THE MARCH TO MEROE.
More than two centuries before Cambyses set foot upon its soil, Egypt
had experienced the rule of the stranger. The reign of the Ethiopic
monarchs of Napata over Egypt (730-672 B.C.) was followed by the more
severe dominion of the Assyrians. But Psammetichus had been able to
restore the kingdom, and the sovereignty of his house; the reign of
Amasis had called into existence a beautiful after-bloom of Egyptian
art, had given a lively impulse to trade, and increased the welfare of
the land. Now the day of Pelusium and the fall of Memphis had decided
the fate of Egypt irrevocably and for all time. The kingdom had been
founded from Memphis three thousand years previously, and at Memphis it
was now overthrown. Egypt, in spite of repeated and stubborn attempts,
was never able to recover from the dominion of the Persians, and even
the fall of the Persian empire did not permit the rise of the Egypt of
the Egyptians.
The speedy and great success which Cambyses achieved had effects beyond
the borders of Egypt. Herodotus narrates that the Libyans in their
anxiety about the fortune of Egypt submitted to Cambyses without a
battle, promised to pay tribute, and sent presents. The Cyrenaeans also
and Barcaeans from similar apprehensions had done the same. The
presents of the Libyans were graciously accepted by Cambyses, but the
500 minae which the Cyrenaeans sent, he threw with his own hand among
the people because "it was too little."[155] Diodorus explains the
anxiety of the Libyans and Cyrenaeans, "after Cambyses had become lord
of the whole of Egypt" and the voluntary submission which was the
consequence of it, by the fact that the Libyans and Cyrenaeans had
fought against Cambyses with the Egyptians. We know from other sources
that the princes of Cyrene were in close and friendly connection with
Amasis.[156] The subjugation of the Libyans cannot have extended farther
than to the tribes adjacent to the Delta, and reaching towards the west
perhaps as far as Cyrene. At that time Archelaus III. was the king of
Cyrene. More than a century before, Greeks from the island of Thera had
founded the city on the well-watered and grassy slopes which run from
the table-land of Barca to the sea. Ever since that time the family of
Battus and Archelaus had reigned over this settlement, which, owing to
its favoured position and lively trade, rose quickly to power and
wealth. The attack which Pharaoh-Hophra made upon it in the year 571
B.C. had been successfully repulsed by the Cyrenaeans (III. 405).
Subsequently, about the year 545 B.C., Battus III. had been compelled to
submit to a constitutional form of government which restricted the
monarchy to a hereditary presidentship. Discontented with this position,
Archelaus III. attempted to recover the old powers. The attempt failed,
Archelaus fled, and found shelter with Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos.
When he had collected there an army of adventurers he returned at their
head, subverted the constitution, and set on foot a cruel persecution
against all who had adhered to it. He may have felt the ground insecure
under his feet in the city; the fall of Egypt deprived him of the
support which he had had in that country, and if he had really sent a
contingent to aid Psammenitus he had to fear the vengeance of Cambyses.
These were reasons enough for seeking the protection of the Persian
king. He recognised the sovereignty of Cambyses, and sent that sum of
money as the first proof of his submission.
"Cambyses now proposed to himself a threefold expedition," so Herodotus
relates; "one against the Carthaginians, a second against the Ammonians,
and a third against the long-lived Ethiopians, who inhabit Libya on the
southern sea. It seemed best to send the fleet against the
Carthaginians, and a part of the land army against the Ammonians, but to
the Ethiopians envoys were first sent. When he had given this command he
ordered fish-eaters to be brought from Elephantine (the island on the
Nile on the border of Egypt) who were acquainted with the language of
the Ethiopians. While these were being brought he ordered the fleet to
set out against Carthage. But the Phenicians refused; they were bound by
great oaths, and they would be guilty of a crime if they went against
their own children. As the Phenicians refused, the rest (_i.e._ the
Greeks) were not strong enough, and so the Carthaginians escaped slavery
under the Persians. For Cambyses could not do violence to the
Phenicians, because they had voluntarily submitted to the Persians (p.
