полная версия

Duncker Max
The History of Antiquity, Vol. 3 (of 6)

In a reign of forty-three years, of which the first three decades, though not each year of them, were occupied by the Egyptian, Arabian, and Syrian wars, Nebuchadnezzar succeeded in restoring almost entirely the buildings of the old kings of Babylon, the ancient temples of the land. In Babylon he completed the great temple of Merodach, and built temples there to Bilit, Nebo, Sin, Bin, and Nana. Four cylinders concur in mentioning that he also built a temple there to the goddess Zarpanit.⁷²⁵ He adorned the temples of Babylon, as Berosus tells us, and the inscriptions confirm his account, in a costly manner with the booty of his victories.⁷²⁶ It is certainly no exaggeration if the Hebrews speak of Babylon as "the beauty of the kingdoms, the pride and glory of the Chaldæans."⁷²⁷ From the temple tower of Merodach now completed, the lofty signal of the city, the eye must have ranged far over the surrounding walls to the palm groves,⁷²⁸ the canals and corn-fields. From the towers of the new citadel, the terrace of the hanging gardens, it must have been possible to survey the city with all its temples, the broad mirror of the Euphrates, the busy life in the streets and on the bridge. Here, without doubt, Nebuchadnezzar might have uttered the saying which a Hebrew puts in his mouth: "This is Babylon the great, which I have built for myself as a royal habitation, as a sign of my glory."

It was not the metropolis only which was restored and exalted to greater splendour than before; the rest of the cities were not forgotten. At Borsippa Nebuchadnezzar completed the great temple of Nebo, restored and completed the temple of the seven planets (of Birs Nimrud), and also built temples to Nana and Bin. At Sippara he built a temple to the gods Samas and Bin; the same gods, as he assures us, received a temple at Senkereh; and this is confirmed by a cylinder discovered there: he restored the temple of the moon-god at Ur, as he tells us, and the bricks of Ur confirm his statement;⁷²⁹ Istar of Erech received back her treasures, and the god Anu received a temple at Nipur. More extensive than the temples are the works of fortification which he erected on a magnificent and well-considered system, the Median wall, and the walls of Babylon itself. We saw how closely these fortifications were connected with his great hydraulic works for the regulation of the inundation, for the connection of the Euphrates and the Tigris, for the drainage of the land at the mouth of the Euphrates. The same care which he showed in these connections by water, and in planting those harbours on the Persian Gulf, for the advancement of trade and intercourse, he also showed in making roads by land. He laid almost indestructible foundations for the agriculture of Babylonia, the welfare of the native land. After a triple subjection of Babylonia the Achæmenid kings could still collect 1000 talents (more than £300,000) in land-tax from the country; and impose on it for four months in the year the maintenance of the king's table in addition to the support of the satrap, his court, his officers, and the garrisons. The value of the products required each day for this table was rated at from 30 to 40 talents. The Babylonians preserved the most grateful memory of Nebuchadnezzar. Even after the fall of the kingdom the recurrence of his name was enough to bring them twice into arms against the Persian dominion.

