Cambyses II

Cambyses was the elder son of Cyrus the Great and Cassandane;^[1] the report of Ctesias that his mother was Amytis, a daughter of the Median king Astyages, Dandamayev judges unreliable.^[2] By the Behistun inscription he had a full brother, Bardiya, of the same mother and father,^[3] the prince whose fate would become the pivot of the succession. Following Persian royal custom as the Greeks describe it, Cambyses married two of his own full sisters. Herodotus names one of them later as Atossa, the future wife of Darius and mother of Xerxes, and leaves the younger unnamed; Ctesias calls a sister-wife Roxane. He also married Phaidyme, daughter of the noble Otanes.^[1][4] Before the sister-marriages, Herodotus says, Cambyses consulted the royal judges, who answered him carefully: "they did not find any law allowing a brother to take his sister to wife, but they found a law that the king of the Persians might do whatever he pleased."^[5] The anecdote is told as a portrait of despotism, but the practice it describes had a long Iranian future: Boyce set the marriages in the context of the enduring Zoroastrian institution of next-of-kin marriage (xᵛaētvadatha) rather than treating them as one man's transgression, though the suggestion that Cambyses was instead copying pharaonic custom, in line with his claim to the Egyptian throne, has also been made.^[5]

Cambyses was groomed for rule from within his father's lifetime, and the Babylonian documents let that grooming be watched almost year by year. On the Cyrus Cylinder Cyrus states that Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon, had blessed both himself and his son Cambyses; and soon after the conquest of Mesopotamia in 539 BCE Cyrus made Cambyses king of Babylon. A damaged passage in the chronicle of Nabonidus reports that, to legitimise the appointment, Cambyses took part in the prescribed royal ritual at the Babylonian New Year festival on 27 March 538 BCE, receiving the royal sceptre in Esagila, the temple of Marduk.^[6] (A famous reconstruction by A. L. Oppenheim, in which Cambyses defiantly entered the temple armed and in Elamite dress out of religious hostility, has not stood: Boyce objected that "the passage has been restored and interpreted in the light of Perso-Egyptian propaganda against Cambyses" rather than providing independent evidence for it, and Dandamaev agreed.)^[5][7]

The kingship of Babylon was a short apprenticeship. Dated tablets show Cambyses as king of Babylon for only about nine months of 538, and only of the city and the north; the south went on dating by Cyrus alone, and Cyrus removed his son from the office before the year was out, for reasons unknown.^[7] Yet the prince stayed in Mesopotamia and ran a working household there: he kept a house at Sippar, and legal texts of the 530s name the steward, the scribe-interpreter, the agents and the seal-cutter of "the crown prince Cambyses", who can even be watched lending silver against a house as security.^[7] At the very end of the reign the titles briefly merge: a handful of tablets from the summer and autumn of 530 are dated jointly by Cyrus and Cambyses, both as king, an arrangement without any Persian parallel. Some scholars read it as a formal co-regency proclaimed before Cyrus rode east against the Massagetai; as Waters puts it, "Some scholars take it as evidence for co-regency, but the episode remains an enigma."^[8][7] Herodotus preserves the same transition in narrative form: Cyrus took Cambyses part of the way on the last campaign and then, as designated heir, sent him back before the fatal battle.^[1] Cyrus fell, and Cambyses became Great King.

His first recorded acts were filial. Ctesias has him send his father's body back to Persia for burial in the tomb at Pasargadae, the first duty of a legitimate successor; and Aristobulus, who saw the tomb with Alexander two centuries later, reports that the magi who guarded it had held their office "ever since the time of Cambyses the son of Cyrus had kept watch over the tomb, the duty passing from father to son", supported by daily offerings from the king. The cult of the dead founder, in other words, was almost certainly Cambyses' endowment.^[9][5] The Persians' own settled judgement of the founders, preserved by Herodotus, gave each of the first three kings a temper, and Cambyses' was severity:

Dareios was a shopkeeper, Cambyses a master, and Cyrus a father; the one because he dealt with all his affairs like a shopkeeper, the second because he was harsh and had little regard for any one, and the other because he was gentle and contrived for them all things good.