90), and the whole naval power rested on the Phenicians. When the
fish-eaters had come, they were told what they had to say to the
Ethiopians, and received the presents which they had to take--a purple
robe, a golden necklace and bracelets, a box of alabaster filled with
ointment, and a jar of palm-wine. The Ethiopians to whom they were sent
were said to be the tallest and most beautiful of men, and as they live
under laws which are different from those of other men, they were said
to regard the man who is the tallest and strongest among them as the
most worthy of the throne."
"When the fish-eaters reached the Ethiopians and gave over their
presents to the king, they said: 'Cambyses, the king of the Persians,
wishes to be your friend and sends you as presents these things in which
he takes most delight himself.' The Ethiopians answered: 'The Persian
king has not sent you with these presents because he wishes to be my
friend, and ye are not speaking the truth. You have been sent to spy out
my kingdom, and he is not a righteous man. If he were righteous he would
not have desired another land than his own, nor would he have reduced
men to slavery from whom he had suffered no wrong. Give him this bow
(the bows of the Ethiopians were of palm-wood and more than four cubits
in length),[157] and say to the king of the Persians, that when his
people can string a bow of that size he may march against the long-lived
Ethiopians with an overwhelming army; till then, he may thank the gods
that it has not occurred to the sons of the Ethiopians to conquer
another land in addition to their own.' Then he gave them the bow, and
he took the purple robe, and asked what it was and how it was made. And
when the fish-eaters gave him a true account of the purple and the
dyeing, he said that the men were deceivers and their garments
deceptive. When he saw the necklace and bracelets, the king laughed,
for he imagined that they were fetters; their fetters, he said, were
stronger. Then he inquired about the ointment, and when the preparation
and use of this were explained, he said the same as about the robes. The
wine he drank and it pleased him greatly, and he asked what the king of
Persia ate, and what was the greatest age to which the Persians lived.
They replied that he ate bread, and explained the nature of wheat; they
also put the greatest age to which the Persians lived at eighty years.
The king replied that he did not wonder that their years were few,
inasmuch as they ate dirt, and they would not live so long as they did,
if the drink did not strengthen them--in that matter the Persians had
the advantage. Of the Ethiopians most lived to 120 years, and some even
longer; their food was cooked flesh, and their drink milk. When the
envoys returned and Cambyses received their account, he fell into a
passion, and marched against the Ethiopians without taking measures for
the supply of provisions or considering that he was about to march to
the end of the world, but like one distraught and out of his mind, he
set forth on his expedition as soon as he heard the account of the
fish-eaters. No Persian was able to draw the bow of the Ethiopians;
Smerdis alone, the brother of Cambyses, was able to draw it two
finger-breadths.[158] Cambyses bade the Greeks who were with him (_i.e._
the crews of the Greek ships) to remain in Egypt; but the whole of the
rest of the army he took with him. When he came to Thebes, he sent
50,000 men away with orders to enslave the Ammonians and burn the oracle
of Zeus; with the rest he marched against the Ethiopians. But before the
army had traversed a fifth part of the way all their provisions were
consumed, and not long after even the beasts of burden were eaten. If
Cambyses when he saw this had given up his intention, and led the army
back, he would have shown himself a wise man after his first mistake,
but he went recklessly onward. So long as the soldiers found anything
growing on the ground, they ate herbs and grass; but when they came to
the sand, some of them did a horrid deed; they drew lots for the tenth
man and ate him. When Cambyses heard of this, he was distressed that the
soldiers should eat each other, abandoned the war against the
Ethiopians, marched back, and reached Thebes after losing many men. This
was the end of the expedition against the Ethiopians. But with regard to
those who were sent against the Ammonians it is only known that they
reached the city of Oasis where the Samians dwell, seven days' march
distant from Thebes through the desert; in the Greek language this place
is called the island of the blessed. To this place the army came; but
beyond this no man knows anything except what the Ammonians say. They
relate that when they marched from the oasis through the sand and were
about midway between the oasis and the Ammonians, and were eating
breakfast, a great wind from the south blew up a mass of sand and
overwhelmed them, and in this way they perished." Diodorus represents
Cambyses as making the attempt to subjugate the Ethiopians with a great
host, in which he lost the whole of his army and was in the greatest
danger.[159]
If the legend of the Greeks of the fortunes of Psammenitus after his
defeat exhibits analogous traits to the legend, also Greek, of the fate
of Croesus after his capture, the account given by Herodotus of the
march of Cambyses against the long-lived Ethiopians reminds us of his
account of the march of Cyrus against the Massagetae. In both cases the
aim is directed against unknown foreign nations, against whom there is
no reason to make war; in both cases good sense, moderation, wisdom, and
love of peace are found in the chief of the barbarians; in both envoys
are sent under false pretences; in both the conversation on either side
is accurately known. In the first case it is a foolish resolution which
brings ruin; in the second it is the vexation of Cambyses at the answer
of the Ethiopians, and the inability to draw the bow, which causes him
to lead his army without any hesitation into destruction. Along with
other indications, the test of the bow here, like the bottle in the
other legend, points to a poetical source.