The buildings begun by Nebuchadnezzar were not all finished when he died, in the year 561 B.C. None of his successors came near him in military skill, in circumspection and enterprise. The active acquisition and fortification of the empire were followed by supine enjoyment. This was quickly succeeded by neglect of government and obedience, conspiracies of relations and court officers. Evilmerodach, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, reigned, according to Berosus, with caprice and want of intelligence.⁷³⁰ Towards Jechoniah of Judah, the son of Josiah, whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried captive thirty-six years previously to Babylon – he had only sat on the throne three months – Evilmerodach showed kindness. He released him from his long imprisonment, invited him to his table, and treated him like the other conquered princes, for whom Babylon was a compulsory place of residence.⁷³¹ After a reign of two years the son of the great king came to an end by assassination. It was the husband of his sister, his brother-in-law, Neriglissar, who removed him out of his way (559 B.C.). In the buttresses on the Euphrates at Babylon we find bricks which show that walls on the river commenced by Nabopolassar, and continued but not completed by Nebuchadnezzar, were carried on by Neriglissar. The stamp of the bricks runs thus: "Neriglissar, king of Babylon, maintainer of Bit Saggatu and Bit Zida."⁷³² On a cylinder found at Babylon, Neriglissar calls himself son of Bel-labar-iskun, and speaks of his buildings at Bit Saggatu, of a water-basin "of the rising sun," of the erection of moats round the royal citadel.⁷³³ Neriglissar died after sitting on the throne for four years: the son whom he left behind, Labaessoarach by name, was still a boy. But the great kingdom of the Medes had already succumbed to the Persians, and Babylonia was in need of a man. The chiefs of the court conspired together; Labaessoarach was murdered after bearing the title of king for nine months; and the throne was conferred by the common resolution of the conspirators on one of themselves, by name Nabonetus (555 B.C.).⁷³⁴

Berosus tells us that Nabonetus (Nabunahid) built the walls of Babylon on the river of burnt bricks and bitumen. A number of these bricks, found in the remains of the bulwarks, confirm the statement: Nabonetus as a fact completed the walls of the river. Red or gray, and entirely covered with bitumen, they display the stamp: "Nabunahid, king of Babylon, maintainer of Bit Saggatu, and Bit Zida, worshipper of Nebo, son of Nabubalatirib."⁷³⁵ Nabonetus did not only build at Babylon; bricks at Senkereh and Ur prove that there also he continued the buildings of Nebuchadnezzar.⁷³⁶ On an injured cylinder, discovered at Ur (Mugheir) he tells us that Nebuchadnezzar had begun to erect there the temple of Samas and Sin, his lords; that he, Nabonetus, completed the work.⁷³⁷ We are acquainted with the heaps of this temple in the north-west of the ruins (I. 289). The tiles of the lower story bear the stamp of Urukh, those of the upper the stamp of his son Dungi; others show the stamp of Ismidagon, king of Ur, and Kurigalzu of Babylon, who restored this temple at the end of the fifteenth century.⁷³⁸ On four clay cylinders found in these ruins, which repeat the same inscription, Nabonetus tells us that the building of the ancient kings, Urukh and Dungi, in honour of the great goddess (of Ur), lay in ruins. This temple he restored on the old foundations, as it had been before, in bricks and bitumen. He had completed this structure in honour of the god Sin; might the god grant continuance to his work. At the same time he entreats Sin to implant reverence for his great divinity in the heart of his first-born son, Bel-sar-ussur (Belshazzar).⁷³⁹ Beyond this we only know of Nabonetus that in the year 551 B.C. he made Hiram, of the race of Ethbaal, whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried to Babylonia after the blockade of Tyre, king of that city, and sent him there.⁷⁴⁰ The most difficult of all tasks was already awaiting Nabonetus: he had to meet the storm which convulsed Asia. Nebuchadnezzar had been ever intent on making the power of his kingdom equal to the power of the Medes. Media and Lydia too were now subject to Cyrus. A mightier power than Nebuchadnezzar had ever looked forward to had set foot in Babylonia, in the East, the North, and the West.

