The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

by Toby Wilkinson

  All Ahmose II could do was hire more Greek mercenaries, build up his naval forces, and hope for the best. Cyrus’s death in 530, while fighting the fierce Scythian nomads of Central Asia, seemed to offer a glimmer of hope. However, any thought of a reprieve was swiftly dashed by events in Egypt itself. King Ahmose, with his army background and strategic ability, had successfully held the line for four decades. So his demise in 526 and the accession of a new, untried, and untested pharaoh, Psamtek III (526–525), dealt the country a blow. The death of a monarch was always a time of vulnerability, but with an aggressor on the doorstep, it was nothing short of a disaster for Egypt.

  The new great king of Persia, Cambyses, saw an opportunity and seized it. Within weeks of receiving the news of Ahmose’s death, he was on the march and heading for the delta. In 525, his forces invaded Egypt, captured Memphis, executed Psamtek III, and forcibly incorporated the Two Lands into the growing Persian realm.

  Cambyses lost no time in imposing Persian-style rule on his latest dominion. He abolished the office of god’s wife of Amun, denying Ahmose’s daughter her inheritance and pushing aside the incumbent god’s wife of Amun, Ankhnesneferibra, who had been in office for a remarkable sixty years. There would be no more god’s wives to act as a focus for native Egyptian sentiment in Upper Egypt. Not that every Egyptian official saw the Persian takeover as a calamity. Some found it only too easy to change allegiance when faced with the new reality. One such was the overseer of works Khnemibra. Coming from a long line of architects that stretched back 750 years to the reign of Ramesses II, Khnemibra—like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him—bore an overtly loyalist name (in his case the throne name of Ahmose II), and he had served his pharaoh faithfully in the quarries of the Wadi Hammamat. But for all his professed loyalty to the Saite Dynasty, he showed no hesitation in accommodating himself to the Persian invasion. He not only survived the change of regime, he prospered, continuing to serve his new Persian masters and being rewarded for his trouble with a clutch of lucrative priestly offices. For many like Khnemibra, personal advancement trumped patriotism every time.

  Others may have had slightly more altruistic reasons for collaborating with the Persians. For the Egyptian elite, nothing embodied their cherished culture and traditions better than their religion. Indeed, every prominent member of society took pains to demonstrate his piety to his town cult, and active patronage of the local temple was a prerequisite for winning respect in one’s community. When faced with alien conquerors who worshipped strange gods, some Egyptians decided not to fight but to try to win the Persians over—to the Egyptian way of doing things.

  A native of Sais, proudest of delta cities, managed to do just that. Wedjahorresnet had all the right credentials. His father had been a priest in the local temple, and Wedjahorresnet had grown up with a deep devotion to the goddess Neith. Like many a Saite before him, he had pursued a career in the military, rising to the position of admiral under Ahmose II. His naval activities must have included sea battles against the invading Persians. He described the invasion as a “great disaster … the like of which had never happened in this land [before].”1 Yet within months of Cambyses’s victory, Wedjahorresnet had ingratiated himself with his new master, winning trust as a senior courtier and being appointed as the king’s chief physician, with intimate access to the royal presence. In public, Wedjahorresnet’s conversion was as thorough as it was rapid, and he showed no trace of embarrassment in lauding the Persian invasion in glowing terms:

  The great leader of all foreign lands, Cambyses, came to Egypt, the foreigners of all foreign lands with him. When he had assumed rule over this land throughout its length, they settled there and he became great ruler of Egypt, the great ruler of all foreign lands.2

  Yet there was more than simple collaboration behind this astonishing volte-face. With his knowledge of Egyptian customs, Wedjahorresnet was in a unique position to guide the country’s new Persian masters and begin the process of Egyptianization, which would turn them into respectable, even legitimate, pharaohs. An important step in this process was the composition of a royal titulary for Cambyses, which Wedjahorresnet masterminded and no doubt strongly encouraged. Little by little, slowly but surely, the Persians were acculturated, following in the footsteps of previous foreign dynasties—Hyksos, Libyan, and Kushite.

