Egypt, Saite Period

Bronze men from the sea

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

When Ashurbanipal's Assyrian army sacked Thebes in 663, it did not rule Egypt directly afterward. It left the country in the hands of local Delta princes who had already been governing under Assyrian oversight, the most capable of them a man named Necho, prince of Sais, whose son Psamtik inherited both the position and the same nominal obligation to an overlord two thousand miles away.

Twelve kings, or one waiting his turn

The Greek historian Herodotus, writing a century and a half later from material collected in Egypt itself, describes the period just before Psamtik's rise as a rule by twelve princes dividing the country between them — a dodecarchy — bound by an oracle's promise that whichever of them poured a libation from a bronze vessel would rule all of it. Psamtik, the story goes, did so unwittingly, using his helmet after his own ceremonial cup was short one for the twelve, and the others drove him out rather than honour the prophecy against themselves.

Herodotus is not always reliable on Egyptian chronology, and the number twelve looks more like a folk-tale convention than a headcount of actual Delta rulers. What the story preserves accurately enough to matter is the shape of the real situation: multiple local Egyptian princes, none strong enough to rule the whole country, all nominally subordinate to a foreign power distracted by problems of its own.

The prophecy that actually came true

A second oracle, from the goddess of Buto, told the exiled Psamtik that he would recover the throne by means of "bronze men come from the sea." Not long after, a fleet of Ionian Greek and Carian raiders — bronze-armoured in a way no Egyptian army was — was driven onto the Egyptian coast by weather. Psamtik hired them.

Whatever the oracle stories owe to hindsight and later embellishment, the mercenaries were real, and Psamtik's use of them was decisive: with a force loyal to him personally rather than to any Egyptian faction or Assyrian appointment, he defeated the rival Delta princes one by one and, while Assyria's own attention was consumed by a civil war against its governor in Babylon, simply stopped behaving as anyone's vassal. No source records a battle against Assyria itself. Psamtik's independence was won by being useful to nobody's notice at the exact moment nobody could afford to notice.

A princess sails south

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Beating the rival Delta princes solved half of Psamtik's problem. The other half was Thebes, eight hundred kilometres upriver, which had spent the past century as the seat of the God's Wife of Amun — a chief priestess of enormous landed wealth and independent standing, currently held by a woman installed under the Kushite dynasty Assyria had just driven out of Egypt. Whoever held that office effectively held Upper Egypt's religious loyalty, regardless of what any Delta king claimed.

An adoption, not a siege

In his ninth year, Psamtik sent a naval flotilla up the Nile carrying his own daughter, a young woman named Nitocris, with instructions that she be adopted as the sitting God's Wife's designated successor. The ceremony that followed is recorded on a stela commissioned for the occasion: the flotilla reached Thebes after a voyage of some two weeks, the population turned out to receive the princess, and the reigning God's Wife — along with her own designated heir, a woman from the Kushite royal line — formally adopted Nitocris and transferred their properties and titles to her.

No battle is recorded. The transfer had the consent, or at least the acquiescence, of the temple's own senior clergy and the city's civil administration, whose support the ceremony's own stela takes care to record by name. What made the adoption possible rather than merely proposed was the fleet that delivered the princess — a demonstration of force present at every stage without being used at any of them.

What was actually being settled

Reading the ceremony purely as an act of piety misses what it accomplished. The Kushite dynasty had held Egypt's south through exactly this office for generations; installing a Saite princess in the same seat, adopted by the same clergy who had served Kushite God's Wives before her, transferred Thebes' loyalty without requiring anyone in Thebes to admit that their own king had lost anything. Everyone involved could describe the same event as either a conquest or a continuity, and the fact that both descriptions were available at once is precisely what let the transfer happen without a war. Egypt was reunified in name nine years into Psamtik's reign, and almost none of that reunification was won by force of arms — a naval procession and a ceremony had done what a Delta war had not needed to.

Closer to Rome than to Djoser

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

Once the throne was secure, this dynasty's art, religion and administration turned backward in a way no earlier period had attempted so deliberately. Sculptors began copying Old Kingdom statue types feature for feature; tomb texts revived phrases and formulas out of Pyramid Age funerary literature that had gone unused for two thousand years; officials adopted archaic titles their own immediate predecessors had not held. The direction of the copying is unambiguous and heavily one-sided: this period reaching back toward the Old Kingdom, not the reverse.