"By the waters of Babylon sat" the Jews whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried from their homes. They were men of distinction, the first in rank and culture, and the priests: it was the intellectual nucleus of the people that had been transplanted to Babylonia. The danger that this nucleus, in despair of the protection of their own god, should turn to the gods of the conquerors as being more mighty, was not great. Jehovah was no longer merely the tribal God of Israel, who had been unable to protect his tribe against all other nations: the prophets had announced him as the Almighty God of the world, who ruled over the kingdoms of the earth, who would raise up and throw down at his pleasure, who exercises justice. Moreover, the captives possessed in the Book of the Law (Deuteronomy) a plain rule of life, which had been wanting to the Israelites when transplanted by the Assyrian kings. Among them were earnest spirits and mighty hearts, who preserved their courage and hope unbroken. Opportunities for these qualities were not wanting in their dealings with their countrymen, for the exiles in their differences with each other repaired much more readily to their own countrymen who were skilled in the law, than to the magistrates of the Babylonians. Among those who were first carried away in the year 597 B.C. (p. 332), was the priest Ezekiel, who had his dwelling on the Chaboras, in Mesopotamia. The rulers often came to consult Ezekiel, and the elders gathered in his house, "that he might ask Jehovah for them."⁷⁴¹ His announcements are strongly coloured by the priestly point of view on which he takes his stand. He maintains strictly the rubrics and customs of worship, the correct offering of sacrifice. It is a comfort to him in his sorrow to imagine, in minute detail, how the temple is to be restored with all its buildings, the land divided among the tribes, what was to be allotted to the priests, and what duties would devolve upon them, if Jehovah should restore Israel again out of the captivity.⁷⁴² Hence with the firmer conviction could Ezekiel say to his people, that they were a people of "an impudent face and hardened heart,"⁷⁴³ but that Jehovah had no pleasure in the death of the evil-doer, but only in his conversion and improvement;⁷⁴⁴ that Jehovah would assemble them out of the lands into which they were scattered. "I will bring you," so Jehovah speaks in Ezekiel, "into the wilderness of the nations; and there will I plead with you face to face, as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the land of Egypt. I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the bond of the covenant. And I will purge out from among you the rebels and them that transgress against me. They shall not return to Israel. I will sprinkle pure water over you that ye may be clean. I will put a new heart and a new spirit within you, and will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and give you a heart of flesh out of my spirit, that ye may walk in my statutes and keep my ordinances. Then shall ye loathe yourselves for the evils which ye have committed in all your abominations; and the ruins of the cities shall be built up and inhabited, and the wilderness shall be as the garden of Eden. Israel and Judah shall no more be two nations; they shall both be my people, and I will be their God, and my servant David shall be king over them, their only shepherd. I will conclude with them an eternal covenant of peace, and establish them in the land wherein their fathers dwelt, and multiply them, and let my sanctuary and my dwelling be for ever among them."

Prophecies uttered with such conviction and certainty, supported and strengthened the hope of the people in the coming restoration of the kingdom. It was possible by the help of Jehovah. It might be expected all the sooner, the more zealously and heartily the exiles worshipped Jehovah. The more melancholy the present state of affairs, the greater was the yearning with which the eye was directed upwards. Under their foreign rulers the Jews became accustomed more and more to think of Jehovah as the one and only king of Judah who would rescue his faithful people out of their slavery in Babylon, even as he had once led them forth with a strong hand and an outstretched arm out of Egypt. In the strange land and among strangers, where the Jews were kept together by nothing more than their common religion, where besides their religion nothing was left to them, adherence to the old faith struck deeper roots, and the increasing strength of religious conviction saved the nationality.

CHAPTER XVI.
EGYPT UNDER THE LAST PHARAOHS

Necho's views for subjugating Syria to his dominion, and renewing the campaigns of the ancient Pharaohs to the Euphrates, were wrecked after some successes. The day of Karchemish, which he lost to the Babylonians, carried with it the loss of the conquests in Syria, with perhaps the exception of Gaza and one or two other places of the Philistines. Necho might count himself fortunate that Nebuchadnezzar remained within Syria. His attempt to support the rebellion of Judah against Babylon, which king Jehoiakim ventured upon in the year 597 B.C., miscarried, as we saw above (p. 331). Nebuchadnezzar now took all as far as the brook of Egypt. Necho's son, Psammetichus II., who succeeded his father in the year 595 B.C., took no steps to hinder the fall of the Phenician cities, which were subjugated by Nebuchadnezzar in the year 593 B.C. Of Psammetichus' short reign – it lasted only six years – Herodotus merely tells us that he undertook a campaign against the Ethiopians, and died immediately after it. From this statement we must conclude that since the time of Psammetichus I. and the emigration of a part of the warrior caste, Egypt had been in strained relations with the kingdom of Napata, and the successors of Urdamane. From the words of Herodotus it would seem that Psammetichus made an unprovoked attack on Ethiopia; but of the success of the undertaking we know nothing. From some words which Greek mercenaries of Pharaoh have left behind them, and the place where they were written, it would seem to have been the intention of Psammetichus to win back for Egypt lower Nubia, which, as we have seen, had for centuries been a province of Egypt.