  Cambyses seems to have acquiesced to the process. With his vast and polyglot empire, he could ill afford to take a culturally purist view. Instead, he showed great tolerance for the different cultures and traditions within his realm. His predecessor Cyrus had released the Jews from their exile in Babylon, and Cambyses followed suit, protecting the large Jewish community in Egypt on the island of Abu. Elsewhere in the Nile Valley, he was perfectly willing to retain the services of Egyptian officials, and life for many people, especially in the provinces, continued much as before. Only in the military were Egyptian officers replaced and their leadership skills directed anew, as with Wedjahorresnet.

  Having been forced to relinquish his naval command, the erstwhile admiral turned his talents to safeguarding and honoring his local temple. His position at court gave him special influence, and he set about using it to further the cult of Neith at Sais. First, he complained to Cambyses about the “foreigners” who had desecrated the temple by installing themselves inside its sacred precinct, and he persuaded his master to issue an eviction notice. After further lobbying, Cambyses ordered the temple to be purified, and its priesthood and offerings reinstated, just as they had been before the Persian invasion. As Wedjahorresnet explained, “His Majesty did these things because I caused His Majesty to understand the importance of Sais.”3 To set the seal on this “conversion,” Cambyses paid a personal visit to the temple and kissed the ground before the statue of Neith, “as every king does.”4 The Persian conqueror was well on the way to becoming a proper pharaoh.

  The same pattern was followed at sites throughout Egypt. In the delta city of Taremu, the local bigwig Nesmahes used his influence—he was overseer of the royal harem—to enrich his community and its cult. It may have helped that the Persian kings readily identified with the power of the local lion god, Mahes, but, here as elsewhere, the determination of Egyptian officials to convert their new masters was a key factor behind developments in the First Persian Period. At Memphis, burials of the sacred Apis bulls continued without interruption, and the Egyptian responsible for the cult could even boast of proselytizing the country’s new rulers: “I put fear of you [Apis] in the hearts of all people and foreigners of every foreign land who were in Egypt.”5

  The Egyptians might have lost their political independence, but they were determined to maintain their cherished cultural traditions.

  AGE OF INVENTION

  IN REALITY, THE PERSIAN CONQUEST OF EGYPT WAS FAR FROM BEING A “great disaster.” If anything, the country’s new rulers brought a much needed dynamism and energy to the government of the Nile Valley, breathing new life into its institutions and infrastructure. The high point of this renaissance was the reign of Cambyses’s successor Darius I (522–486). He took a particularly keen interest in Egypt’s repositories of learning, the “houses of life” attached to the major temples. From his royal palace at Susa (built by Egyptian craftsmen with ebony and ivory from Nubia), he ordered Wedjahorresnet, by now an old and trusted retainer living at the Persian court, to return to Sais and restore the house of life after it had fallen into ruin.

  Perhaps drawing on the temple records, Darius is said to have codified the laws of Egypt to establish a firm basis for government. He recognized that Egypt was not just another satrapy in his empire. Egypt’s great wealth and ancient culture gave it a special significance, and it was simply too important a possession to risk losing. Hence the satrap (Persian governor) based in Memphis was not allowed any control over economic affairs. Instead, these were the responsibility of a separate chancellor, who was also tasked with keeping an eye on the satrap, to prevent him from going native. Satraps were frequ
ently recalled to Persia to account for their activities in person before the great king.

  On the whole, though, Darius ruled Egypt with a light touch. Native Egyptians continued to hold high office, the tribute exacted was not excessive, and contemporary documents suggest a degree of prosperity, even in the provinces. The keys to Persian control were excellent communication with the rest of the empire, a good intelligence network, and strategically placed garrisons. From the island of Dorginarti, in lower Nubia, to the deserts of the Sinai, imposing fortresses ringed Egypt’s perimeter, giving the Persians the means to put down any signs of insurrection quickly and decisively.