Herodotus 3.89, trans. Macaulay^[1]

The conquest of Egypt was prepared long before it was fought. Egypt was the one major old kingdom Cyrus had left untaken, and Briant has argued that the campaign was not a mad grasp at the ends of the earth but the built-in consequence of Cyrus's own arrangements: once Babylonia and Trans-Euphrates (the lands "across the River") were joined in a single satrapy reaching toward the Sinai, a collision with the power that had contested that corridor for centuries followed of itself.^[10] The Egypt that awaited him was no soft target. The pharaoh Amasis (r. 570–526) presided over a prosperous country, kept a fleet and an army stiffened with Carian and Greek mercenaries, had taken Cyprus, and had built a diplomatic web across the Greek world, from the temple of Delphi to an alliance with Polycrates, the ambitious tyrant of Samos.^[10]

Cambyses dismantled that position piece by piece. Phoenicia and Cyprus, with the largest fleets of the eastern Mediterranean, came over to Persia voluntarily, and out of their squadrons Cambyses built something Persia had never had. In Briant's judgement, "Cambyses was the real creator of the Persian Navy, which was built with men and materials levied from both Phoenicia and Asia Minor."^[10] Polycrates read the wind and abandoned the Egyptian alliance, sending forty triremes to the Persian expedition (manned, Herodotus says, with the citizens he most suspected, with a request that they not be sent home).^[1] Phanes of Halicarnassus, a mercenary officer with a grudge against Amasis and precise knowledge of Egypt's defences, escaped his pursuers and defected to Cambyses; and a treaty with the king of the Arabs, whose camels carried water-skins into the desert, solved the one problem that had defeated Near Eastern armies before, the waterless crossing of the Sinai.^[1][4] The Persians remembered the result as an achievement to set beside Cyrus's own: asked how he compared with his father, the courtiers answered, as Herodotus reports, that "he was better than his father, because he had all the latter's possessions, and had added to them Egypt and the sea."^[4]

Egypt's position collapsed at the worst moment: Amasis died in 526, on the eve of the invasion, leaving his son Psammetichus III (Herodotus's Psammenitus) a throne he would hold for six months. The one great battle was fought in the spring of 525 at Pelusium, where the desert road meets the easternmost mouth of the Nile. It was bloody and stubborn; Herodotus, visiting the field two generations later, says the bones of the dead still lay heaped there, and later tradition adds a hard siege of the frontier fortress itself.^[1][7] The beaten army fell back on Memphis. Cambyses sent a herald upstream in a Mytilenean ship to demand surrender; the defenders destroyed the boat and butchered the crew, and after a siege the city fell and the killing was answered in kind, ten leading Egyptians condemned for every man of the herald's party, the pharaoh's own son at their head.^[1] The Libyans and the Greek cities of Cyrene and Barca submitted of their own accord. By late summer 525 the whole country was in Persian hands, and Egypt entered the satrapal order it would inhabit, with two long interruptions, until Alexander. The conventional date is 525; Quack's redating puts the invasion in 527–526, a reminder of how thin the fixed points are.^[11]

The fate of the defeated king became one of Herodotus's great set pieces: Psammenitus, tested by Cambyses, watches his daughter pass as a slave and his son led out to death with dry eyes, and breaks only at the sight of an old companion begging; Cambyses, moved, orders the son spared, too late. Whatever the truth of the scene, its shape is Greek moral theatre, and its sequel is political fact: the deposed pharaoh lived at court until he was caught fomenting revolt among the Egyptians, and died by drinking bull's blood.^[1][10] Before leaving the country Cambyses set a Persian, Aryandes, over Egypt as its first satrap.^[10]

What kind of king Egypt had acquired, the Egyptian documents answer with one voice: a pharaoh. Cambyses was formally installed in Egyptian style, took the titulary in due form, and appears in the record as "king of Upper and Lower Egypt", with the Horus-name Smatawy ("Uniter of the Two Lands") and the throne-name Mesutire ("Offspring of Ra").^[12] An office seal cut for the new reign styles him in full pharaonic form:

The king of Upper and Lower Egypt Cambyses, beloved of (the goddess) Wadjet, lady of (the city of) Imet, the great, the mistress of the heaven, the Eye of the Sun, mistress of gods (to whom) life is given like the sun.

