of Egypt, on coming to the throne, found Sennacherib, the next king of Assyria, pursuing these

2 Kings,

successes, and threatening the dech. xix. 9. struction of the kingdom of Judæa. The prophet Isaiah had warned Hezekiah, the Jewish king, that trusting in Egyptian help was leaning on a bruised reed; and so it proved. Sennacherib marched towards

Fig. 145.

Egypt to attack Tirhakah instead of waiting to be Josephus, attacked. He came to the walls of Pelusium, the lib. x. 2. frontier city, and laid siege to it in due form. He dug his trenches and raised his platforms to a level with the city walls, and was nearly ready for the assault, when he heard that the Egyptian army was marching from Memphis to the relief of the place. But the Egyptians were stopped by a revolt, arising perhaps from a jealousy between the priesthood and the soldiers. The governor of Memphis, the priest of Pthah, whom Herodotus calls by his priestly Herodotus, title Sethon, who was the general of the Egyptian

lib. ii. 141. army, had unwisely quarrelled with the soldiers

about their allowance of land, at the rate of six acres a man, which they had been allowed to hold free of rent. He had treated them with great severity. So the soldiers refused to march with him. On this he encamped near Pelusium, with such citizens and volunteers as would join him, for the defence of the city. But the courage of these raw tribes was never tried. Before they met the enemy, the army of Sennacherib was no more. An unseen hand had Isaiah, ch. routed or destroyed the Assyrians in the night; or the loss of their supplies by sea had left them without food with the desert in their rear; the prophet Isaiah gave glory to Jehovah for the destruction of the nation's enemy, and the Egyptians set up a monument in the temple of Memphis in gratitude to their god Pthah.

Xxxvii. 36.

Perieg. 49.

(27) Pelusium was one of the naval stations of the Egyptians; its population was made up of sailors. Dionysii They were not Egyptians, but Phenicians and other seafaring Asiatics, who settled there of old. place had to be attacked by sea, as well as by land, and for the siege of Pelusium, the Assyrians employed a fleet of

The

2 Kings, xix. 23. Bonomi's

2nd Edit. Fig. 53.

Phenician vessels, or ships of Tarsus, to meet the land forces with timber. This was cut on Mount Lebanon, and put on shipboard at the city of Tyre, as we see in a picture carved on the Assyrian monuments (see Nineveh, Fig. 146). But the timber ships were lost in a storm, and with them probably the other necessary supplies for the land forces; and when the Hebrew Psalmist speaks of the enemy retreating in fear from the walls of Jerusalem, he also thanks God for breaking to pieces these ships of Tarsus with an east wind. Another Assyrian army, which, under the command of Tartan, had been sent against Ashdod, a

Psalms, xlviii. 7. before

Isaiah,

ch. xx. 1.

Fig. 146.

strong city of the Philistines, was more successful; it continued the siege of that place, and shortly afterwards took it.

(28) The kingdom of Ethiopia was now in its greatest prosperity. The Nubian gold mines added to its revenues; and kings who could hold Upper and Lower Egypt as a province did not forget to ornament their own cities with

VOL. I.

L

taste formed in Thebes. The grand temple built at Napata by Tirhakah was equal in size, though hardly in beauty, Hoskins's to those of Egypt. There the pigmy grotesque Ethiopia. figure of the god of Memphis stands against the columns, and the king styles himself Beloved by the Theban goddess Athor. Sabacothph had built on the large island of Argo, or Gagaudes, as Pliny calls it; and the colossal statues there still declare its grandeur (see Fig. 147). And the kings of these distant regions, eight hundred miles to the south of Memphis, were now meddling in the quarrels between the Assyrians and the Israelites. Under Tirhakah Egypt was less a province of Ethiopia than it had been under the two former Ethiopian kings. Tirhakah probably removed his seat of government from the poorer to the wealthier part of his dominions. The priests of Thebes Wilkinson, recorded on their walls his victories

Thebes. over the Assyrians, as to the honour of Egyptian arms; and thus Thebes again Burton's gave laws to Ethiopia. The city Excerpta, of Tanis now quietly submitted; and we find the name of Tirhakah among the sculptures which ornament the temple of that city.

pl. 41.

Fig. 147.

(29) Hitherto, the dates in our history, during the thousand years which we have hastily run over, have been settled by calculating backwards from this reign along the line of Egyptian kings and Jewish priests, by allowing about twenty years to a reign and thirty to a generation. Hence, the error at the beginning may have amounted to one or even two centuries, and must have grown less as we approached this time. But here we have arrived at certainty in chronology. Tirhakah, the Ethiopian, reigned in Egypt while Hezekiah reigned in Judæa, ch. xxxix. Sennacherib in Assyria, and Mardoch Empadus in Ptolemæi Babylon; and with this last begins the series of Syntax. recorded Babylonian eclipses on which the historian now builds his chronology, while he acknowledges his debt to the Alexandrian astronomers who have preserved

Isaiah,

Mag.

them for us, and to modern science which has calculated them. Henceforth the error in our dates ought not to be greater than twelve months, and is probably seldom twice as great; and with exactness in the dates follows greater certainty in history. The Egyptians kept no records of eclipses or of occultations of the stars.

Fig. 148.-Rameses II. suckled by a goddess.

148

CHAPTER IV.

RISE OF THE WESTERN HALF OF THE DELTA. THE KINGS

OF SAIS. B.C. 697-523.

(1) DURING the sixty years which follow the defeat of Sennacherib's attack upon Tirhakah, the Jewish annals are silent as to any wars between Assyria and Egypt. Of the two nations the Assyrians were the stronger; and whether from foreign conquest, or from other causes, Egypt was sinking in power. After the death of Tirhakah the kingdom fell to pieces; Thebes again lost its rank as the capital of Egypt; and the country was divided into several Herodotus, little monarchies. As many as twelve cities then ii. 147. found themselves the independent capitals of their several districts; and their twelve kings governed quietly without plunging the country into civil war. Memphis, though the largest city in the Delta, was not the governing city. Sethon of Memphis, who had commanded the army in the late reign, was the last of the kings or sovereign priests of that city that is known to us. But indeed of those who governed Memphis during the thousand years since Suphis, the builder of the pyramid, not many of their names have been saved. Manetho mentions none after Queen Nitocris. The kings who followed her when not kings of Thebes were subjects to the kings of Thebes. But though the kings or chief priests of Memphis after her time possessed little more than the title, and their sway may have been for the most part limited to the command over the temple services, yet they continued to add new buildings to their city. The ruins also of sixty pyramids on the range of Libyan hills show that they continued to build tombs for themselves of the same form, though not of the same lasting strength as before; and the brick pyramid of Asychis, which has been destroyed, was even larger than that of Nef-chofo, which has remained because built of stone. The tombs in the neighbourhood of the pyramids are as numerous as those near