We have seen that the ancient Pharaohs, the Sesurtesen and Amenemha,
Tuthmosis and Amenophis, and after them Sethos and Ramses II., had
extended the dominion of Egypt up the Nile to Semne and Cumne, and
subsequently to Mount Barkal. The Egyptian language, worship, and art
spread in this direction, and with the decline of the Egyptian power
after the time of the Ramessids (from the year 1100 B.C.), an
independent state grew up, the metropolis of which was Napata, near the
modern Meravi, on Mount Barkal. The princes of this state in their turn,
from king Pianchi onwards, had forced their way down the Nile.[160]
Sabakon, Sebichos, and Tirhaka had governed Napata and Egypt. After
Sabakon had come into conflict with the Assyrians at Raphia in Syria
(720 B.C.), and Tirhaka at Altaku (701 B.C.), Tirhaka succumbed in the
year 672 B.C. to the arms of Esarhaddon. Repeated attempts of Tirhaka
and his son Urdamane upon Egypt were wrecked; Esarhaddon calls himself
king of Miluhhi and Cush. Assurbanipal boasts that he pursued Urdamane
as far as the land of Cush. But the kingdom of Napata, which the
inscriptions of Sargon, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon and Assurbanipal call
Miluhhi (Meroe[161])--in the inscriptions on Mount Barkal we find the
names Meru and Merua--continued to exist, and maintained itself against
the restoration of Egyptian power under Psammetichus and his successors.
We cannot doubt that Cambyses wished to penetrate up the Nile at least
as far as the army of the Assyrians, that he felt it necessary to secure
his dominion in Egypt against attacks from Napata, and to extend his
dominion as far up the Nile as the army of the old Pharaohs had reached.
That the prince, who, as we saw, made the most careful preparations for
the campaign against Egypt, should have thrown himself foolishly and
recklessly into this undertaking, as Herodotus represents, is
incredible, and the statement must be attributed to special tendencies
in the sources used by the historian. So far as Meroe, Herodotus tells
us from information collected at Elephantine on the southern border of
Egypt, the way lay up and on the Nile. First there were four days'
journey from Elephantine (against the stream), then forty days' march
along the river, since the rocks made navigation impossible, and then
after twelve days' voyage the great city of Meroe was reached, the
metropolis of the rest of the Ethiopians. The distance to the place
where the Egyptians lived who had emigrated under Psammetichus (III.
307) was not less than the distance from Elephantine to Meroe, and it
was a long journey for them to the long-lived Ethiopians. The total of
56 days' journey from the way from Elephantine to Meroe upon or along
the Nile points to a place much higher up the river than Napata. The new
Meroe is meant, which the princes of Napata, receding before the
Persians, had founded before the time of Herodotus.[162] Herodotus'
statements that the Ethiopians worshipped Zeus and Dionysus alone among
the gods, and worshipped them very zealously, that there was an oracle
of Zeus in their country, and that it was only by its command that they
went to war, are completely established by the monuments of Napata. They
show that the worship of Ammon, the god of Thebes and upper Egypt, and
that of Osiris whom the Greeks, as we know, compared with their
Dionysus, were zealously prosecuted. From inscriptions and intelligence
of other kinds we have also ample information of the influence of the
priests, and the importance of the oracle in the kingdom of Napata. The
fame of the priesthood at Napata may be the basis of the "pious
Ethiopians" of Homer; the same piety, though further removed, is shown
in Herodotus' narrative of the long-lived Ethiopians.
