Egypt, the Native Restoration

A death in Susa

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)formation

Egypt had been a Persian province for a hundred and twenty years, on and off, when Darius II died in Susa in 404 and the empire's attention turned to the succession dispute his death set off among his own sons. A Delta rebel leader named Amyrtaeus, who had already been active against the Persian garrison for a few years with Cretan mercenary support, used the distraction to finish the job: Memphis fell, the Persian administration was expelled, and Amyrtaeus proclaimed himself pharaoh of a country no Persian army immediately came back to reclaim.

A restoration that did not restore any one family

Whatever legitimacy Amyrtaeus claimed, he did not pass it to an heir. Within five years he was overthrown and executed by a rival, Nefaarud, who founded a new line ruling from Mendes in the eastern Delta rather than continuing at Sais. That dynasty itself lasted less than twenty years and ended the same way most transitions in this period would: not through foreign conquest, but through an Egyptian general deciding an existing king's own son was not worth deferring to.

Sixty years, three capitals

By the time a general named Nectanebo seized the throne in 380 and founded a third dynasty at Sebennytos, further west in the Delta, native Egyptian kingship had changed capital twice in twenty-four years without any of the changes being forced by an outside power. What held the restored kingship together across those transitions was not a family's claim on the office — none of the three houses that held it were related to each other — but the office's own persistence: whoever won the latest contest for it simply became pharaoh in the full traditional style, and the country's administration carried on beneath him largely undisturbed by which general currently sat above it.

The flood that fought for him

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)expansion

Nectanebo I had been on the throne barely five years when Persia mounted the most serious attempt yet to take the restored kingship back: an invasion force of some two hundred thousand men and five hundred ships, under the joint command of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus and the Athenian mercenary general Iphicrates, hired specifically for the expertise no Persian officer could supply against Egyptian defences.

Around the wall, not through it

Pelusium, guarding the easternmost and most heavily fortified approach to Egypt, held. Rather than force it, the invading army ferried its troops further along the coast and forced a landing at the mouth of the Mendesian branch of the Nile instead, taking the fortress there and opening a route toward Memphis that Egypt's frontier defences had not been built to cover.

An argument, and then a flood

The campaign stalled at exactly the point it should have succeeded. Pharnabazus and Iphicrates disagreed over whether to press on toward Memphis immediately, while Nectanebo was still scrambling reinforcements into the capital, or wait for the rest of the invasion force to come up in support — and while the two commanders argued, the season turned. The Nile flood arrived, as it did every year, and turned the Delta the army was standing in into open water and unusable ground. An invasion that had broken through Egypt's strongest fortress withdrew without ever fighting the decisive battle it had come for, beaten by a river on a schedule no general's competence or incompetence had any control over.

What the win actually proved

Nectanebo did not defeat this invasion by force of arms in any battle worth naming. He survived it by holding Memphis long enough for the country's own geography to do what his army alone might not have managed. It is the same defence, in substance, that had protected Egypt from land invasion for most of its history — an approach that turns to swamp on a predictable annual cycle — succeeding one more time against an army large and well-led enough that nothing else about the campaign suggests it should have failed.

The Spartan changed sides

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)expansion

Teos, Nectanebo I's son and successor, tried something no king of this period had attempted before him: taking the war to Persian territory rather than waiting to be invaded. In 360 he led an Egyptian army, reinforced by a two-hundred-ship fleet and Greek mercenary contingents, against the Persian-held cities of Phoenicia — and assembled, for the purpose, two of the most famous soldiers in the Greek world. Chabrias, an Athenian general, commanded the fleet. Agesilaus, king of Sparta and by this point in his eighties, commanded a mercenary infantry force in the field.

The brother left at home

Teos left his own brother, Tjahapimu, as regent in Egypt while the campaign was under way in Syria. It was a bad choice. With the king and the army's most senior loyalists absent, Tjahapimu raised a rebellion at home and offered the throne to his own son — who happened, by the accident of the campaign's own command structure, to already be serving under Teos as commander of the Egyptian infantry currently besieging Syrian towns. The son's name was Nectanebo.

The choice that decided it

What made the coup succeed rather than collapse the moment word reached the army was a decision made by neither Egyptian brother. Chabrias and the Egyptian fleet stayed loyal to Teos. Agesilaus, the Spartan king Teos had paid to fight for him, judged the usurper the better bet and brought his mercenary force over to Nectanebo's side. Deprived of the one contingent actually capable of contesting Egypt by land, Teos had nothing left to fight with. He fled to the Persian court at Sidon — the very power his campaign had been raised to attack — and Artaxerxes II granted him refuge there rather than treating him as an enemy still worth pursuing.

A throne only as secure as its rented army

Nectanebo II inherited the kingship this way: not by defeating his uncle and cousin in battle, but by being the candidate an aging foreign king, already paid and already in the field, decided was worth switching allegiance for. Every Egyptian dynasty of this period had leaned on hired Greek soldiers for its wars; this coup is the moment the arrangement's other edge showed itself plainly — a kingship's survival decided, in the end, not by which brother Egypt's own people preferred, but by which one a Spartan mercenary captain judged more likely to keep paying him.

A temple that would outlast everyone

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)aside?What aside means

Nectanebo II ruled with the threat of a Persian reconquest hanging over every year of his reign, and used the resources of a kingdom under that threat to build more extensively than any pharaoh of the preceding century. The choice is worth pausing on separately from the war that eventually ended it.

