Note 532 — Chapter IV · Egypt

Maspero, Pop. Stories, pp. 281–2; the story, however, is Ptolemaic and may be influenced by Hdt.; cp. Wiedemann, Hdt. II. 173. E. Meyer, Ges. Aeg. p. 366, n. 1, uses the demotic stories about Amasis’ drunkenness as proof that the Saite Pharaohs were not popular with their Egyptian subjects. It might as well be argued that Edward VII must have been unpopular in England because the masses like to associate him with horse-racing and cigars. When the Egyptians represented Amasis as drunken they paid him the compliment of making him like themselves. The catastrophe of 525 B.C. was helped on by the drunkenness of the servants sent by Amasis to capture Phanes the captain of the Greek mercenaries when he was on his way to desert to Persia (Hdt. III. 4). The Egyptian who “complained before his majesty King Cambyses on the subject of all the strangers who dwelt in the sanctuary of Neith (at Sais) to the end that they might be expelled” (so-called demotic chronicle, ap. Rev. Égy. 1880, p. 75) is a better witness as to the policy of Cambyses than as to the unpopularity of Amasis; cp. the sequel: “His Majesty ordained: expel all the strangers who dwell in the sanctuary of Neith: destroy their houses.”