We know the colossi which Ramses II. caused to be hewn out of the rocks before the entrance of the temple which he excavated at Abu Simbel.⁷⁴⁵ On the left thigh of the second colossus from the south some Greeks, Ionians, and Dorians, have cut the following words in Ionic letters: "When Psammetichus came to Elephantine, those who came by vessel with Psammetichus, the son of Theocles, wrote this inscription. They came up above Kerkis, as far as the river permitted. The foreigner Dechepotasimto, the Egyptian Amasis. But Archon, the son of Amœbichus, and Pelecus, the son of Udames, wrote me." Others of the mercenaries, who were acquainted with the art of writing, have also inscribed their names there; we find a Helesibius of Teos, a Telephus of Ialysus, a brother of Archon, Python the son of Amœbichus, and three others. The Phenician mercenaries were not either now or later behind the Greeks: Phenician inscriptions are inscribed beside the Greek.⁷⁴⁶ Those of the Greeks prove that Psammetichus had encamped with his army at Elephantine, that he had sent a part of it up the Nile with a Greek, the son of Theocles, who had already got an Egyptian name, Psammetichus – (which he must, therefore, have obtained under the reign of Psammetichus I.). His object was certainly not to obtain information about the land and the river, which was well enough known to the Egyptians as far as Napata and above it. But it might very well be necessary to ascertain the views and powers of the opponent in Napata. Among the names in the inscription first mentioned the name of the "foreigner Dechepotasimto" – a name which no doubt belonged to an Ethiopian – and the name of the Egyptian Amasis prove that Egyptians and Ethiopians acquainted with the land and the river were in the division of the son of Theocles. How far to the south this division penetrated, we cannot determine, for the place Kerkis, beyond which it passed, is not mentioned elsewhere. On the return the detachment encamped to the north of the falls of Wadi Halfa at Abu Simbel, and those among the Greeks who knew how to write and wished to do so made use of their stay to perpetuate in this manner their journey and their presence in this distant region. Nothing is said of their collision with the Ethiopians; it appears that the ruler of Napata had then abandoned lower Nubia to the Egyptians. If this reconnoitering of the enemy by the detachment of Theocles took place on the campaign of Psammetichus against Ethiopia, of which Herodotus speaks, we must place it in the year 590 B.C., for Psammetichus II. died "immediately after," in the next year.⁷⁴⁷ Nothing is left of the monuments of Psammetichus II.; we merely find his name-shield on the rocks of the islands of Elephantine and Konosso; they may arise from the time when the king was staying there, and had his head-quarters at Elephantine, as the Greeks showed us. We are also told by the sarcophagus of an Apis, buried under the successor of Psammetichus, that this bull was brought into the temple of Ptah in the first year of the reign of Psammetichus II.⁷⁴⁸

In spite of the double subjugation (600 and 597 B.C.), Judah remained in ferment and bitterness against the dominion of Babylon. The accession of Hophrah, the son of Psammetichus II. (Apries of the Greeks, Uahabra of the inscriptions), aroused in Jerusalem, as we saw, the hope of shaking off the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar with the aid of Egypt. According to the statements in the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which are confirmed by the course of events in Syria, Hophrah must have promised assistance to Zedekiah, king of Judah. The Jews rebelled; but before the Egyptians were ready, Nebuchadnezzar had already invested the fortified cities of Judah, together with the metropolis (588 B.C.). In the next year Hophrah's army marched to the relief of Jerusalem, which held out stubbornly. Nebuchadnezzar raised the siege, in order to meet the Egyptians with the united force of his army. He compelled the Egyptians to retire. After a renewed investment and furious attack, Jerusalem fell (p. 343).