When Cambyses, so Strabo tells us, had made himself master of Egypt, he
advanced to Meroe (Napata), and it is said that he gave the name to the
city in honour of his wife, or his sister, as others say, who was buried
there. Diodorus indeed tells us that Cambyses founded the famous city of
Meroe, and gave it the name of Meroe after his mother.[163] Josephus
also observes that Cambyses changed the name of the royal city of the
Ethiopians and called it Meroe.[164] However unfounded may be the
assertion that the name of Meroe proceeded from Cambyses--for we find it
used two centuries previously by the Assyrians--it is quite clear from
these statements that Cambyses did advance as far as the old metropolis
of the Ethiopians and brought it into his power; that he conquered and
maintained the kingdom of Napata. Indeed Herodotus tells us elsewhere
himself that he advanced far beyond Napata to the south. "In his
campaign against the long-lived Ethiopians," we are told in this
passage, "Cambyses subjugated the Ethiopians who dwell around the sacred
Nysa, and hold festivals in honour of Dionysus." The position of the
mythical Nysa, we cannot, it is true, define more precisely than that a
Homeric hymn puts it above the fountains of the Nile,[165] and Herodotus
himself places it above Egypt in Ethiopia;[166] but inasmuch as these
Ethiopians of Nysa wore leopard and lion skins, according to Herodotus,
and were armed with clubs; as their arrow-heads were made of sharp
stones, and their lances of the horns of antelopes; as they painted
themselves half red and half white in battle;[167] as they had to pay
to the Persians every third year two hundred logs of ebony, twenty large
tusks of elephants, five boys, and two choenixes of unrefined gold,[168]
Cambyses must have penetrated into the land of the negroes, the zone of
ebony and the elephant. On the middle course of the Nile in Nubia, and
above Napata, there were tribes akin to the Egyptians; the land of the
negroes began about the union of the White and Blue Nile. The monuments
of Egypt comprise both populations under the name Cush, the name of the
land of the south, and they exhibit these southern nations as partly red
and partly black. The Greeks call the red and black inhabitants of the
land of the south, Ethiopians. According to the statements of
Artemidorus of Ephesus and of Agatharchides, which have been preserved
by Strabo and Diodorus, the land of the elephant-hunters and
ostrich-eaters, who fought with the Ethiopians, men armed with the horns
of the antelope, began south of the confluence of the Atbara and
Bahr-el-Azrek or Blue River, and the Nile.[169] At the present time the
region of the ebony-woods and elephants begins in the marsh at the foot
of the Abyssinian Alps; elephants are not found elsewhere except in some
more northern regions on the Red Sea; and that the Ethiopians did not
acquire the elephants' tusks in the way of trade is proved by the small
amount of gold which they had to pay as tribute. As we find in the
reliefs of Persepolis and Naksh-i-Rustem, among the nations of the
Persian kingdom, certain figures which are marked out as negroes by
their short, curly hair, their snub nose, their bare breast and the
animal's skin on the shoulders; as the Ethiopians of Nysa and their
neighbours served, according to Herodotus, in the army of Xerxes, and
paid the tribute mentioned, as Herodotus expressly tells us, even in his
day, the march of Cambyses must have penetrated beyond the mouth of the
Atbara, and Napata must have been permanently maintained, otherwise such
distant tribes would not have furnished contingents in war fifty years
later, and their tribute would have come to an end long before
Herodotus.
