The Historians' History of the World 02

But it was impossible to withstand the hatred of his subjects, and it compassed his ruin. Cyrus dead, Aahmes resigned himself to war. There was no lack of serious counts against him: he had made an alliance with Lydia; he had intrigued with Chaldea; and Cambyses, being young, was more disposed to excite than to calm the warlike spirit of his compatriots. According to the Persians, Cambyses asked the daughter of the old king in marriage, hoping that his refusal would furnish him with an insult to avenge. But Aahmes substituted Nitetis the daughter of Uah-ab-Ra for his own daughter. Sometime afterwards, when Cambyses was with her, he called her by the name of her pretended father; whereupon she said: “I see, O king! that thou dost not suspect how thou hast been deceived by Amasis [Aahmes]; he took me, loaded me with jewels, and sent me to thee as his own daughter. It is true I am the child of Apries [Uah-ab-Ra] who was his lord and master, until he rebelled and was put to death with the other Egyptians.” The anger of Cambyses, son of Cyrus, was thus roused, and he took up arms against Egypt.

In Egypt the story was different: Nitetis was sent to Cyrus, and she was the mother of Cambyses, and the conquest was only the re-establishment of the legitimate family against the usurper Aahmes; and thus Cambyses ascended the throne, less in the character of a conqueror, than in that of Uah-ab-Ra’s grandson. It was by an equally puerile fiction that the Egyptians in their decadence consoled themselves for their weakness and disgrace. Always proud of their past glory, but henceforth powerless to conquer, they pretended that they were only vanquished and governed by themselves. It was not Persia that imposed her king upon Egypt, but Egypt who loaned hers to Persia and thence to the rest of the world. The desert and marshes formed a perfect bulwark for the Delta against the attacks of the Asiatic princes. There were ninety leagues of distance, which no army could traverse in less than three weeks, between the last important garrison of Syria and Lake Serbon, where the Egyptian outposts were encamped. In times past the stretch of desert was less, but the incursions of the Assyrians and Chaldeans had depopulated the country and given over to the nomadic Arabs regions which had been formerly quite accessible. An unforeseen event, however, showed Cambyses a way out of the difficulty. Phanes of Halicarnassus, one of the generals of Aahmes, deserted, and fled to Persia. He was a man of judgment and energy, and fully acquainted with Egypt. He advised the king to make friends with the sheikh who governed the coast, and get a passport from him; so the Arab had camels, loaded with sufficient water for the whole army, stationed all along the road.

[525-523 B.C.]

On arriving at Pelusium, the Persians learned that Aahmes was dead, and that he had been murdered by Psamthek III. In spite of their confidence in their gods and themselves, the Egyptians now began to be alarmed. They were not only threatened by the nations of the Tigris and Euphrates, but the whole of Asia and the Hellespont also seemed ready to invade them. The allies upon whom Aahmes had counted, such as Polycrates of Samos, and old subjects like those of Cyprus, had abandoned his cause, which now seemed hopeless, and supplied the Persians with forces. The people, consumed with fear of the invader, regarded the slightest phenomenon of nature as a bad sign. Rain is rare in the Thebaïd, and storms rarely come more than once or twice in a century; so, as some days after the accession of Psamthek, “rain fell in torrents at Thebes, which was a rare event, the battle before Pelusium was fought with the bravery of despair.”