A gap longer than it looks

The scale of that reach is easy to understate. From this dynasty's own throne, the Old Kingdom lay roughly two thousand years in the past — a greater distance in time than separates the present day from the founding of imperial Rome. Nobody at Sais had a living memory, or a grandparent's living memory, or any continuous institutional thread back to the world being copied. What the copying drew on was whatever the monuments themselves, still standing and still legible, could be made to yield: an antiquity being reconstructed from ruins rather than handed down.

Why reach that far back at all

A dynasty founded within living memory of Assyrian vassalage, on the strength of hired foreign mercenaries and an adoption ceremony rather than inherited right, had an unusually acute need for legitimacy that recent history could not supply. The Kushite kings just displaced from Thebes had made their own claim on Egyptian tradition by taking the full pharaonic titulary; this dynasty answered by reaching past every intervening period — past the Kushites, past the fragmented kinglets before them, past the New and Middle Kingdoms both — to the one era universally agreed to be Egyptian kingship at its most authentically itself.

Whether the resulting art and religion should be judged as a hollow revival or a genuine act of cultural recovery is a matter later scholarship has argued both ways. What is not in dispute is the scale of the ambition: a dynasty with the shallowest claim to legitimacy of almost any so far in this valley's recorded history chose to anchor itself in the deepest past still available to be read.

The sun on the wrong side

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Necho II, Psamtik's grandson, pursued two projects that together say more about how this dynasty understood Egypt's place in the world than any battle it fought. Both involved water going somewhere no earlier Egyptian king had tried to send it.

A canal toward the Red Sea

Necho began cutting a canal linking the Nile, through the Wadi Tumilat, to the Red Sea — a route that would let a ship sail from the Mediterranean to the Arabian and East African trade without going overland at all. Ancient sources differ on whether he finished it in his own reign or abandoned the project unfinished on a priestly warning that it would benefit foreigners more than Egypt; the route was certainly usable within a century, since the Persian king Darius I later completed or restored a working version of it and commemorated the fact on stelae along its banks. Either way, the ambition itself — physically joining Egypt's two seas rather than treating the isthmus between them as a fixed boundary — belongs to Necho.

A voyage nobody in Egypt is recorded taking credit for

The second project is stranger and, on the evidence, real. According to Herodotus, Necho commissioned a Phoenician crew to sail from the Red Sea around the entire African continent and return to Egypt through the Mediterranean — a voyage the Greek historian reports took three years, with the sailors putting ashore twice to sow and harvest grain before continuing.

Herodotus himself did not believe the sailors' most specific claim: that partway through the voyage, the sun stood on their right hand rather than their left. To a Mediterranean sailor, the sun stands to the north at midday, on the left if facing west — Herodotus records the detail specifically to dismiss it as beyond belief. He had the geography backward. South of the equator, at the relevant time of year, the noon sun genuinely appears in the northern sky, meaning it would fall on the right for a ship sailing west along Africa's southern coast — a fact no Mediterranean observer of the period had any way to know unless somebody had actually been there to see it. The detail Herodotus rejected as the least credible part of the story is, to a modern reader, the strongest evidence that the voyage happened.

What the two projects share

Neither the canal nor the circumnavigation added an acre of territory to Egypt. Both were investments in movement itself — in what could reach Egypt, and what Egypt could reach — from a king whose own dynasty had come to power a hired fleet at a time and clearly never stopped thinking about what the sea could still deliver.

When king Psammetichus came

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

In 592, Psamtik II sent an army south into Nubia, deep enough to threaten the old Kushite heartland around Napata itself — a strike, most likely, against a dynasty that had ruled Egypt within living memory and had never stopped using the full pharaonic titulary from its own new capital further south. The campaign's official record is unremarkable as these things go. What survives beside it is not.

Soldiers who could write

On the leg of one of the colossal seated statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel — already thirteen centuries old when this happened — a group of Greek and Carian mercenaries serving in Psamtik's army carved a message in their own alphabet, hacked into the stone with an axe rather than professionally cut. It reads, in translation:

When king Psammetichus came to Elephantine, this was written by those who sailed with Psammetichus the son of Theocles, and they came beyond Kerkis as far as the river permits. Those who spoke a foreign tongue were led by Potasimto, the Egyptians by Amasis.

Two of the men who carved it signed their own names beside it.

