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πέντε καὶ εἴκοσι. Manetho (fr. 66) gives Apries nineteen years, i. e. 589-570 B. C.; but he reigned nominally with Amasis for three years (c. 169 n.). H.'s ‘twenty-five’ is by any reckoning excessive.

Τυρίῳ. After the second capture of Jerusalem (586 B. C.) Nebuchadnezzar besieged Tyre in vain for thirteen years. On the retirement of the Babylonian, Apries' fleet gained the victories here spoken of; this early success of sea-power is more probable than Josephus' story (x. 11) that Nebuchadnezzar conquered Egypt and killed the king ‘in the twenty-third year of his reign’ (i. e. 582-581); the Jewish historian probably misinterpreted the prophecies (cf. Jer. xliii. 8-13 and Ezek. xxx. 10-19). Nebuchadnezzar, however, in a fragmentary inscription (for which cf. 27. 2 n.), mentions a campaign, perhaps victorious, against Amasis in 568 B. C., and Wiedemann thinks that Egypt was overrun by the Chaldaeans as far as Syene; to this invasion he referred the inscription of Nesuhor (cf. 30. 1 n.), and he still maintains his view, though the Nesuhor inscription has been proved to refer to a revolt of an Egyptian garrison and not with a Chaldaean war. The question must be left open (as by Meyer, i.1 497); on the one hand the silence of H. as to such a defeat is easily explicable by the vanity of his Egyptian informants, and Egypt would have been an easy prey, being weak from internal divisions (cc. 162-3); on the other hand, the prosperity of the reign of Amasis renders a Chaldaean conquest unlikely.


προφάσιος = ‘cause’ (i. 29. 1). For the fulfilment of this promise cf. iv. 159; the ‘cause’ was the offered alliance of the Libyan tribes against Cyrene; Apries, true to the policy of his family, was extending his hold along the Mediterranean coast.


No doubt Apries sent his ‘Egyptian’ troops, because his Greek ones could not be trusted against Greeks. The contemporary inscription (169 n.) seems to confirm H. as to the motives of the Egyptian army; ‘Haunebu (Greeks), one knows not their number, are traversing the North land . . . he (Apries) hath summoned them’ (King and Hall, p. 434).

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