ern mouth of the Nile, it was his son, PSAMMETIK III. (more frequently called PSAMMENIT by the Greeks), whom they encountered. There was one battle, near PELUSION, and it was final. Psammetik at once retreated to Memphis with the bulk of his army, intending to make a stand in this the holiest and most ancient city of the monarchy. Pelusion was held for a short time by another detachment, but was unable to resist the pressure of army and fleet combined. The surrender of this fortress opened Egypt to the invader; his ships now sailed up the Nile and reached Memphis before the land army, to which they afforded a most welcome and necessary support, since the Nile had to be crossed before the capital could be attacked. It would seem that the city did not offer much resistance. The citadel, indeed, with its garrison commanded by the king, did well and bravely, but was overpowered by numbers and forced to surrender. The noblest of the land fell as captives into the hands of the conqueror, and Psammetik was of the number. This virtually ended the war, and the whole country submitted almost with alacrity. An Egyptian inscription has been found which says: "When the great king, the lord of the world, Kambathet (Kambyses), came up against Egypt, all the nations of the world were with him. He made himself master of the whole land, and bade them sit down there." It may be doubted, however, whether the submission would have been as rapid and universal had the reigning house been more popular. It was not only that Amasis had been an usurper; he

was not the first; and usurpers, when they flatter the national tastes and prejudices, seldom find the people's hearts obdurate against them. But Amasis had been a friend of the Greeks, had admitted them. to settle in the country, and even enlisted a bodyguard of the hated and despised foreigners-all grievous sins in the eyes of the proud and bigoted Egyptians.

7. On finding himself thus almost unexpectedly master of so great a country, where every thing must have been bewilderingly strange to him and to his companions, Kambyses acted as became a son and pupil of the great Kyros, whose golden rule was: mild treatment to the vanquished, respect and toleration to their customs and religion. He treated the captive Psammetik kindly and honorably, and there was no question of sacking cities, plundering or desecrating temples, wasting plantations, and the like atrocities. The only act of severity which he enforced, was the execution of two thousand Egyptian youths, whose lives the Persians demanded, in reprisal for the massacre of the entire crew of the first ship that reached Memphis in advance of the fleet and found itself cut off from all assistance. The ordinary crew of a war-ship in those days consisted of about two hundred men, and there was nothing excessive, according to Oriental ideas, in inflicting a tenfold penalty; it was simply the fate of war. Otherwise nothing was changed or disturbed in laws, institutions, or the national life generally. The principal fortresses were garrisoned, and a Satrap appointed to maintain the peace and collect the tribute, that

was all. As to the Egyptian religion, its forms of worship must have been not only highly distasteful to a Mazdayasnian, but ludicrously absurd, especially the divine honors paid to so many animals, useful and noxious alike—the cat, the jackal, the crocodile, the ibis,—and the preservation, by means of embalming, of dead bodies, both of men and sacred animals. Yet he outwardly conformed to the religious customs of the people whose ruler he had become, and took pains to appear before them in every way as the Pharaoh, the successor of Pharaohs, and as such he is represented on a painting, kneeling in adoration before the Apis-Bull, the most sacred of all animals, reverenced as the living emblem of the One Supreme God himself. This painting still exists in one of the galleries which formed the catacombs or buryingplaces expressly constructed for the mummified remains of successive lines of Apis-Bulls through unnumbered centuries. The inscription informs us that the recently deceased Apis had been deposited in the resting-place prepared for him by the king Kambyses, while another inscription reports the birth of a new Apis, in the fifth year of Kambyses. The inscription quoted above (see p. 351), is a long one, engraved on the statue of an Egyptian, who held public offices under Amasis, Psammetik III., Kambyses, and Dareios, and speaks with great praiseof Kambyses' zeal in religious matters and his liberality to temples and their ministers. The stories, therefore, which Herodotus transmitted of the blasphemous and sacrilegious atrocities in which that king was said to have indulged, even to the desecra

tion of graves and the killing of the Apis-Bull with his own hand, may safely be set aside as later inventions prompted by spite against the conqueror and retailed to foreigners by ignorant or malicious guides. Greek travellers of Herodotus' time were the more likely to put faith in them, that they had themselves a mortal grudge against the Persians, and certain Persian customs must have struck them as iniquitous. Thus Herodotus is horrified at Kambyses wedding his two sisters, while we have seen that, according to the king's own religion, such unions. were meritorious acts enjoined by the highest authority.

But

8. The most natural course for Kambyses to pursue, the conquest of Egypt once achieved and established, would have been to depart to his own. lands, leaving behind governors and garrisons. he lingered on and on, evidently possessed with an invincible repugnance to return, evincing more and more signs of mental perturbation, and yielding to unprovoked fits of murderous temper which made him a terror to his nearest kinsmen and attendants. These fits became the more frequent and ungovernable that he indulged in excessive drinking—a vice not uncommon among the Persians. It is most probable that remorse for his brother's fate was at the bottom both of his reluctance to face his own people again and of his attacks of spleen. He sought occupation in further plans of conquest, intending to carry his arms into the heart of Libya and of Ethiopia. He also meditated an expedition against Carthage, which was to be reached by sea, along the