After the fall of Jerusalem, as remarked above, the prophets of the Jews expected that Egypt would be attacked by Nebuchadnezzar and subjugated. From the Chaboras Ezekiel announced to the dwellers on the Nile the bloody vengeance and punishment awaiting them because they had been a staff of reed for Israel; and Jeremiah, who had been carried to Egypt a few months after the fall of Jerusalem by the Jews who took to flight in consequence of the assassination of the viceroy of Nebuchadnezzar, and had there found a welcome and protection together with the rest, announced at Daphne, on Egyptian soil, to Hophrah and the Egyptians, their destruction by the sword of Nebuchadnezzar; he saw the king of Babylon already enthroned on his carpet at Daphne. But Nebuchadnezzar contented himself with maintaining and fortifying still further his dominion over Syria. He followed up the capture of Jerusalem with the long investment and siege of Tyre. When Tyre finally submitted (573 B.C.), Ezekiel again saw Nebuchadnezzar's army invading Egypt. In reference to the long siege of Tyre, and the fact that it ended not in the storming and plundering of the city, but in coming to terms, Ezekiel says: "Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, caused his army to serve a great service against Tyre: every head was made bald, and every shoulder was peeled; yet he had no wages, nor his army, from Tyre. Now will I give to Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, the land of Egypt, and he shall take her multitude and take her spoil and take her prey, and it shall be the wages for his army. I will give him the land of Egypt for his reward, saith Jehovah. The king and his people, and with him the mightiest of the nations, shall be led forth for the desolation of Egypt. They shall draw their sword against Egypt and fill the land with slain. The pride of Egypt shall come down; from Migdol to Syene they shall fall by the sword; and in the same day messengers shall go forth in ships to make the careless Ethiopia afraid. I will make the canals dry. I will destroy the idols, and cause the images to cease out of Noph (Memphis). I will make Patrus (upper Egypt) desolate, and will set fire to Zoan (Tanis), and will execute judgments in No (Thebes). I will pour my fury upon Sin (Pelusium), the strength of Egypt, and will cut off the multitude of No. I will set fire in Egypt; Sin shall have great pain, and No shall be rent asunder. The young men of On (Heliopolis) and Bubastis shall fall by the sword, and at Tachpanhes (Daphne) the day shall be darkened."⁷⁴⁹ But even after the subjugation of Tyre, Nebuchadnezzar did not pass beyond Syria.