The Egyptian seal of Cambyses, trans. Dandamaev^[7]

Traces on the stone show the name cut over an erasure, an official of Amasis or Psammetichus quietly re-tooled for the new master, which is itself a miniature of how the conquest worked.^[7] He went to Sais, the Saite dynastic capital, prostrated himself before the goddess Neith at her temple, and offered sacrifice to the Egyptian gods.^[2]

The legitimation ran deeper than ceremony. The Demotic evidence suggests Cambyses did not count Psammetichus III a lawful king at all: he dated his Egyptian reign not from the conquest but from his accession in Persia in 530, absorbing his predecessor's months, and presented himself as the successor of Amasis, and behind Amasis of the old line.^[7] Persian propaganda supplied the genealogy to match, the story that Cambyses was the son of Cyrus by Nitetis, a daughter of the pharaoh Apries whom Amasis had overthrown, and so the rightful avenging heir; Herodotus reports the tale in three versions and the Egyptians' own counter-claim, and the historian can watch legitimacy being manufactured on both sides.^[1][4] Even the most notorious outrage at Sais may belong here rather than in the madness file: the exhumation and burning of Amasis's mummy, which Herodotus tells as sacrilege against fire itself, reads on the Egyptian side as a formal damnatio of a usurper, since burning a corpse branded the dead man a criminal and enemy of Ra. Destroying Amasis was not an attack on Egypt; it was a statement about who Egypt's lawful kings had been.^[1][4]

The fullest native witness to all this is Udjahorresnet, priest of Neith, chief physician, and commander of the royal fleet under Amasis and Psammetichus III, who passed into the service of Cambyses and then of Darius. His autobiography, carved over a green basalt naophorous statue now in the Vatican, is the single most important Egyptian text of the Persian conquest. It reports the invasion without illusion, "Cambyses came to Egypt, the foreign peoples of every foreign land being with him", and its outcome without euphemism: "He gained majesty of this land in its entirety. They established themselves in it, and he was Great Ruler of Egypt and Great Chief of all foreign lands."^[12] Then it shows the conquest being domesticated. It was Udjahorresnet who framed the king's Egyptian identity ("I composed his titulary in his name of King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mesutire"); who persuaded him of the greatness of Sais; and who obtained the expulsion of the foreign soldiers squatting in the temple of Neith: "Then his majesty commanded to expel all the foreigners who dwelt in the temple of Neith, to tear down their houses and their entire refuse which was in the temple."^[12] The climax is a Persian king performing pharaonic piety in person:

The King of Upper and Lower Egypt came to Sais. His majesty betook himself to the temple of Neith. He touched the ground before her very great majesty as every king had done. He organised a great feast of all good things for Neith, the great one, the mother of god, and the great gods who are in Sais, as every excellent king had done.

The statue-inscription of Udjahorresnet, trans. Kuhrt^[12]

The text must be read for what it is: an apologia by the most successful collaborator of the age, composed to justify his change of masters and to bank his services with the gods (A. B. Lloyd's study calls it a "collaborator's testament"). Its refrain, that Cambyses acted "as every king had done", is precisely the claim a collaborator needed to be true; and it is silent about the one measure Cambyses took against the temples (below), which touched Sais too.^[13][7] Yet it does not pretend the conquest was gentle. Udjahorresnet boasts that "I saved its people from the very great disaster, which befell in the entire land", a phrase some read as conventional pious formula and others, with Lloyd, as the invasion itself, the hostile foreign chief transfigured by ritual into a legitimate king.^[12][13] Briant drew the structural conclusion: "in the same way that Cyrus was Babylonized, Cambyses in Egypt was Egyptianized by the Egyptians who wished to collaborate with the new power". The pharaoh Cambyses was a joint production of the conqueror and the conquered elite, and the Cyrus Cylinder is its exact Babylonian twin (see The Cyrus Cylinder).^[10]

Behind the later hatred of Cambyses most scholars have found not a stabbed god but a ledger. A Demotic text preserved on the back of the papyrus that carries the so-called Demotic Chronicle (a Ptolemaic compilation, centuries later and to be used with care) records a decree of Cambyses on the incomes of the Egyptian temples. Wood, cattle, birds and grain that the sanctuaries had received from the crown "in the time of Pharaoh Amasis" were cut off or made the priests' own responsibility, with only three leading temples, Memphis among them, keeping their full allocation:

The silver, cattle, birds, cereal (and) all the other things which used to be given to the sanctuaries of the gods, in the time of Pharaoh - life, prosperity, health - Amasis - life prosperity, health -, - with the exception of the three sanctuaries above - Cambyses ordered the following: 'Do not give them to the gods'.

