Four years after his coronation, Cambyses began the attack on Egypt. His navy began its journey down the coast, while the Persian army marched across the desert. Cambyses, accompanied by his spear-bearer Darius, was in the lead; Darius, part of his personal bodyguard, was the son of a Persian nobleman who was in command of the conquered area called Parthia, in the northeastern part of the empire.9
Amasis readied his own forces to meet the Persians. But he was over seventy and had already led a long and very busy life. Before Cambyses could arrive, Amasis died of old age.
This was a bit of very good luck for Cambyses, since the job of defending Egypt now fell on Amasis’s son, Psammetichus III, who was not a gifted general. Psammetichus III lined up his forces at the northeastern border of Egypt, centering his defense at the border fortress Pelusium, which had been built by Necho II to guard his canal. There was nothing wrong with this; but when the battle began to turn against the Egyptian forces, he pulled them back all the way to Memphis.
This gave the Persians almost free access to the waterways of the Delta and allowed them to besiege Memphis both by land and by sea. We have no details of the war that followed, but Psammetichus III was soon forced to surrender. He had been pharaoh of Egypt for less than a year.
Cambyses now styled himself pharaoh of Egypt, “King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Cambyses, beloved of the goddess Wajet”—this was the cobra-goddess of Lower Egypt whose likeness had appeared on the Red Crown, all the way back in the days of the unification.10 He also apparently ordered Amasis’s body exhumed and dismembered, but mummification had made it so tough that he had to resort to burning it instead.
Herodotus (who dislikes Cambyses) says that this was an act of gratuitous sacrilege. More likely, Cambyses was attempting to identify himself as the successor of the deposed Apries, and his desecration of Amasis’s corpse was his attempt to portray the old general as a usurper whose rule had been fortunately ended. He told the people of Egypt that he was the “beloved of Wajet,” and that he had come to liberate them: a now familiar strategy.
The “beloved of Wajet” didn’t spend long in his new country; Cambyses put a governor in charge of Egypt and headed back into his empire to take care of other business. But his tenure as Great King was a short one. Three years after the conquest of Egypt, eight years after the death of Cyrus, Cambyses’s reign ended suddenly and mysteriously.
Herodotus, who gives the most detailed account of Cambyses’s reign, seems to have gathered and repeated every single anti-Cambyses story ever told: if he is to be believed, Cambyses was a madman who randomly executed his officials when they crossed him, killed his brother, married two of his sisters and murdered one of them, and set off to conquer Ethiopia in a temper without bothering to pack any food for his men. Given that Cambyses had managed to march an entire army across the Arabian desert and safely into Egypt, this seems unlikely. Herodotus’s offhand remark that his sources for these stories are mostly Egyptian probably explains the hostility. Apparently Cambyses’s attempt to portray himself as liberator was less than successful; he was not a popular pharaoh.
But Cambyses did indeed die suddenly, oddly, and without heirs.
The oldest sources say that Cambyses, when he began the Egyptian campaign, left his household under the management of a man Herodotus calls Patizeithes. Cambyses took his younger brother Bardiya on campaign with him, but after the conquest sent him back to Persia to check on how things were going back in the capital.
Somewhere between Egypt and Persia, Bardiya disappeared.
It so happened that the steward, Patizeithes, had a younger brother named Smerdis who looked so much like Bardiya that the two could be mistaken for each other.176 This steward, receiving news by fast courier of Bardiya’s disappearance, realized that he could keep the news under wraps. He convinced his younger brother to pose as the missing prince, set him on the throne, and then sent out messengers proclaiming Bardiya, full royal son of Cyrus, king in place of Cambyses.
Cambyses was over in Syria, checking on the western reaches of his empire. According to Herodotus, when Cambyses heard that his throne had been stolen, he ran for his horse, vaulted on to it, and in the process knocked the scabbard off his sword and sliced himself in the thigh. The wound turned; three weeks later, the Great King was dead from gangrene.11
With Cambyses dead, the imposter managed to hold onto the Persian throne for seven months; long enough for Babylonian documents to date themselves by his accession year.12 During all this time, he escaped detection by never leaving the palace compound in Susa, or calling any of the Persian noblemen who had known the family well into his presence.