Herodotus tells us that Hophrah marched out against Sidon, and fought a battle by sea with the king of Tyre. Of the results of this battle Herodotus says nothing: he only remarks that after his great-grandfather Psammetichus, Hophrah was the most successful of this family. Diodorus narrates: Hophrah attacked Cyprus and Phœnicia with a well-appointed army by land and sea; took the city of Sidon by storm, and the rest of Phenician cities by the terror of his name; conquered the Phenicians and Cyprians in a great battle by sea, and then returned to Egypt with great spoil.⁷⁵⁰ These accounts are very extraordinary. In the year 593 B.C., Tyre and Sidon had striven with the Ammonites and Moabites against Nebuchadnezzar; they were defeated. Then, as has been already shown, Nebuchadnezzar blockaded Tyre from 586 B.C. to 573 B.C. We saw that Hophrah opposed Nebuchadnezzar in the years of the Jewish war, i. e. from his accession till the fall of Jerusalem (589-586 B.C.). If during this period, or subsequently, when Nebuchadnezzar was blockading Tyre, he had made war upon Sidon and Tyre, and the other cities of the Phenicians, he would have worked for Nebuchadnezzar; whereas, on the contrary, he must have regarded it as of the first importance that the last independent city of Syria, Tyre, should not be reduced. He must do for Tyre what he had done for Jerusalem, and for that city also he must venture on war with Nebuchadnezzar. Hence Hophrah can only have carried on war against the Phenician cities in the three last years of his reign (between 573 and 570 B.C.), and this again is only conceivable under the hypothesis that Hophrah set out with the Egyptian fleet against Cyprus, which Diodorus regards as the object of the campaign, in order to prevent this island as well as Tyre from becoming subject to Nebuchadnezzar – in order to obtain in this island a counterpoise to the incorporation of Syria and the Phenician cities in the Babylonian kingdom. The war with Tyre and Sidon would then have broken out because Sidon wished to prevent the island from passing under the dominion of Egypt. But if Hophrah, as Diodorus states, had taken the cities of the Phenicians, he must have taken them from Nebuchadnezzar, which seems highly improbable. If Hophrah wished to take them from Nebuchadnezzar, he could not be guilty of greater folly than to wait thirteen years, till the submission of Tyre, in order to attack the city when it had fallen, and Nebuchadnezzar had established a firm foot on the coasts of Syria. If he wished to liberate the cities from Babylon, they would have been eager, so far as lay in their power, to receive the Egyptian garrisons; we must then suppose that in their anxiety not to lose their trade with the lands of the Euphrates, they had now vigorously repelled the Egyptians. But if this be so, how are we to explain their earlier resistance, and the thirteen years' struggle of Tyre against Babylon? As already remarked, Herodotus tells us nothing of any successes which Hophrah gained against Tyre and Sidon; in Diodorus the campaign of Hophrah is primarily directed against Cyprus, then against Sidon and the other cities. Hophrah returns home laden with booty; but of permanent successes even Diodorus says nothing. Herodotus, on the contrary, remarks that the successor of Hophrah was the first conqueror of Cyprus; and in Diodorus it is the successor of Hophrah who conquers Cyprus. Besides, after Hophrah's time we find Babylonia still in possession of the supremacy over Tyre (p. 394). It is obviously statements of the Egyptians about the achievements of Hophrah on the coast of Syria, which Herodotus and Diodorus hand down to us: we know the style of the Egyptian accounts of victory; but even according to these, as repeated in Diodorus, there was nothing more than a plundering raid.⁷⁵¹

The power of Babylon over Syria could not now be shaken. Egypt must be content to be free from attacks. But in the West, in Libya, there was a better prospect of success than against Babylon. Some 60 years previously Greek settlers had built the city of Cyrene, to the east of the great Syrtis, and the flourishing condition of this city was hardly contemplated with satisfaction in Egypt. Its importance was increased by a great number of new settlers, whom Battus III. had summoned to Cyrene; and to maintain these a considerable portion of land had been taken from the neighbouring Libyans. Adikran, the prince of these tribes, summoned Hophrah to his assistance against the Cyrenæans; for this protection he was prepared to recognise the supremacy of Egypt. Hophrah sent a strong army against Cyrene. But the Cyrenæans succeeded in defeating it at the fountain of Theste, and in inflicting a severe blow on the Egyptians (571 B.C.). This disaster caused a new outbreak of ill-feeling on the part of the Egyptian military caste against the Ionian mercenaries. As these, on whom devolved the protection of the eastern border against the Babylonians, had been left behind, the Egyptian warriors thought that the Pharaoh had purposely sent them to their destruction. On their return the remnant of the army rebelled against the Pharaoh; Hophrah sent Amasis to bring back the troops to obedience.⁷⁵²