Hence Cambyses did not, as the account of Herodotus represents, return
to Egypt from the upper Nile without success. On the contrary, he
penetrated much further than the Assyrians, and his campaign had more
lasting results than the conquests of Tuthmosis III. and Ramses II. on
the upper Nile. The account given by Herodotus of the distress into
which the army fell, the statement that the soldiers ate each other
(which is also told of the expedition of Cyrus to the Indus), and that
the retreat to Egypt was thus brought about, is hardly compatible with
such results and so firmly-established a supremacy. Yet we may suppose
that Cambyses wished to penetrate even further than the junction of the
White and Blue Nile, and there fell into difficulties. But it is
probable that quite another incident lies at the base of the legend of
the distress of Cambyses "in the sand." At Premnis on the Nile, Pliny
mentions "the market of Cambyses;" in Ptolemy the same place is called
"the Magazine of Cambyses." Strabo, when narrating the campaign which
Petronius took in the year 24 B.C. against Napata, tells us, that after
Petronius had taken Pselchis (140 miles above Elephantine) he came to
Premnis (150 miles further up the Nile, below Abu Simbel and the falls
of Wadi Halfa), "after he had marched through the sand-heaps in which
the army of Cambyses was buried by a sudden wind." Thus, five hundred
years after the campaign of Cambyses, the tradition was in existence,
that his army had been buried there. Hence when Napata had been
conquered, and the negro stems subjugated, when Mount Barkal and the
falls of Wadi Halfa were already behind the army on the return journey,
it was overtaken by a sand-storm in the neighbourhood of Egypt, and a
part of the army, though not the whole, was buried.[170]
Herodotus told us above that Cambyses in his march against the
Ethiopians sent a section of his army against the Ammonians, to reduce
them to slavery, and burn the oracle of Ammon there. Diodorus repeats
the statement of Herodotus almost in the same words. Justin observes,
that Cambyses had sent an army for the conquest of the famous temple of
Ammon, but it was overwhelmed by a storm and masses of sand. Herodotus'
narrative of this campaign cannot have arisen from the source from which
he took the striking traits of his account of the march against the
long-lived Ethiopians. Had this treated of the march against the
Ammonians it would have given some account of the issue of it; but
Herodotus expressly tells us that only the Ammonians could give an
account of this. His authority therefore was a Greek-Egyptian tradition.
The Ammonians inhabited the oasis of Sivah, which lies in the desert to
the west of Egypt: the worship of Ammon was carried there by Egyptian
settlers and Egyptian influence.[171] We cannot doubt that Cambyses,
after Cyrene and the tribes of the Libyans between Egypt and Cyrene had
submitted, sent a part of his army to obtain possession of this oasis.
The oasis of Ammon was well adapted to keep the Libyans of the coast as
well as the Cyrenaeans in subjection; and was at the same time an
important station for trade, and a desirable point of support for
further undertakings in the West. The command to enslave the inhabitants
of the oasis and burn the temple, is part of the conception which
represents Cambyses as setting out against the Ethiopians in a moment of
reckless passion. According to Herodotus, the expedition to Sivah came
in seven days after leaving Thebes to "the Island of the Blest," _i.e._
to the oasis El Charigeh, which as a fact is seven good days' march from
Thebes in the desert.[172] From this point the army had to proceed about
500 miles; at present the caravans go northward from El Charigeh, then
to the west from the oasis of Kasr, to Sivah. What happened to the army
on one of these routes, no one, Herodotus says, can tell; the Ammonians
declared that it was buried half way between El Charigeh and Sivah.
It would be rash to connect the heaps of bones which a traveller in our
times saw in the neighbourhood of the oasis of Kasr with the destruction
of the army of Cambyses,[173] and it is surprising that the Persians
took the longer route from Thebes, when the shorter route which led from
Memphis to Sivah was already frequented. Alexander of Macedon, in order
to reach the Ammonians, marched from the Mareotic Lake along the coast
westward to Paraetonium, then he turned directly to the south, and in
eight marches reached the oasis. A modern traveller reached it in
fifteen days from Fayum, in 1809, and the troops of Mahomet Ali who
subjugated Sivah in 1820 to Egypt (2000 men and 500 camels with water)
reached it in fourteen days. Most remarkable of all is the fact, that
