Cambyses II: the conqueror of Egypt

Cambyses II inherited the largest empire the world had yet seen and added to it one of the oldest and richest kingdoms of all: Egypt. With the Nile in Persian hands, the empire stretched from the Aegean to Central Asia and from the Black Sea to the edge of the Sahara. Yet he is one of the most maligned kings in history. Herodotus, writing about a century later and drawing on Egyptian priests who hated him, made him the model of a ruler driven mad by power. Modern historians, reading the inscriptions and papyri of his own time, are not so sure.²

Early life

Cambyses was the eldest son of Cyrus the Great and his wife Cassandane, an Achaemenid noblewoman; his year of birth is not known. The Behistun inscription says he had a brother, Bardiya, "of the same mother and the same father." Ctesias later claimed that their mother was a Median princess, but historians do not trust him on this.³

When Cyrus took Babylon in 539 BC, he made his son king of the city. On 27 March 538, a Babylonian chronicle records, Cambyses took part in the rites of the New Year festival, the ceremony by which a Babylonian king received his power from the gods. The damaged text suggests an incident: he and his men entered the temple armed. He held the title "king of Babylon" only briefly, about nine months according to the Iranica, a year according to Livius, and why it was taken away is unknown. He went on living and doing business in Babylonia as crown prince.⁴

King of kings

In 530 BC Cyrus marched against the Massagetae in Central Asia. Before he left he named Cambyses his heir, and for some months father and son both bore the title "king of Babylon, king of the lands." Herodotus says Cambyses set out on the campaign with his father but was sent home before the battle in which Cyrus was killed. Babylonian records show the son in sole command by the end of 530.⁵

Like any new king he needed the loyalty of the great Persian families. He married Phaidyme, daughter of the nobleman Otanes, and two of his own full sisters, Atossa and Roxane. Herodotus saw the marriages to his sisters as a sign of madness; Livius points out that such unions were not unusual in the Persian world.⁶

The road to Egypt

Egypt was the one great power left beyond Persian reach. Before he set out, according to the Behistun inscription, Cambyses had his brother Bardiya secretly killed, so that no rival could seize the throne in his absence. Herodotus places the murder later, during the Egyptian campaign; Livius and the Iranica both judge the inscription's date more likely.⁷

The war was won partly before it began. Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos and an ally of Egypt, changed sides and sent ships to the Persian fleet. Phanes, a Greek officer in the Egyptian army, deserted to Cambyses and gave him valuable intelligence about the country and its defenses. Arab chiefs supplied water for the hardest stretch of the march, the crossing of the Sinai desert from Gaza to the Nile.⁸

Pelusium and Memphis

The old pharaoh Amasis died while the Persians were preparing, and his son Psamtik III had reigned only a few months when the invaders reached Pelusium, the fortress at the eastern edge of the Nile Delta. There, in the spring of 525 BC, the Egyptian army was beaten in a major battle. The Egyptians fell back on Memphis, the capital, which the Persians took after a siege. Psamtik was captured alive.⁹

Resistance collapsed. By the summer all of Egypt was in Persian hands, and the Libyans and the Greek cities of Cyrene and Barca to the west sent their submission of their own accord. In only a few months Cambyses had added the whole of the Nile valley to the empire.¹⁰

Pharaoh

Cambyses was installed as king of Egypt with the traditional pharaonic titles. One of the Egyptians who served him was Udjahorresnet, who had commanded the pharaoh's fleet and became the new king's chief physician. In the autobiography carved on his statue, Udjahorresnet tells how he persuaded Cambyses to move Persian troops out of the temple of the goddess Neith at Sais and to restore its rites; the king himself worshiped there and made offerings to the Egyptian gods.¹¹

Cambyses also cut the large revenues that the last pharaohs had granted to the temples, a measure the Egyptian priesthood did not forgive.¹²

Beyond Egypt

From Egypt, Cambyses looked further. Herodotus says he planned three expeditions: against Carthage, against the oasis of Ammon (Siwa) in the western desert, and against the Ethiopians, the kingdom of Kush on the upper Nile. The attack on Carthage was never attempted. The force sent to Ammon, Herodotus reports, was overwhelmed by a sandstorm and never seen again; Livius suspects the story was invented.¹³

Cambyses led the southern march himself. He annexed the northern part of Nubia, beyond the First Cataract, but ran short of supplies and had to turn back with heavy losses. While he was away, the Egyptians rose against Persian rule, and on his return to Memphis he put the revolt down harshly. The Iranica dates his return to the end of 524 BC, Livius to the autumn of 523.¹⁴

Command style

The Egyptian campaign shows a king who prepared carefully and won through diplomacy and logistics as much as on the battlefield. He bought or won over Egypt's allies and officers before a blow was struck, secured water for the desert crossing, and brought a fleet from his subject peoples to support the army. Once Egypt was his, he ruled through Egyptians who knew the country, as Cyrus had done in Babylon.¹⁵

His weakness showed beyond the frontier. The Nubian expedition, launched without enough provisions into country he did not know, ended in a costly retreat, and the desert swallowed (or, if Livius is right, never received) the column sent to Siwa. Whether his ambitions in Africa were a real plan of conquest or, as Livius suggests, the show of power expected of a new pharaoh, they were the least successful part of his reign.¹⁶

Death

On 11 March 522 BC, while Cambyses was still in Egypt, a man claiming to be his brother Bardiya rose in revolt in Persia, and Persia, Media and the other provinces went over to him. Cambyses set out for home. He died on the way, in Syria, in circumstances that remain a mystery. The Behistun inscription says only that he "died his own death," which scholars read as a natural death, an accident or suicide. Herodotus tells that as he mounted his horse the cap fell off his sword sheath and the blade wounded him in the thigh, the very spot where, in his story, the king had stabbed the sacred bull Apis.¹⁷

The date is uncertain as well. Britannica puts his death in the summer of 522; the Iranica entry on Cambyses says he was still alive after 1 July, while its entry on Bardiya gives the spring. He left no children. Among the officers of his household was his spear bearer, Darius, who in September killed the usurper and took the throne.¹⁸ › Darius the Great

Legacy and memory

Herodotus fixed the image that lasted for two thousand years. He lists a catalogue of crimes: Cambyses had the embalmed body of Amasis dragged from its tomb, flogged and burned; he stabbed the Apis bull; he shot the son of his courtier Prexaspes to prove he was not drunk. Only a madman, Herodotus concludes, would mock the gods and customs of another people. He adds that the Persians called Cyrus a father and Cambyses a master, because he was harsh and cared for no one.¹⁹

Egyptian evidence undermines the story of the bull. The Iranica cites an official epitaph for an Apis that died in August 525 and was buried in a granite sarcophagus made at Cambyses' order; Livius dates the death to September 524 and notes that the funeral monument from the Serapeum at Saqqara shows Cambyses worshiping the sacred bull. Both conclude that the tales of sacrilege came largely from Egyptian priests angry at the loss of their revenues, and Britannica agrees that his early rule in Egypt was conciliatory.²⁰

His conquest outlived him. Egypt remained a Persian satrapy, the period Egyptologists count as the 27th Dynasty, and the statue of Udjahorresnet, describing the Persian kings as respectful of Egyptian tradition, still stands in the Vatican as a rare voice from inside his reign.²¹

Meet his father Cyrus the Great and his successor Darius the Great, or explore the other great commanders of the Persian Empire and the greatest battles of the Persian Empire.