Chapter Fifteen - The Persian Takeover

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Persian Takeover

BY THE SIXTH century BCE, Egypt was a shadow of its former self. The temples were still impressive. The rituals still ran on schedule. But the country had been ruled by Libyans, Nubians, and competing priesthoods for generations. The idea of a strong, central pharaoh was mostly symbolic, and the real power was drifting east.

Enter: the Persians.

At the time, the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great and later Darius I was expanding like wildfire. It had already swallowed up Babylon, Lydia, and much of Central Asia. Egypt was next.

In 525 BCE, the Persian king Cambyses II, son of Cyrus, invaded Egypt. He defeated the Egyptian forces at the Battle of Pelusium, a clash so lopsided that it became legend. According to one account, Cambyses ordered his soldiers to paint cats on their shields, knowing that Egyptians considered cats sacred and wouldn’t fight as aggressively. Whether that’s true or not, the result was clear: Persia won, and Egypt became part of a foreign empire.

Cambyses declared himself pharaoh, but he didn’t exactly win hearts and minds. Egyptian sources portray him as erratic and disrespectful, possibly insane. He allegedly desecrated temples, insulted the gods, and ruled with cruelty. Whether those stories are exaggerated or not, the cultural message was clear: this wasn’t Egyptian rule. This was occupation.

After Cambyses died, Darius I tried to do better. He respected Egyptian customs, built temples, and even completed some construction projects that earlier native kings had left unfinished. He let the priests do their thing and tried to act more like a traditional pharaoh. But at the end of the day, he was still a foreign emperor, and Egypt was still a conquered land.

There were revolts. Always. But none of them stuck.

Persia would rule Egypt for over a century, interrupted only briefly by a few native uprisings that managed to carve out independence for a few decades here and there, only to be crushed or reabsorbed later. By the time Artaxerxes III reconquered Egypt in 343 BCE, any illusion of self-rule was gone.

Egypt was no longer calling the shots.

It was part of someone else’s map.

And just when it seemed like things couldn’t get any more foreign, another outsider arrived. This one from even farther away.

His name was Alexander.