clad in
their coats of mail, landed not far from his abode. The messenger who
brought tidings of their advent had never before seen a soldier fully
armed, and reported that brazen men had issued from the waves and
were pillaging the country. Psammetichus, realising at once that the
prediction was being fulfilled, ran to meet the strangers, enrolled them
in his service, and with their aid overthrew successively his eleven
rivals.*

* The account given by Diodorus of these events is in
general derived from that of Herodotus, with additional
details borrowed directly or indirectly from some historian
of the same epoch, perhaps Hellanicus of Mitylene: the
reason of the persecution endured by Psammetichus is,
according to him, not the fear of seeing the prediction
fulfilled, but jealousy of the wealth the Saite prince had
acquired by his commerce with the Greeks. I have separated
the narrative of Herodotus from his account of the Labyrinth
which did not originally belong to it, but was connected
with a different cycle of legends. The original romance was
part of the cycle which grew up around the oracle of Buto,
so celebrated in Egypt at the Persian epoch, several other
fragments of which are preserved in Herodotus; it had been
mixed up with one of the versions of the stories relating to
the Labyrinth, probably by some dragoman of the Fayyum. The
number twelve does not correspond with the information
furnished by the Assyrian texts, which enumerate more than
twenty Egyptian princes; it is perhaps of Greek origin, like
the _twelve_ great gods which the informants of Herodotus
tried to make out in Egypt, and was introduced into the
Egyptian version by a Greek interpreter.

A brazen helmet and an oracle had dethroned him; another oracle and
brazen men had replaced him on his throne. A shorter version of these
events made no mention of the twelve kings, but related instead that a
certain Pharaoh named Tementhes had been warned by the oracle of Amon to
beware of cocks. Now Psammetichus had as a companion in exile a Carian
named Pigres, and in conversing with him one day, he learned by chance
that the Carians had been the first people to wear crested helmets; he
recalled at once the words of the oracle, and hired from Asia a number
of these "cocks," with whose assistance he revolted and overthrew his
suzerain in battle