  The Persian great king Darius I in the guise of an Egyptian pharaoh TOBY WILKINSON

  When it came to exploiting Egypt’s vast economic potential, Darius’s priority was to encourage maritime trade between the Nile Valley and the Persian Gulf. In Upper Egypt, the overland track through the Wadi Hammamat to the Red Sea coast was reopened and was used regularly by Persian expeditions. In Lower Egypt, however, no such route existed, so a different solution had to be found. The answer was one of the greatest engineering projects in ancient Egyptian history, every bit as ambitious as the pyramids at Giza. Back in the heyday of Saite control, Nekau II (610–595) had initiated a scheme to build a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea. Now, a hundred years later, his idea was finally realized. Where the Saites had merely dreamed, the Persians delivered. The result was a canal 150 feet wide that ran for some forty miles from the easternmost branch of the Nile, along the Wadi Tumilat, to the Bitter Lakes and thence southward to the Gulf of Suez.

  As ships sailed the four days’ journey from one end to the other, they passed massive stelae of pink granite, set up at strategic points along the canal. On each giant slab, ten feet high and seven feet wide, carefully chosen scenes and texts emphasized Darius’s dominion over his vast empire. One side of the stelae depicted the great king under the protection of his Persian god Ahura Mazda, with an accompanying text in cuneiform; the other side showed the emblem of Egyptian unification under a winged sun disk, with a laudatory inscription in hieroglyphics. In time-honored pharaonic fashion, the Egyptian version also included a frieze of twenty-four kneeling figures, each perched on an oval ring containing the name of an imperial province. Such scenes would have been a familiar sight to any Egyptian acquainted with the great temples of the land—except that, on Darius’s monuments, one of the subject territories was Egypt itself. Little comfort that it was listed alongside such exotic and fabled lands as Persia, Media, Babylonia, Assyria, and even India. Darius drove the message home on the other side of the stela, where he boasted “I, a Persian, with Persians, I seized Egypt. I gave orders to dig a canal from the river that is in Egypt—the Nile is its name—to the bitter river [that is, the Red Sea] that flows from Persia.”6 To celebrate the official opening of his landmark project in 497, the king paid a personal visit to the canal and looked on proudly as a fleet of twenty-four ships laden with Egyptian tribute made its way slowly eastward, bound for Persia.

  If the ancient Suez Canal was born of an interest in maritime trade routes, the Persians’ desire to control the desert routes across the Sahara, on the other side of Egypt, spawned an equally impressive feat of engineering. Kharga, the southernmost of the four great Egyptian oases, had long been a key nexus in desert communication, where a network of tracks converged, linking the Nile Valley with Nubia, to the south, and the lands beyond the Sahara, to the west. Not since the late Old Kingdom had the Kharga Oasis been permanently settled. The climate had become simply too arid, the annual rainfall insufficient to support even a small population. With their customary ingenuity, the Persians had two answers to the problem. First, they introduced the camel to Egypt. Brought from their Bactrian and Arabian provinces, it revolutionized desert travel, enabling caravans to travel far greater distances without the need to find water. Second, the Persians pioneered an extraordinary technique for bringing the water trapped inside the underground sandstone aquifer to the surface. Throughout the Kharga Oasis, they excavated deep underground rock-cut galleries that ran for miles across the parched landscape. These were, in effect, subterranean aqueducts, enabling gardens and fields on the surface to be irrigated with sweet, fresh artesian water. Thanks to this advanced technology, vast tracts of land were brought into agricultural production for the first time, yielding abundant crops of cereals, fruit, and vegetables, and cotton—another Persian introduction. New villages and towns sprang up around the aqueducts, complete with administrative buildings and temples. Because of the distance of these settlements from the Nile Valley, papyrus was rare and costly, so instead the local inhabitants used shards of pottery as a writing medium for their correspondence. As a result, an extraordinary archive has been preserved that illuminates daily life in this far-flung outpost of Persian imperialism. As might have been expected, individuals and institutions took care to preserve particularly valuable documents. Besides the receipts, household accounts, and everyday jottings, legal contracts feature heavily. They reveal that the basis of the local inhabitants’ wealth was not land but water. The water supply from each rock-cut aqueduct was carefully divided into days and fractions of days, and these could be bought and sold, rented, or used to guarantee loans. In this desert oasis, water was, quite literally, money.