What five lines happen to prove

Nobody commissioned this text. It is not a royal monument, follows no temple's decorum, and was carved by soldiers for reasons that can only be guessed at — pride, boredom, or the same impulse that puts a name on any wall a traveller expects never to see again. Its value has nothing to do with what it says about the campaign, which the official record covers adequately on its own, and everything to do with what it proves by simply existing: foreign mercenaries serving this dynasty could read and write their own language, expected other literate people to encounter what they wrote, and travelled far enough up the Nile to leave it a thousand kilometres from the Mediterranean coast they had presumably arrived from.

It is also, by a wide margin, among the earliest substantial pieces of Greek writing found anywhere outside the Aegean world — a language with no business at Abu Simbel at all, standing on a monument older than anyone who carved it could have reckoned, put there by men whose employer this dynasty's own reunification had depended on from its very first generation.

The army that would not fight its own

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The mercenary establishment that had made this dynasty possible from Psamtik I's own first campaign eventually broke it. Apries, ruling by the 570s, kept a standing force of Greek soldiers close to the throne in numbers and favour that native Egyptian troops had come to resent — resent enough that when a Libyan expedition under Egyptian command failed badly, the surviving soldiers blamed the king for having sent them under-supported while keeping his foreign guard back in comfort at home.

A mutiny that chose its own general

Apries sent a trusted officer, Amasis, to put the mutineers down. Amasis instead let himself be acclaimed king by the men he had been sent to suppress — not staging a coup so much as recognising an army already in open revolt and stepping in front of it. Apries, left with his mercenary guard and whatever native troops still held to him, marched against his own former subjects and lost. He held on for several more years as a diminished rival monarch, apparently with Babylonian backing at one point, before dying in a final confrontation Amasis is reported to have granted him a royal burial after.

What the mutiny actually exposed

The tension the mutiny brought into the open had been present since Psamtik I first hired Ionian and Carian bronze men against his own Delta rivals: an army split between soldiers who owed the dynasty their personal loyalty because it paid and equipped them directly, and soldiers who belonged to the country the dynasty ruled and increasingly felt like the lesser-favoured half of its own defence. Amasis did not resolve that split so much as become its beneficiary — a native commander raised up specifically because native troops would follow him against a king who had stopped trusting them with anything that mattered.

He went on to reign forty-four years, the longest and by most accounts the most stable of the dynasty, presiding over expanded trade with Greek merchants at Naucratis even as the resentment his own rise had ridden never fully vanished from how Egyptian and mercenary forces related to one another for the rest of the century.

Six months on the throne

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Amasis died in his own bed in 526, still king after forty-four years, and was succeeded by his son Psamtik III without incident — the dynasty's most ordinary transfer of power in over a century, and its last. The Persian king Cambyses was already marching on Egypt when Amasis died, and Psamtik inherited a war rather than a kingdom at peace.

A defection before a single battle

Herodotus attributes part of what followed to Phanes of Halicarnassus, a Greek commander formerly in Egyptian service who defected to Cambyses and briefed him on how to cross the waterless approach to Egypt's eastern frontier — securing safe passage and water for the Persian army through an Arabian intermediary before the campaign had reached Egyptian territory at all. Whatever the exact truth of Phanes' role, the desert crossing that had turned back or worn down every earlier invader approaching Egypt from the east cost Cambyses nothing.

Pelusium

The armies met at Pelusium, on the coast at Egypt's eastern edge, in the spring of 525. The Egyptian line — Psamtik's mixed force of native troops and the same Greek and Carian mercenary establishment this dynasty had depended on since Psamtik I's own reign — was broken. What was left of the army fell back on Memphis, which Cambyses then besieged and took.

What ended and what did not

Psamtik III was captured, treated for a time as a Persian prisoner with some ceremony, and executed some months later after apparently being implicated in a plot to raise a revolt. Egypt was made a Persian province — the twenty-seventh dynasty, in the traditional Egyptian king-list convention, though the throne that dynasty inherited had nothing Egyptian about the family holding it.

What the conquest did not do was end Egyptian kingship as an institution the country's own elite still understood and, eventually, reasserted: Cambyses' own successors would rule Egypt for a century as pharaohs in the full Egyptian style, and Egypt itself would throw off Persian rule entirely within another century and a half, showing that the office this dynasty had spent a hundred and forty years rebuilding out of two- thousand-year-old fragments had outlasted the family that rebuilt it.