The charade could not go on forever, though, and soon more than one Persian aristocrat was asking why he was never called into the throne room. Among them was Othanes, an experienced soldier and the father of one of Cambyses’s wives; and also Darius, Cambyses’s spear-bearer during the conquest of Egypt, who had returned to Persia after the campaign to Egypt and was now in Susa (for some reason unknown).
All together, seven Persian lords agreed to mount an assassination attempt against the pretender and his older brother. Othanes seems to have been the leader of the conspiracy, but Darius offered to get the group of men, their weapons hidden beneath their robes, past the palace guards; he could, he pointed out, claim that he had just come from his father, governor of Parthia, with a message for the king.13
The plan worked until the seven were almost at the doors of the royal chambers, when the king’s eunuchs refused to let them in. Then they drew their weapons, killed the eunuchs, cut off the heads of both the imposter and his brother, and displayed them to the rest of the Persian aristocrats to prove that the man who had claimed to be Bardiya was, in fact, no son of Cyrus at all.
Now the Persian empire was balanced on a knife edge. It had no king, and both sons of Cyrus were off the scene. Each of the seven conspirators might have had his own ambitions (Herodotus writes that the seven had a reasonable, Greek-sounding, and very unlikely debate about the fair way to pick one of the seven, or whether Persia should perhaps become a democracy), but Darius was the natural choice. He was young and energetic, probably around thirty at the time of the conspiracy; he had been Cambyses’s trusted aide, he was of the Achaemenid tribe by birth, and his father already held power over the soldiers in a large portion of the empire. In 521, he was acclaimed king of Persia by his six fellow conspirators, and started to smooth out the ripples caused by the death of Cyrus’s heirs.
There are a lot of question marks in this story.
Cambyses’s convenient death is probably the first. What actually happened to the Great King? Herodotus’s story is not impossible, but shows uncharacteristic carelessness on the part of a man who had spent most of his life around sharp objects; the Greek historian Ctesias, who is rarely reliable, says that he was whittling out of boredom and cut himself on the thigh.14 An Egyptian papyrus simply notes that Cambyses died “on a mat” (an odd phrase, which suggests that he was on a sickbed for some time) before reaching his own country, and that Darius then became king.15 Darius’s own accession inscription, the Bisitun Inscription, says without elaboration, “Cambyses died his own death,” a phrase which usually implies natural causes of some kind.
Of course, it is possible that the death from gangrene was natural but the original wound was not; Darius’s reticence on the subject is not necessarily in his favor. It was to his benefit that Cambyses die a natural death, just as it was to his benefit to discover that the man on the throne of Susa was an imposter.
Which brings us to the second mystery: what was the real identity of the “Bardiya” who died at the hands of the Persian seven? And is it really likely that an imposter could manage to hold power for almost a year, in a city where everyone knew the face of the king? Perhaps the real Bardiya didn’t disappear in the desert; maybe he arrived safely at Susa, and then mounted a coup against his brother, which would make Cambyses’s fury at the news even more understandable.<
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In this case, Darius is the villain. The man he killed at Susa was no imposter at all, but rather the last legitimate son of Cyrus the Great. A decapitated head is not easy to identify with certainty, particularly if it’s been hacked up while being removed.
Darius’s character is the big question mark in this scenario. It doesn’t help his cause that we know the story of Bardiya the imposter mostly from Darius’s own Bisitun Inscription, which puts Darius in the best possible light: “The people feared [the imposter] greatly,” he insists, “since he used to slay in great number the people who previously had known Bardiya…. No one dared say anything…until I came…. Then I with a few mens lew [him]…I restored Persia, Media, and the other lands.”16
On the other hand, Darius’s tale of a false Bardiya might actually be true. It is not at all unlikely that a young man who grew up in the court of Cyrus might bear a startling resemblance to one of Cyrus’s legitimate sons, and if the Bardiya at Susa was indeed an imposter as Darius claims, the real Bardiya did disappear.
This brings us to the third mystery: what happened to Cambyses’s younger brother?
