in the hands of a Saite
dynasty was a more formidable foe than when ruled by the Ethiopians. The
report of the revolution of which Apries had become a victim at length
determined him to act; the annihilation of the Hellenic troops, and the
dismay which the defeat at Irasa had occasioned in the hearts of
the Egyptians, seemed to offer an opportunity too favourable to be
neglected. The campaign was opened by Nebuchadrezzar about 568, in the
thirty-seventh year of his reign,* but we have no certain information as
to the issue of his enterprise.

* A fragment of his Annals, discovered by Pinches, mentions
in the thirty-seventh year of his reign a campaign against
[Ah]masu, King of Egypt; and Wiedemann, from the evidence of
this document combined with the information derived from one
of the monuments in the Louvre, thought that the fact of a
conquest of Egypt as far as Syeno might be admitted; at that
point the Egyptian general Nsihor would have defeated the
Chaldaeans and repelled the invasion, and this event would
have taken place during the joint reign of Apries and
Amasis. A more attentive examination of the Egyptian
monument shows that it refers not to a Chaldaean war, but to
a rebellion of the garrisons in the south of Egypt,
including the Greek and Semitic auxiliaries.

According to Chaldaean tradition, Nebuchadrezzar actually invaded the
valley of the Nile and converted Egypt into a Babylonian province,
with Amasis as its satrap.* We may well believe that Amasis lost the
conquests won by his predecessor in Phoenicia, if, indeed, they still
belonged to Egypt at his accession: but there is nothing to indicate
that the Chaldaeans ever entered Egypt itself and repeated the Assyrian
exploit of a century before.

* These events would have taken place in the twenty-third
year of Nebuchadrezzar; the reigning king (Apries) being
killed and his place taken by one of his generals (Amasis),
who remained a satrap of the Babylonian empire.

This was Nebuchadrezzar's last war, the last at least of which history
makes any mention. As a fact, the kings of the second Babylonian empire
do not seem to have been the impetuous conquerors which we have fancied
them to be. We see them as they are depicted to us in the visions of the
Hebrew prophets, who, regarding them and their nation as a scourge in
the hands of God, had no colours vivid enough or i