Cambise
Cambise
| Cambise 525-522 BC. dynasty The second king of the Persians and Medi, he governed Egypt for two years, founding the XVII dynasty. His father, the famous Ciro, had already reunited under his scepter Iran, Anatolia and the Babylon empire. In 525, the great army defeated Psammetico III near Pelusio and occupied Menfi. Cambise was acclaimed as the pharaoh from the clergy in Sais, the mother-city of the previous dynasty: this dynastic acceptance by the Egyptians marks a really important date. An Apis bull is sacrificed, on his beautiful sarchophagus a dedication in Cambise’s name is engraved: Erodoto will tell that he had killed the sacred animal himself and will dwell on the intemperance, on the madness and on the cruelty of Ciro’s son, and also on the defeats he suffered in Etiope and in the Libyan desert. Apis’s presumed omicide represents one of the events through which, some Egyptians began to think the foreign dominators as desecrators. The bad publicity that the Persian opinion gave to Cambise under Dario, the resentment against the Asiatic dominators that was in Egypt, increased in Erodoto the caricature he made of a mad tyrant, that was by chance between two wise founders, Ciro and Dario. |
