Cambyses Ii

Achaemenid Great Kings

Cyrus II ( -559 ( -550? ) / -529 ( -530? )) Cambyses II ( -529 / -522 ) Bardiya ( -522 / -522 ) Darius I ( -522 ( -521? ) / -486 ) Xerxes I ( -486 ( 485? ) / -465 ) Artaxerxes I. ( -465 / -424 ) Xerxes II ( -424 / -424 ) Sogdianus ( -424 / -424 ( -423? )) Darius II ( -424 ( -423? ) / -404 ( -405? )) Artaxerxes II ( -404 / -359 ) Artaxerxes III ( -359 ( -358? ) / -338 ) Arses ( -338 / -336 ) Darius III ( -336 / -330 )

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Cambyses II, Greek / ( -522 ), great king Achaemenid the Persian empire from -529 to -522 in his death, is best known for having won the Egyptian.

Cyrus Cambyses had designated as his heir before his death, to the detriment of his eldest son Bardiya , which subsequently led to a rivalry between two brothers. The first years of the reign of Cambyses after his accession to the throne in -529 are poorly known, and we know only that he completed the conquest of countries overseas Euphrates by seizing the Phoenicia and Cyprus. Both navies allowed the Persian army to bring a powerful fleet.

Cambyses was the son of Cyrus II. Herodotus (III, 1) reported three traditions concerning his mother. Cyrus, after the conquest of Palestine , had designs on Egypt. Advised by an Egyptian magus, he demanded of Pharaoh Amasis he sent him one of his daughters. In fact, Amasis sent Nittis , a daughter of the previous pharaoh, Apries. According to Egyptian tradition, Nittis Cyrus married and gave birth to Cambyses. According to Persian tradition, Nittis married Cambyses. Finally, another tradition reports that Cassandana was the mother of Cambyses, and that it was so jealous of her son Nittis swore to avenge her.

Cambyses married his half-sisters, Atossa and Meroe and her sister Roxanne, it has no known children.

Titulary

		Horus name
Hieroglyph
Coding
Transliteration	( Unicode )	Hr sma-Tawi
Transliteration	( ASCII )	'
Transcript		Horus Semataoui
Translation		"He who unites the Two Lands"

		Name Nesout-Bity
Hieroglyph
Coding		(N5 S16 S29 U33)
Transliteration	( Unicode )	Mstj-R
Transliteration	( ASCII )	'
Transcript
Translation		"Heir of Re"

		Name Sa-Ra
Hieroglyph
Coding		(D58 M17 G17 V31 V13 X1)
Transliteration	( Unicode )	Kmbjt, KMBT, kmbD, gmwD
Transliteration	( ASCII )	'
Transcript
Translation		"Kembetjet or Cambyses'

Reign

The conquest of Egypt

Cambyses killing Psammetichus III

When Cambyses led his army to Egypt in -525 , the country is in a critical situation. Amasis had died the previous year, Psammetichus III succeeded him. Two allies of weight that have been lacking: Polycrates of Samos , the all-powerful master of Cyclades joined Cambyses and Phanes of Halicarnassus , a leading mercenary leader Carian troops of Pharaoh, and having a great knowledge of Egypt in particular pathways.

After conquering Gaza crossing to serve as a bridgehead to all campaigns to Egypt, the Persian army crossed the Sinai with the help of Arab tribes. The Egyptian army has massed Pelusium , gateway to Egypt. After a long siege, the Egyptians are forced to withdraw to Memphis , where they are again under siege. The city finally fell, Psammetichus III was captured and Cambyses penetrates winner in the capital.

As with the empire of Cyrus the Medes , Cambyses went to his account during the conquest of Egypt to Libya and Cyrenaica , and towards the Ethiopia. Libya and Cyrene submitted without fighting, by cons campaign to Ethiopia was a failure. Phoenician troops of the Persian army refused to attack Carthage , and expansion of the Persian empire under Cambyses stopped there.

Once masters of the country, Cambyses was crowned pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt. Tradition, reported mainly by the Greeks, because of Cambyses a man on the verge of madness, tyrannical and cruel. He was accused of destroying many temples and sacred idols, the massacre of much of the elite, as well as Persian Egypt, killing the bull Apis , which he has been flogging the corpse, etc.. It is clear that the Egyptians were particularly shocked by the excesses and plunder of the Persian army, but it does not appear that there was a willingness to systematic destruction of temples. Excavations have uncovered in the Serapeum Memphis mummy of the Apis died during the reign of Cambyses, and is accompanied by the pharaoh's traditional Persian inscriptions, indicating that Cambyses was involved in the cult of Apis as any other pharaoh. Moreover, the cruel punishment under his reign are actually quite typical of the habits of the Persian kings, the most famous of these was the punishment the judge Sisamns.

The death of Cambyses

In -522, Cambyses II learns the usurpation of the throne by his brother Bardiya. Then he returned in haste to Persia , he died in early summer of gangrene after a hamstring injury incurred in Syria. According to Herodotus , he died at Ecbatana ^{The lost army of Cambyses}

The lost army of Cambyses II, after an engraving of the ^nineteenth century.

According to Herodotus 3:26, Cambyses sent an army to threaten the oracle of Ammon in the Siwa oasis. The army, composed of 50,000 men, had crossed half of the desert when a violent sandstorm rose and buried the soldiers. Many Egyptologists and explorers such as Lszl Almsy and Tom Brown , long considered the story as a myth, the archeology could not find trace of the missing army .

In January 1933 , Charles Orde Wingate , later known as the creator of Chindits , allied troops who fought behind enemy lines against the Japanese during the Second World War , sought unsuccessfully for the missing army of Cambyses in the Egyptian Western Desert , then known as the Libyan desert.

From September 1983 to February 1984 , Gary S. Chafetz, American journalist and writer, led a six-month expedition to find the lost army of Cambyses in the Egyptian-Libyan border. 500 barrows (burial style Zoroastrian ) many of which contained bone fragments were discovered. The thermoluminescence allowed to From the year 1500 BC. BC, a thousand years before the army lost. Upon his return to Cairo, Chafetz was arrested in February 1984 for hijacking a plane in Egypt, despite the written permission granted to him by the Egyptian Geological Council to do so. He was selected 24 hours. The aircraft is now in the War Museum in Cairo, with the inscription: "Capturing an Israeli spy" ^{, ,} .

During the summer 2000 , a geological team from the University of Helwan , in search of oil in the Western Desert of Egypt, discovered fragments of well preserved textiles, metal objects like swords and human remains that was supposed to belong to the lost army of Cambyses. The Supreme Council of Antiquities announced that he would organize an expedition to explore the site, but gave no further information .

In November 2009 , two Italian archaeologists, Angelo and Alfredo Castiglioni, announced the discovery of human remains, tools and weapons, which date from the time of the Persian army. These objects were found near the oasis of Siwa . It would according to them the first evidence confirming the narrative of Herodotus.

Notes

Bibliography

• Pierre Briant, History of the Persian Empire: Cyrus Alexander, Fayard , Paris, 1996 ( ISBN 2-213-59667-0 ) .
• Paul Sussman, Army of sand, Presses de la Cite , Paris, 2004 ( ISBN 978-2258057913 ) .

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