previous next

H. rightly emphasizes the change in the character of his sources (147. 1; cf. 154. 4 and App. X. 10-11).


ἄνευ βασιλέος. H. for once drops his Egyptian sympathies and ironically says the natives ‘though freed’ could not get on ‘without a king’. Diodorus (i. 66) calls the state of Egypt ἀναρχία.

δυώδεκα. There is no trace of this ‘dodecarchy’ on the monuments; Diodorus (u. s.) repeats the figure, and adds that the twelve ἡγεμόνες ruled fifteen years, and that the victory of Psammetichus was at Momemphis. H.'s story seems to correspond to the broad facts, though it has been made too symmetrical, and adorned with religious motives by his priestly informants at Buto. The number ‘twelve’ is probably a Greek interpolation; Maspero (iii. 488 n.), who compares the ‘twelve great gods’ (c. 43) which the Greek version gave, says the monuments give us the names of more than twenty petty rulers at this time. The rivalry of chiefs at this period in the Delta is illustrated by a contemporary demotic romance published in 1897 (cf. Petrie, iii. 321 seq.). Lying between the Assyrian and the Ethiopian conquerors (cf. App. II. 3; X. 9), they had gained a state of semi-independence.

For Necho, perhaps the chief of them, cf. 152. 1 n.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: