| Psamtik I The Great | |
|---|---|
| |
| Pharaoh of Egypt | |
| Reign | 22 January 664 B.C. - 13 April 610 B.C. |
| Predecessor | Necho I |
| Successor | Necho II |
| Born | January 5, 689 B.C. Sais, Egypt |
| Died | April 13, 610 B.C. (aged 79) |
| Spouse | Khedebneithirbinet I |
| Issue | Necho II, Nitocris I, Tefnakht |
| Full name | |
| Horus Name: Aaib Nebty Name: Neba Golden Horus Name: Qenu Praenomen: Wahibra Nomen: Psamtik | |
| House | Tefnakht - Psamtik |
| Father | Necho I |
| Mother | Istemabet |
| Religion | Kemetism |
Wahibra Psamtik I (Egyptian: Wꜣḥ-jb-Rꜥ Psmṯk) was the first pharaoh of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty of Egypt, the Saite period, ruling from the city of Sais in the Nile delta between 664–610 BC. He was installed by Ashurbanipal of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, against the Kushite rulers of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, but later gained more autonomy as the Assyrian Empire declined.
Name[]
The Egyptian name psmṯk, pronounced as Psamāṯăk, was a short form of pꜣ-sꜣ-n-mṯk, meaning "the man of Meṯek", with Meṯek presumably a deity.
His name was rendered by the Assyrians as Pishamilki (Akkadian: Pišamilki), by the Ancient Greeks as Psammētikhos (Ψαμμητιχος), and by the Romans as Psammētichus.
Psamtik was also called Nabu-shezibanni (Akkadian: Nabu-šezibanni), meaning "O Nabu, save me!" by the Assyrians.
Biography[]
Ascension to the throne[]
Psamtik I is the son of Necho I. Together with his father, he first acted against Assyria, and then on the side of Assyria against Tanutamani. After the death of his father in a battle with the Kushites (Ethiopians in Greek sources), Psammetich fled to Assyria and helped Ashurbanipal expel Tanutamani from Egypt.
Taking advantage of the difficulties that Assyria experienced in the middle of the 7th century BC, Psamtik I declared himself an independent ruler around the fourth year of his reign (about 660 BC). We do not have any information on the basis of which we could judge how the separation of Egypt from Assyria occurred. According to some researchers, the Assyrian state at that time was busy with wars in other areas, and therefore it was more profitable for it to have an ally in Psamtik than an unreliable subject.
Psamtik first consolidated his power in Lower Egypt. As you know, the rulers of the northern regions were in a state of civil strife, which made the unification of the country extremely difficult. For this, Psamtik required significant military forces. In the northern part of the country, local rulers by origin were leaders of the Libyan army. To suppress them, Psamtik apparently had to rely not on local Libyan soldiers, but on alien soldiers.
According to Greek legend, Psamtik and his supporters were assisted by Greek mercenaries from Ionia and Caria in Asia Minor. As for the messages from Assyrian sources, it also followed from them that the Lydian king Gyges sent soldiers to Psammetichus. Then he ousted the Kushites Tanutamani from Thebes, and, probably, by 656 BC. e. united the entire country, becoming the legitimate pharaoh of all Egypt. The process of unifying Egypt was extremely difficult, and therefore Psamtik I had to spend a lot of time and effort. It is known that he began his reign in 664 BC. e. There is also no doubt that Thebes remained under the rule of the Ethiopian king Tanutamani until 658 or 657 BC. e. Psamtik I spent 9 years on the final unification of Egypt, until in 651 BC. e. The XXVI (Sais) dynasty was not firmly established on the throne.
Herodotus, who visited Egypt after the Persian conquest, in the second book of his History, left a number of interesting stories dedicated to the rise and reign of Psammetichus. It should be noted that the Greek historian's information about Egyptian history becomes generally reliable only from the end of the Sais period (even in reports about the rule of the Nubians there is confusion in names and events). Herodotus in his narrative named the high priest Ptah as the culprit for the exaltation of Psamtik I. According to Herodotus, after the liberation of the country from the Ethiopians, twelve rulers of Egypt gathered for sacrifices in the temple of Ptah (called Hephaestus in the work of Herodotus) in Memphis, but the high priest mistakenly gave out eleven (one less) golden libation bowls, and Psamtik resourcefully used instead of a bowl your bronze helmet. However, Psamtik did not take into account the previously announced prophecy of the oracle that the one who poured a libation from a copper bowl would receive power over all of Egypt. Accordingly, the other rulers saw in the act of their competitor an attempt to usurp supreme power. However, after interrogating Psammetichus, they came to the conclusion that his actions were spontaneous and unintentional, and decreed a lenient punishment for him - they deprived him of most of his possessions, leaving him with an insignificant coastal strip of land.
According to a popular legend, retold in this regard by Herodotus, Psammetichus, deprived of his possessions, felt unjustly punished and turned to the oracle Wadget (called Latona in Herodotus's work ) in Buto and received the following answer. The goddess promised Psammatikh victory over his rivals and the Assyrians if he accepted “copper people from the sea” into her service. Having met shipwrecked Greek hoplites dressed in copper armor (possibly Ionians and Carians who were engaged in sea robbery), the pharaoh decided that these were the “copper people from the sea” predicted by the oracle. Indeed, a large number of Greek mercenaries served in the army of the pharaohs of the Late Kingdom. But the reason for this was the colonization of the Mediterranean by the Greeks, which made Greece the main center of world civilization in antiquity.
The German historian Eduard Meyer, noting the real basis of the folk legend retold by Herodotus, suggested that the Ionian and Carian mercenaries were in fact not pirates, but reinforcements deliberately sent by the Lydian king Gyges to help in the joint struggle against Assyrian rule (as already mentioned, this guess is supported by Assyrian sources) .
In the second book, the second paragraph of Herodotus's History, there is a legend about how Psamtik decided to find out whether the Egyptians were the most ancient people by conducting an experiment with two children. According to it, Psamtik gave two newborn babies to a shepherd, giving instructions that no one should speak to them. The shepherd had to feed and care for them and listen to determine their first words. The shepherd fed the children milk. When two years later the shepherd returned home one day, the children rushed to him with the word “bekos” ( Greek: βεκὸς ). Psamtik learned that the word was Phrygian, meaning "bread". It was concluded that the Phrygians were a more ancient people than the Egyptians .
Strengthening Egypt[]
Under Psammetichus, significant centralization of the country was achieved, which made it possible to overcome the power of independent local rulers who tore the country apart throughout the Third Transition Period. Psamtik sought to subordinate the nomarchs to his power, and confirmed them in office. So the official Nesneshmet was appointed ruler successively in 9 regions, replacing one region with another at the discretion of the pharaoh. However, the power of some nomarchs was quite strong. The powerful ruler of Heracleopolis united in himself the power of a nomarch, the title of priest of a local deity, commanded shipping in almost the entire state, and ruled the middle part of the country.
The old ruler Montuemhet continued to sit in Thebes, whom Ashurbanipal even calls the king of Thebes. Although Montuemhet retained his privileges and powers, his power ceased to be hereditary. Thus, Montuemhet was succeeded not by his son Nesuptah, but by Pedichorus, appointed by Psammetichus. The situation in Thebes was further complicated by the presence there of the Nubian princess Amenerdis II, daughter of Taharqa, “the sovereign wife of Amon” (the high priestess, in whose place Kushite princesses had been appointed since the time of the Nubian ruler Kashta). In the 9th year of his reign, Psamtik gave his daughter Nitocris I to the Nubian princess as a “daughter” and successor.
But, despite such kinship with the rulers of Thebes, Psamtik was and remained a northern pharaoh. During his reign of more than half a century, he almost did not abandon his construction activities in Thebes, but he built a lot in Lower Egypt, especially in Memphis. To the detriment of the Theban god Amun, who for many centuries headed the Egyptian pantheon, Psammetich began to put forward the gods of the Delta - primarily the goddess Neith - the patroness of Sais, as well as the god of Memphis Ptah and ancient Osiris .
Herodotus' story about the construction of the new king in Memphis should be taken as gratitude to the Memphis priesthood for the assistance provided to Psamtik I during his accession to the throne. The northern priesthood could have been a significant support for Psamtik I. By this time, the late Egyptian temples had significant resources. They gave impetus to the development of the money economy. Obviously, the necessary funds for hiring foreign warriors to Psamtik were provided precisely by the temples and the priesthood. This means that in the person of the XXVI dynasty, a new, temple nobility took power into its own hands. It was she who kept the process of money circulation under her control. The development of the monetary economy was in the interests of this temple nobility and led to the state unity of the country.
As already mentioned, in the struggle for the unification of the country in the future, Psamtik relied on Greek mercenaries, and not native Egyptians, which caused discontent among the Egyptians. From the narrative of Psammetichus, it is known that up to 240,000 Egyptian warriors fled to Nubia after they were not given relief after their three years of frontier duty. If we discard the absolutely fantastic number of defectors and the folklore legend about the pharaoh's prayers addressed to them, then the real background of the story outlined by Herodotus is revealed - the strengthening of contradictions between the traditional military elite of Libyan origin and the Greek-speaking mercenaries who had recently settled in Egypt.
Psamtik patronized Greek merchants and artisans. Under him, Greek trading posts arose in the Delta, of which the port of Naucratis was especially large. Psammetichus's authority in the Greek world was so great that he helped promote Egyptian cultural influences in the Mediterranean. The tyrant of Corinth, Periander, valued good relations with Sais Egypt and even named his nephew after the Egyptian pharaoh, who, due to the death of all five sons of the tyrant, succeeded in 585 BC. e. power over the polis .
Intending to restore the lost greatness of Egypt, Psamtik turned to the period of the Old Kingdom as the most consistent with the spirit of the Egyptian people. All subsequent changes, especially those relating to the period of the "cosmopolitan" New Kingdom, were considered foreign and persecuted. Through the efforts of the priesthood, which supported Psamtik and his successors, later additions were erased from the religious tradition of the Late Kingdom. Naturally, all foreign deities, mainly of Semitic origin, were excluded from the pantheon. Thus, Seth, who, despite his inherent cunning and meanness, was initially widely revered as the god of war, acquires the features of a distinct embodiment of all vices and replaces Apep as the main negative character of Egyptian mythology.
On the other hand, the cults of Isis, Bast and the deified Imhotep reached the greatest spread, and the temples of the Delta (Sais, Buto, Bubastis and Athribis ) became the richest in the country, pushing into the background the temples of ancient Ra, Amun and Ptah. The veneration of the kings of the Early and Old Kingdoms was restored. And their mastabas and pyramids in the vicinity of the ancient capital of Egypt, Memphis, as well as Abydos, were restored.
Foreign policy activities[]
Psamtik made several attempts to restore Egyptian rule in Asia, but the long (Greek sources claim that it lasted 29 years - an absolute record in world history - although the reliability of this information is disputed by modern science) siege of the Philistine Ashdod took too much strength from the Egyptians, and the invasion Scythian tribes who passed through all of Assyria and penetrated south all the way to the borders of Egypt, around 625 BC. e. forced to abandon territorial expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean. Herodotus says that Psamtik bought them off with rich gifts, but, more likely, they were stopped with the help of the power of the Egyptian state. The strengthening of Babylonia and Media prompted Psamtik to support Assyria at the end of his reign.
Death[]
Psamtik I died around 610 BC. e. Sextus Africanus, quoting Manetho, indicated that the king reigned for 54 years, but Eusebius of Caesarea, citing the same Manetho, wrote: Psamtik reigned 45 years (from Sincellus ) or even 44 years (Armenian version).
The wife of Psamtik I was Mehetenveskheta, daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis Harsies.
Wives[]
Psamtik's chief wife was Mehytenweskhet, the daughter of Harsiese, the vizier of the North and High Priest of Re at Heliopolis. Psamtik and Mehytenweskhet were the parents of Necho II, Merneith, and the Divine Adoratrice Nitocris I.
Psamtik's father-in-law—the aforementioned Harsiese—was married twice: to Sheta, with whom he had a daughter named Naneferheres, and to an unknown woman, by whom he had both Djedkare, who succeeded him as vizier of the North, and Mehytenweskhet.