te experience of men and
things, his intimate knowledge of the resources of Egypt, his talents as
a soldier and a general, his personal prestige, his Hellenic leanings,
commanded the confidence of his own men and the respect of foreigners;
but what could be expected of his unknown successor, and who could say
whether he were equal to the heavy task which fate had assigned to him?
The whole of the Nile valley was a prey to gloomy presentiment.*

* Psammetichus III. has left us very few monuments, which is
accounted for by the extreme shortness of his reign. For the
same reason doubtless several writers of classical times
have ignored his existence, and have made the conquest of
Egypt take place under Amasis. Ctesias calls the Pharaoh
Amyrtseus, and gives the same name to those who rebelled
against the Persians in his own time, and he had an account
of the history of the conquest entirely different from that
of Herodotus.

Egypt was threatened not only, as in the previous century, by the
nations of the Tigris and Euphrates, but all Asia, from the Indus to the
Hellespont, was about to fall on her to crush her. She was destitute
of all human help and allies, and the gods themselves appeared to have
forsaken her. The fellahin, inspired with vague alarm, recognised evil
omens in all around them. Rain is rare in the Thebaid, and storms occur
there only twice or three times in a century: but a few days after the
accession of Psammetichus, a shower of fine rain fell at Thebes, an
event, so it was stated with the exaggeration characteristic of the
bearers of ill news, which had never before occurred.*

* The inhabitants of the Said have, up to our own time,
always considered rain in the valley as an ill-omened event.
They used to say in the beginning of the nineteenth century,
when speaking of Napoleon's expedition, "We knew that
misfortune threatened us, because it rained at Luxor shortly
before the French came." Wilkinson assures us that rain is
not so rare at Thebes as Herodotus thought: he speaks of
five or six showers a year, and of a great storm on an
average every ten years. But even he admits that it is
confined to the mountain district, and does not reach the
plain: I never heard of rain at Luxor during the six winters
that I spent in Upper Egypt.

Pharaoh hastened to meet the invader with all the men, chariots,