  There was coinage, too. In 410, the Athenian currency (stateres) was introduced as the monetary standard, revealing the pervasive influence of the Greek world on Egyptian commerce. It was yet another sign of the cosmopolitan character of Persian Egypt, a land where people married across the religious and cultural divide; where reliefs in Egyptian temples could depict strange winged creatures from Zoroastrian mythology; and where second-generation Persian immigrants could adopt Egyptian nicknames.

  All in all, Egypt under Darius I was a dynamic melting pot of peoples and traditions, a place of cultural innovation, a prosperous trading nation, and a tolerant multiethnic community. But it was not to last.

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  DARIUS’S SUCCESSORS SHOWED MARKEDLY LESS INTEREST IN THEIR Egyptian satrapy. They ceased even to pay lip service to the traditions of Egyptian kingship and religion. Commercial activity began to decline, and political control slackened as the Persians focussed their attention increasingly on their troublesome western provinces and the “terrorist states”7 of Athens and Sparta. Against such a backdrop of political weakness and economic malaise, the Egyptians’ relationship with their foreign masters started to turn sour. A year before Darius I’s death, the first revolt broke out in the delta. It took the next great king, Xerxes I (486–465), two years to quell the uprising. To prevent a recurrence, he purged Egyptians from positions of authority, but it could not stop the rot. As Xerxes and his officials were preoccupied with fighting the Greeks at the epic battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, members of the old provincial families across Lower Egypt began to dream of regaining power—a few even went as far as to claim royal titles. After less than half a century, Persian rule was beginning to unravel.

  The murder of Xerxes I in the summer of 465 provided the opportunity and stimulus for a second Egyptian revolt. This time, it was led by Irethoreru, a charismatic prince of Sais following in the family tradition, and the revolt was not so easily suppressed. Within a year, he had won supporters across the delta and further afield; even government scribes in the Kharga Oasis dated legal contracts to “year two of Irethoreru, prince of the rebels.” Only in the far southeast of the country, in the quarries of the Wadi Hammamat, did local officials still recognize the authority of the Persian ruler. Sensing the popularity of his cause, Irethoreru appealed to the Persians’ great enemy, Athens, for military support. Still smarting from the vicious destruction of their holy sites by Xerxes’s army two decades earlier, the Athenians were only too glad to help. They dispatched a battle fleet to the Egyptian coast, and the combined Greco-Egyptian forces succeeded in driving the Persian military back to their barracks in Memphis, and in keeping them pinn
ed down there for many months. But the Persians were not going to give up their richest province so easily. Eventually, by sheer force of numbers, they broke out of Memphis and began to take the country back, region by region. After a struggle lasting nearly a decade, Irethoreru was finally captured and crucified as a grim warning to other would-be insurgents.

  The Egyptians, however, had enjoyed their brief taste of freedom and it was not long before another rebellion broke out, once again under Saite leadership, and once again with Athenian support. Only the peace treaty of 449 between Persia and Athens brought a temporary halt to Greek involvement in Egyptian internal affairs, and allowed the resumption of free commerce and travel between the two Mediterranean powers. (One beneficiary of the new dispensation was Herodotus, who visited Egypt sometime in the 440s.) Yet Egyptian discontent did not evaporate. The prospect of another major uprising looked certain.

  In 410, civil strife erupted across the country, with near anarchy and intercommunal violence flaring in the deep south. At the instigation of the Egyptian priests of Khnum, on the island of Abu, thugs attacked the neighboring Jewish temple of Yahweh. The perpetrators were arrested and imprisoned, but, even so, it was a sign that Egyptian society was in upheaval. In the delta, a new generation of princes took up the banner of independence, led by the grandson of the first rebel leader of forty years before. Psamtek-Amenirdis of Sais was named after his grandfather but also bore the proud name of the founder of the Saite Dynasty, and he was determined to restore the family’s fortunes. He launched a low-level guerrilla war in the delta against Egypt’s Persian overlords, using his detailed local knowledge to wear down his opponents. For six years, the rebellion continued unabated, the Persians discovering the impotence of a superpower against a determined uprising with popular local support.