for the other,* and he was brother to that Oropastes to whom Cambyses had entrusted the administration of his household before setting out for Egypt.**

* Greek tradition is unanimous on this point, but the
inscription of Behistun does not mention it.

** The inscription of Behistun informs us that the usurpers
name was Gaumâta. Pompeius Trogus alone, probably following
some author who made use of Charon of Lampsacus, handed down
this name in the form Comètes or Gometes, which his
abbreviator Justin carelessly applied to the second brother.
Ctesias gives the Mage the name Sphendadates, which answers
to the Old Persian Spentôdâta, he who is given by the Holy
One, i.e. by Ahura-mazdâ. The supporters of the Mage gave
him this name, as an heroic champion of the Mazdoan faith
who had destroyed such sanctuaries as were illegal, and
identified him with Spentôdâta, son of Wistâspa.

Both of them were aware of the fate of Smerdis; they also knew that the Persians were ignorant of it, and that every one at court, including the mother and sisters of the prince, believed that he was still alive. Gaumâta headed a revolt in the little town of Pasyauvadâ on the 14th of Viyakhna, in the early days of March, 521, and he was hailed by the common people from the moment of his appearance. Persia, Media, and the Iranian provinces pronounced in his favour, and solemnly enthroned him three months later, on the 9th of Garmapada; Babylon next accepted him, followed by Elam and the regions of the Tigris. Though astounded at first by such a widespread defection, Cambyses soon recovered his presence of mind, and was about to march forward at the head of the troops who were still loyal to him, when he mysteriously disappeared. Whether he was the victim of a plot set on foot by those about him, is not known. The official version of the story given by Darius states that he died by his own hand, and it seems to insinuate that it was a voluntary act, but another account affirms that he succumbed to an accident;* while mounting his horse, the point of his dagger pierced his thigh in the same spot in which he had stabbed the Apis of the Egyptians. Feeling himself seriously wounded, he suddenly asked the name of the place where he was lying, and was told it was Agbatana (Ecbatana). Now, long before this, the oracle of Buto had predicted that he should end his days in Agbatana, and he, believing it to be the Agbatana in Media where were his treasures, understood that he should die there in his old age; whereas the oracle meant Agbatana in Syria. When he heard the name, he perceived his error. He understood what the god intended, and cried, It is here, then, that Cambyses, son of Cyrus, must perish! He expired about three weeks after, leaving no posterity and having appointed no successor.**

* It has been pointed out, for the purpose of harmonising
the testimony of Herodotus with that of the inscription of
Behistun, that although the latter speaks of the death of
Cambyses by his own hand, it does not say whether that death
was voluntary or accidental.

** The story of a person whose death has been predicted to
take place in some well-known place, and who has died in
some obscure spot of the same name, occurs several times in
different historians, e.g. in the account of the Emperor
Julian, and in that of Henry III. of England, who had been
told that he would die in Jerusalem, and whose death took
place in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster. Ctesias has
preserved an altogether different tradition--that Cambyses
on his return from Babylon wounded himself while carving a
piece of wood for his amusement, and died eleven days after
the accident.

What took place in the ensuing months still remains an enigma to us. The episode of Gaumâta has often been looked on as a national movement, which momentarily restored to the Medes the supremacy of which Cyrus had robbed them; but it was nothing of the sort. Gaumâta was not a Mede by birth: he was a Persian, born in Persia, in the township of Pisyauvadâ, at the foot of Mount Ara-kadrish, and the Persians recognised and supported him as much as did the Medes. It has also been thought that he had attempted to foment a religious revolution,* and, as a matter of fact, he destroyed several temples in a few months.

* Most of the ancient writers shared this opinion, and have
been followed therein by many modern writers. Rawlinson was
the first to show that Gaumâtas movement was not Median,
and that he did not in the least alter the position of the
Persians in the empire: but he allows the Magian usurpation
to have been the prelude to a sort of religious reform.

Here, however, the reform touched less upon a question of belief than on one of fact. The unity of the empire presupposed the unity of the royal fire, and where-ever that fire was burning another could not be lighted without sacrilege in the eyes of the faithful. The pyres that Gaumâta desired to extinguish were, no doubt, those which the feudal families had maintained for their separate use in defiance of the law, and the measure which abolished them had a political as well as a religious side. The little we can glean of the line of action adopted by Smerdis does not warrant the attribution to him of the vast projects which some modern writers credit him with. He naturally sought to strengthen himself on the throne, which by a stroke of good fortune he had ascended, and whatever he did tended solely to this end. The name and the character that he had assumed secured him the respect and fidelity of the Iranians: there was not one, either among the Medes or the Persians, nor among the members of the Achæmenian race, who dreamed of disputing his power in the early days of his reign. The important thing in his eyes was, therefore, to maintain among his subjects as long as possible the error as to his identity. He put to death all, whether small or great, who had been in any way implicated in the affairs of the real Smerdis, or whom he suspected of any knowledge of the murder. He withdrew from public life as far as practicable, and rarely allowed himself to be seen. Having inherited the harem of his predecessors, together with their crown, he even went so far as to condemn his wives to a complete seclusion. He did not venture to hope, nor did those in his confidence, that the truth would not one day be known, but he hoped to gain, without loss of time, sufficient popularity to prevent the revelation of the imposture from damaging his prospects. The seven great houses which he had dispossessed would, in such a case, refuse to rally round him, and it was doubtless to lessen their prestige that he extinguished their pyres; but the people did not trouble themselves as to the origin of their sovereign, if he showed them his favour and took proper precautions to secure their good will. He therefore exempted the provinces from taxes and military service for a period of three years. He had not time to pursue this policy, and if we may believe tradition, the very precautions which he took to conceal his identity became the cause of his misfortunes. In the royal harem there were, together with the daughters of Cyrus, relatives of all the Persian nobility, and the order issued to stop all their communications with the outer world had excited suspicion: the avowals which had escaped Cambyses before the catastrophe were now called to mind, and it was not long before those in high places became convinced that they had been the dupes of an audacious imposture. A conspiracy broke out, under the leadership of the chiefs of the seven clans, among whom was numbered Darius, the son of Hystaspes, who was connected, according to a genealogy more or less authentic, with the family of the Achæmenides:* the conspirators surprised Gaumâta in his palace of Sikayauvatish, which was situated in the district of Nisaya, not far from Ecbatana, and assassinated him on the 10th of Bâgayâdîsh, 521 B.C.