Amasis of Siuph in the canton of Sais was of humble origin, a man of loose morals, who loved wine, and the pleasures of the table, merriment and riotous living, but still possessed intelligence and ambition. Instead of bringing back the rebellious troops to obedience, he allowed himself when he arrived in the camp to be saluted by them as king. Hearing of this, Pharaoh Hophrah put himself at the head of the Ionians and Carians – they were 30,000 in number – and went to meet the rebels, who had already reached the borders of Egypt. In spite of the bravest efforts the Ionians and Carians were defeated by the Egyptians at Momemphis, as Herodotus states, or as Diodorus tells us, at Marea, on the south-western shore of Lake Mareotis. Hophrah himself was taken prisoner. Amasis intended to spare him. He brought him to Sais, and there put him in prison in the citadel which his forefather Psammetichus had built. But afterwards Amasis yielded to the request of the people, and gave up Hophrah to the mob who put him to death (570 B.C.).⁷⁵³

Thus ended the race of Psammetichus in Egypt; in the same region where his great-grandfather is said to have obtained the liberation of Egypt and the throne, Hophrah had lost it. Since the times of the Ramessids, the Pharaohs of Tanis and Bubastis had no longer sought their sepulchres at Thebes: the family of Psammetichus had prepared a sepulchre at Sais where his citadel stood. It was situated at the temple of Neith the goddess of Sais, at the tomb of Osiris, where the Saites kept the funeral festival of the god: here also was Hophrah's body buried.⁷⁵⁴

Amasis (Ahmes) was raised to the throne by the Egyptians against the Greeks, to break down the influence and favoured position of the foreigners. His victory over the Ionians had brought him to the throne. As soon as he had gained it, he returned back to the system which Psammetichus and his successors had followed, and established it yet more firmly. He made ancient Egypt an Egypto-Grecian state. His first care was to conclude peace and alliance with the Cyrenæans. To king Battus III. of Cyrene he sent a gilded image of the goddess of Sais and his own portrait. He took to wife a woman of the house of Battus, by name Laodice. The Ionians and Carians conquered by him he removed from the eastern border, from the Pelusiac arm of the Nile, into the interior to Memphis. They were no longer to protect the border of Egypt which was most threatened, but the person of the king. He made them his bodyguard.⁷⁵⁵ The Greek merchants he allowed to live at Naucratis under their own overseers and their own system of justice. The settlers came in greater numbers than ever. Greek Hetæræe followed trade into the distant land and accumulated treasures in Egypt.⁷⁵⁶ The Greeks were even allowed to erect altars and temples in the country; the king himself provided the necessary sites; a proceeding which must have filled with horror and dismay the priests of the land, and all Egyptians of the old way of thinking. Hence the four Ionian cities, Chios, Teos, Clazomenæ, Phocæa; and the four Dorian, Cnidus, Rhodes, Halicarnassus, Phaselis, and the Æolian Mytilene, built a common shrine for their deities at Naucratis. Miletus erected a special temple to her deity Apollo. Samos and Ægina also built special temples. Amasis went still further: he honoured the Greek gods by dedicatory gifts. Two statues of stone, portraits of himself, and a wonderful corslet, as Herodotus assures us, he dedicated at Cnidus in the temple of Athene; and when the Delphians made a collection among the settlers in Egypt in aid of their temple which had been burnt down, Amasis also sent them a contribution.⁷⁵⁷

If Amasis allowed such advantages to the Greeks, he also knew how to reckon with the old Egyptian feeling. Besides two Greek women, Laodice and Sebaste, he took to wife two Egyptians, of whom one was the daughter of Psammetichus II. The monuments of Egypt give us their names, Tentchet and Anchnas. The latter we see represented at Selsilis, beside Amasis, pouring libations to Ammon, Mut, and Chons; her sarcophagus is in existence: Tentchet is mentioned by the successor of Amasis on a monument as his mother; she must therefore have been the sister of Hophrah, the daughter of Psammetichus II.⁷⁵⁸ By this union Amasis sought to legitimize his dominion and to connect himself with the race of Psammetichus: and with this view he also gave to the son whom Tentchet bore him the name of his grandfather, Psammetichus. Thus his rule seemed to be only the continuation of the dominion of the descendants of the liberator of the house of Sais.