Building against the odds

Restorations and new construction under this king are attested at temples across the whole length of the Nile valley he controlled, from the Delta to the First Cataract and, in one case, an oasis well beyond it: a temple to Amun at Siwa, hundreds of kilometres into the western desert. The most consequential single project, in hindsight, was a temple to Isis on the small island of Philae near Aswan, where Nectanebo II built the first pylon and colonnade of what would grow, under the Ptolemaic and Roman rulers who followed him by centuries, into one of the last functioning centres of the old Egyptian religion anywhere — a cult of Isis at Philae that continued for roughly nine hundred years after this king's own reign ended, into the sixth century AD.

What building this much, this late, was for

A king whose own claim to the throne had come from a coup rather than an orderly succession, ruling a restored kingship barely two generations old and facing the same empire that had already conquered Egypt once within living memory, had every practical reason to spend his revenue on defence rather than stone. That he spent it on both at once says something about what temple-building was actually doing for a king in this position: not a luxury competing with the war effort, but a public assertion, renewed at site after site, that the kingship itself was permanent even while the man holding it knew exactly how contingent his own position was.

The building nobody intended

None of the men who commissioned Philae's earliest stonework could have known that a chapel raised there in an ordinary Late Period building programme would still be receiving worshippers when a Roman emperor's own religion had already displaced the gods Nectanebo built it for everywhere else. Whatever this king expected to leave behind, an active fifth-century cult centre one dynasty's ordinary provincial construction project away from Nubia was not obviously the plan — and it is nonetheless what outlasted every other part of his reign.

The last pharaoh's other son

Drafted from (ed.), The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000)aside?What aside means

A legend attached itself to Nectanebo II within a few centuries of his death that is worth examining for what it reveals about later expectation rather than for anything it says about the ninth-to-last decade of the fourth century BC. The Alexander Romance, a work of fiction compiled and expanded across the Hellenistic and Roman periods and eventually translated into more languages than almost any other ancient text, claims that Nectanebo did not simply flee to Nubia after his final defeat. He fled, the story says, to Macedonia — disguised as an Egyptian magician — where he seduced Queen Olympias in the shape of the god Amun and fathered the son who became Alexander the Great.

What the story cannot be

Nothing about the claim survives contact with the ordinary chronology. Nectanebo's flight from Egypt is dated to 343 BC; Alexander was already thirteen years old by then, born in 356 to a marriage that had taken place years before Nectanebo lost his throne. No version of the legend attempts to reconcile the dates, because reconciling them was never the point.

What the story is actually doing

Read as history, the tale is worthless. Read as a document of what an Egyptian audience under later foreign rule wanted to be true, it is exactly the same move Egyptian religious institutions had made twice before within living memory of this dynasty — Kushite kings taking the pharaonic titulary, Saite kings reaching two thousand years back to Old Kingdom precedent — pushed one step further, into outright invention: if Egypt could no longer produce its own native pharaoh, at least the conqueror who finally ended Persian rule over the country a decade later could be quietly reclaimed as one. Alexander himself, on his own arrival in Egypt, was welcomed as a liberator and crowned in the traditional manner at Memphis — a coronation the story's authors had every reason to want explained by more than politics.

The legend says nothing reliable about who fathered Alexander. It says a great deal about how badly, within a few generations of this dynasty's fall, an Egyptian audience wanted a native pharaoh's blood in the family of the king who ended their occupation.

South and out of the story

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Artaxerxes III had already crushed a wave of satrapal revolts across the rest of the Persian empire by the time he turned to the one province that had stayed independent longer than any other Persian loss: Egypt, still ruled by the general who had taken the throne from his own uncle two decades earlier.

The invasion that did not stall

The 373 invasion had failed on the approach to Memphis, undone by a commanders' quarrel and the Nile's own calendar. Artaxerxes' campaign, arriving in the winter of 343 with the Nile flood already receded and Mentor of Rhodes commanding a Greek mercenary contingent fighting for the Persian side this time, did not make the same mistake. Pelusium and the Delta fortresses fell in sequence rather than being bypassed, and Nectanebo's own mixed army of Egyptians, Libyans and Greek mercenaries — the same recipe that had built and repeatedly saved this restored kingship for sixty years — was broken in the field before it could fall back on Memphis in any organised way.

A flight rather than a surrender

Nectanebo did not stay to negotiate terms or accept a reduced status as a Persian client, the way some Delta kings during the fragmented centuries before this one had. He gathered what treasure and following he could and withdrew south, into Nubia, beyond the reach of the army that had just beaten him — and, on the scattered later evidence, seems to have kept some kind of following and local standing there rather than simply disappearing. He never returned, and no source records him attempting to.

What ended for good

Artaxerxes installed a Persian satrap at Memphis and this time the administration held: Egypt was reincorporated into the Achaemenid empire directly, without the sixty-year interruption that had followed Cambyses' own conquest two centuries earlier, and stayed Persian territory until Alexander took it from the Achaemenid empire in turn. No Egyptian-born king ever again held the full traditional office this dynasty had spent sixty years restoring, defending and finally losing — a fact later generations found hard enough to accept that at least one of them wrote Nectanebo back into history as the secret father of the man who conquered Persia itself.