Darius himself chalks up Bardiya’s death to Cambyses: “Cambyses killed Bardiya,” he writes, “and it did not become known to the people that Bardiya had been killed.” But it is in Darius’s best interest to make Cambyses the villain, since that gives Cyrus’s dynasty a nice neat implosion and ends the line so that he can begin a new dynasty. If the story of the resemblance is true, and the Bardiya in Susa was an imposter, the villain in the story is probably neither Cambyses nor Darius. Cui bono: the steward Patizeithes did best out of Bardiya’s disappearance. The accident of his brother’s resemblance to Bardiya may have been the genesis of a plot to get rid of Cyrus’s younger son.
But now Patizeithes was dead. And so were his followers (Darius had them executed), and so was Cambyses, and so was Bardiya. Darius himself married Cambyses’s widow, and nothing more was heard from her about her first husband’s death. The suspects were mostly dead, the rest were silent, and the mystery would remain unsolved.
In the meantime, more than one outlying territory of the empire had begun to plan revolt.
Darius went immediately to war to keep his new empire secure. Judging from the Bisitun Inscription, rebellions broke out among the Babylonians, the Scythians to the north, the Medians to his east, and even Parthia, where Darius’s own father had lost control of the army. A scattering of smaller rebellions blazed up between them, all across the empire.
But in an amazingly brief time, Darius had corralled them back into the empire. However he had gotten into the position of power, Darius proved extremely capable of holding onto it: not through sympathetic tyranny, as Cyrus had before him, but by crushing his enemies.
Cambyses’s army had been made up of a large number of draftees, soldiers sent to him as tribute. In an army made up mostly of draftees, the majority of the soldiers were disposable, numbers to throw in front of an opposing battle line in hopes of bearing down the opposition by sheer size. This was a strategy that had worked for Cambyses because of the inexperience of his opponent, and had not aided Cyrus, in his battle against the Scythian tribes, at all.
Darius had a different vision for his army. Instead of padding his ranks with mercenaries and tribute fighters, Darius planned for a professional army, one that would be smaller, but better fed, better trained, and more loyal. It would have a professional standing core of ten thousand foot soldiers and ten thousand cavalry, all of them Persians or Medes, and would move far faster than the huge and unwieldy armies of his predecessors.17 “The Persian and Median army which was under my control was a small force,” Darius writes, in his own inscription.18 The troops were bound together by national feeling, with loyalty so strong that the ten thousand infantry soldiers called themselves the Companions and jealously guarded entrance into their own ranks.
One division of this new army put down the eastern rebellion of Media, while Darius in command of another small force tackled the Babylonian uprising, and yet another squad travelled to Asia Minor. The core troops—small, fast, flexible, well trained—were successful. In hardly more than a year, the revolts were over. Darius’s huge celebratory relief, carved onto a cliff overlooking the road into Susa (where no one could miss it), shows him with his foot on the chest of the prostrate imposter to the throne, the false Bardiya, with the kings of Babylon, Scythia, Media, and six other lands roped and chained in front of him.
Darius was as brilliant an administrator as a general (a rare combination). He organized the reconquered empire into a more orderly set of provinces, or satrapies, each governed by a trustworthy satrap, and assigned each satrap a tribute which had to be sent to Susa each year. Satraps who did not send the proper amount, or who did not manage to keep their satrapies in order, were liable to be executed. This seems to have worked quite well for Darius; it transferred the job of intimidating conquered peoples from the king to the governors, who were forced to be far more diligent in keeping an eye on their territories than any Eye or Ear of Cyrus could ever have been.
We get a glimpse of this in the biblical book of Ezra. The satrap who had the watch over Jerusalem noticed that the construction of the temple (and its defensive walls) had progressed to a worrying degree. The rising building must have looked suspiciously like the center of a fortress, because the satrap, a man named Tattenai, made a special journey down to ask the builders what they thought they were doing.
The Jews protested that Cyrus had given them permission to build, but Tattenai was not willing to take their word for it. He ordered them to stop building until he could report the activity to Darius. “The king should know,” the report reads, “that the people are building it with large stones and placing the timbers in the walls; the work is making rapid progress.”19 Darius ordered the royal archives searched. Eventually a copy of Cyrus’s decree was located, in (of all places) an old library at Ecbatana, and Darius gave the satrap permission to let the building go ahead. The biblical account is not sympathetic to Tattenai, but the man was undoubtedly worried lest he miss the seeds of rebellion and lose his head.