both campaigns of Cambyses were overtaken by the same disaster. The
direction taken by each does not allow us to connect the two; the route
to Sivah could not be past Pselchis and Premnis. Yet neither one nor the
other disaster is in itself incredible, though 50,000 men cannot have
perished. Some 70 years ago a caravan of about 2000 souls was buried in
a sand-storm on the road from Darfur to Egypt.[174] But even if the
division which was despatched against the oasis of Ammon succumbed to
the storms of the desert, Cambyses maintained the oasis El Charigeh,
which Herodotus calls the city Oasis and the Island of the Blessed. The
magnificent remains of a temple which Darius the son of Hystaspes caused
to be erected there to the god of the oasis, the ram-headed Ammon, prove
that the oasis was conquered and held by Cambyses.[175]
Like the undertaking against the Ammonians, the intention of Cambyses to
send the fleet against Carthage was evidence of his plan of extending
his power to the west, and achieving in Africa what his father had done
in Asia. Herodotus gives the account of the order commanding the fleet
to sail, of the refusal of the Phenicians, and the abandonment of the
project by Cambyses, according to the tradition of the Greeks, who
together with the Phenicians made up the fleet of Cambyses and the
Greeks in Egypt. There is no reason to doubt the statement. By the
submission of the Cyrenaeans and Barcaeans Cambyses became the neighbour
of Carthage, which had lately united the Phenician colonies of West
Africa under her leadership and was eager to oppose the advance of the
Greeks in the west of the Mediterranean, the settlement of their
colonies to the west of the great Syrtis, and their progress in
Sardinia, Corsica, and Sicily. If the attempt to advance to the desert
to the west of El Charigeh were already wrecked, if Cambyses had already
returned from Napata when he commanded the fleet to sail against
Carthage, new successes covered that disaster as well as the calamity of
Premnis, and the gain of Carthage was of more importance than that of
the oasis of Sivah. The old Phenicians of the East, in union with the
navy of the Anatolian cities, was to conquer the new Phoenicia of the
West. The Greeks no doubt were ready, but the Phenicians refused. By
injuring their colonies in the West they would have rendered the
greatest service to the rival naval power and trade of the Greeks; in
Anatolia and on the coasts of Sicily they would probably have given a
fatal blow to their own power by sea. Whether Cambyses saw this
connection of affairs, and felt that the subjection of Carthage would
liberate the independent Greeks from a dangerous neighbour, and the
dependent Greeks from a rival in trade, or whether he simply gave way to
the refusal of the Phenicians, we cannot decide: we only know that "as
the fleet of the Phenicians refused,"--and it formed the preponderating
part of the naval force,--it was impossible to compel it to go.
FOOTNOTES:
[155] Herod. 3, 13.
[156] Diod. "Exc. de legat." p. 619 = 10, 14.
[157] Herod. 7, 69. Cf. Strabo, p. 802.
[158] Herod. 3, 30.
[159] Herod. 3, 17-26; Diod. 3, 1.
[160] Vol. III. 63 ff. 159.
[161] The name Miluhhi is nevertheless used so often in the inscription
of the kings, and in such close connection with Egypt, that the kingdom
of Napata may merely be meant. Assurbanipal tells us that his brother
seduced into rebellion "the princes of Miluhhi whom he subjugated." Vol.
III. 170.
[162] Herod. 2, 29; Strabo, p. 786. Herodotus' statements, like those of
the later authorities from Eratosthenes to Strabo and Pliny, have the
second, more southern, Meroe in view, the ruins of which were found at
Begerauieh, above the mouth of the Atbara, some 150 miles as the crow
flies to the south of Napata. They describe this Meroe as situated on an
island, because the Atbara was regarded as an arm of the Nile. The ruins
at Begerauieh are less important and artistic than those of Napata, the
hieroglyphics are of another kind. As the Persians maintained their hold
on Napata, a new metropolis of the Ethiopian kingdom obviously grew up
at this place after the times of Cambyses and Darius, which adopted the
name and civilization of the old.
[163] Strabo, p. 790; Diod. 1, 33.
[164] "Antiq." 2, 10.
[165] "Hymn." 26, 9.
[166] "Hymn." 2, 146.
[167] "Hymn." 7, 69.
[168] "Hymn." 3, 97.
[169] Diod. 3, 26, 33; Strabo, p. 772.
[170] Plin. "H. N." 6, 35; Strabo, p. 822.
[171] Herod. 2, 42.
[172] Parthey, "Die Oase des Jupiter Ammon, Abh. Berl. Akad." 1862, s.
159 ff.
[173] Belzoni, "Narrative," p. 398.
[174] Ritter, "Erdkunde," 2, 1, 397.
[175] Lepsius, "Trinuthis, Z. Aegypt. Sprache," 1874, s. 76 ff.