With the existing empire stable, Darius could turn his eyes to new frontiers. He hoped to march his army towards India.
INDIA WAS NOT, for the Persians, a strange and unfamiliar land, as Alexander of Macedonia would find it to be a century and a half later. The Indians of the north were, after all, descendants of the same Aryans who also stood in the Persian family tree. In the language of the Persians, the names of Darius’s noblemen are recognizably kin to the names of the Indian princes who ruled the mahajanapadas: Utana, son of Thukra; Vidafarnah, son of Vayaspara; Bagabuxsa, son of Datuvahya.
While the Persians were expanding their grasp to the east and west, the Indian kingdom of Magadha was trying to swallow its own neighbors. The ambitious Bimbisara, who had conquered Anga and claimed part of Kosal as his wife’s dowry, had sired an equally ambitious son. Unwilling to wait for his own chance at rule, this son, Ajatashatru, mounted a revolt against his father, imprisoned him, and allowed him to starve to death: “Bimbisara was imprisoned by his son in a tower,” says the tale “The Jealousy of Devadatta.”177
63.3 The Expansion of Magadha
His mother grieved so harshly over her husband’s loss that she died. At that point her brother, now king of Kosal, reclaimed the land that had been in her dowry, and Ajatashatru went to war to get it back.
At first, his soldiers were driven back by the Kosal defense forces, but Kosal had its own internal troubles. The crown prince, as ambitious as Ajatashatru himself, took advantage of the conflict to mount his own bid for the throne, and drove his father out of Kosal. Then he began a war of his own against the gana-sangha of Shakya, the tribal alliance that had produced the Buddha. He wiped them out; from this point, they disappear from the historical record.20
Meanwhile, his dethroned father had fled towards Ajatashatru’s capital city of Rajagriha (a particularly well-fortified cit
y, thanks to the natural walls formed by five hills that ringed it).21 When he reached the city, he begged for sanctuary. This may seem like an unwise decision, but he was Ajatashatru’s uncle, and could claim some privilege of kinship. He was also an elderly man, and by the time he got to the wall, he was so worn out by his journey that he died before the gates could actually be opened.22
At this, Ajatashatru had yet another excuse to make war on Kosal. He regathered his forces, vowing loudly (and publicly) to avenge his uncle’s death (never mind that his own attack on his uncle’s land had brought about the original situation). But before he could get to Kosal, he had to turn and deal with his own family. His brother, who was serving him as vice-regent over the conquered kingdom of Anga, made a bid to become a king in his own right. He was preparing an alliance with the gana-sangha just to his north, Licchavi, against Ajatashatru. Ajatashatru built a fort on the frontier between the two territories, the fort Pataliputra on the shores of the Ganga, and went to war.
It was a war that lasted twelve years. At least Ajatashatru was spared from having to fight off his cousin in Kosol at the same time. A flash flood wiped out most of the army of Kosol, which had unwisely camped in a riverbed (later, a similar catastrophe drowned a number of Alexander’s camp followers on one of his campaigns to the east). With the army gone, Ajatashatru simply marched in and took Kosol over.23
The twelve-year war with his brother, a few details of which survive in the Buddhist tales, forced Ajatashatru to make innovations. For one thing, he is credited with inventing a couple of new offensive weapons, including a huge rock-throwing catapult and a new kind of war chariot. Twelve years of war also required a professional army, one paid to do nothing but fight: India’s first standing military force.24
His army was not Ajatashatru’s only weapon. When the Buddha died, on a journey north into the kingdom of Malla, Ajatashatru at once claimed that Magadha had the right to guard the Buddha’s sacred legacy. He ordered a council held in his capital, Rajagriha, in order to collect and set down into writing the Buddha’s sayings, the suttas. This first Buddhist council presided over the first composition of those collected sayings which would become the Pali Canon, and it was held under Ajatashatru’s watchful eye.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 52