The verso of the Demotic Chronicle, trans. Brosius^[13]

The stelae recording royal generosity to the temples, numerous before 525, cease under Cambyses; the tribute burden demonstrably rose.^[10] Here, most likely, is the germ of the whole hostile tradition: the priesthoods whose incomes he cut had every motive to blacken him, and the wealthiest corporations in Egypt owned the country's memory. Briant read the decree as of a piece with the conquest itself, perhaps reprisal against sanctuaries slow to legitimise the new power, and noted that pharaohs had always balanced piety against the temples' financial power, so that "the discontinuity introduced by Cambyses is perhaps more apparent than real"; a more recent line of work (Agut-Labordère) reads the measure still more positively, as administrative rationalisation rather than punishment.^[10][4] The Jewish garrison at Elephantine, petitioning a century later, still remembered the conquest as an assault on the Egyptian temples from which their own shrine was exempt:

Already in the days of the kings of Egypt our fathers had built that temple in the fortress of Yeb, and when Cambyses came into Egypt he found that temple built, and the temples of the gods of Egypt all of them they overthrew, but no one did any harm to that temple.

The petition of Yedoniah to Bigvai, Cowley no. 30, trans. Cowley^[14]

The memory is partisan (a community advertising its old loyalty to Persia), and "overthrew" may compress plunder, billeting and confiscation into a single verb; but it is evidence that the conquest was experienced as violent, whatever the king's formal policy. Kuhrt's summary of the whole Egyptian dossier is the balanced one: "however devastating the initial impact of the Persian conquest may have been, a sustainable working relationship between conquerors and local powerholders was achieved relatively swiftly".^[4]

Egypt taken, Cambyses turned to its African approaches, and here even the hostile tradition records real disaster rather than mere cruelty. Herodotus has him plan three campaigns, against Carthage (abandoned when the Phoenicians refused to sail against their own colony), against the oracle-oasis of Ammon (Siwa), and against the "long-lived Ethiopians" of Nubia, the kingdom of Kush.^[1] The Nubian expedition is introduced with a diplomatic comedy, an embassy of spies bearing gifts and a Nubian king who sends back an enormous bow with the challenge that when a Persian can draw it, Persia may come; and it ends, in Herodotus's telling, in catastrophe brought on by the king's derangement:

Cambyses flew into a rage and immediately set out to make war on the Ethiopians, without giving any orders for the provision of food, nor considering the fact that he was planning to campaign to the ends of the earth. In fact, he was mad.

Herodotus 3.25, trans. Kuhrt^[4]

The army, he says, ate its baggage animals, then grass, then every tenth man by lot, before Cambyses turned back. The force sent against Ammon fared worse: it marched from Thebes into the western desert and was never seen again, buried, the Ammonians said, when "a terrific south wind started to blow suddenly while they were breakfasting, bringing with it piles of sand and buried them, and that is how they vanished", the "lost army of Cambyses" that has drawn searchers ever since.^[4]

Set against the archaeology, the picture changes. Both campaigns continued standing Saite policy toward the oases and the south; the frontier fortress of Dorginarti near the Second Cataract remained garrisoned through the Achaemenid period, Persian control is documented in the Kharga oasis under Darius, and Cambyses did annex northern Nubia beyond the First Cataract, which Herodotus himself elsewhere counts among the peoples subject to Persia.^[4][2] Two later writers even associate him with a successful march far up the Nile, and Strabo has him reach Meroe and name it;^[15] a place still called "Cambyses' Depot" near the Third Cataract in Roman times is probably a confusion of a similar name, and Kush is absent from the Behistun list of lands, appearing only in later rosters, so the deep south was likely Darius's acquisition rather than his.^[4][7] The honest verdict is overreach and hard loss on the marches, but consolidation at the frontier: the historical core beneath the Greek picture of a king rushing at the impossible, loss enough to feed the legend without requiring the madman who stars in it.

The portrait that fixed Cambyses in Western memory is Herodotus's, and it is savage. Book 3 gathers the king's Egyptian outrages into a rising catalogue: the abuse and burning of Amasis's mummy; the mockery of the cult image of Ptah and the burning of the images of the Kabeiroi in a shrine only the priest might enter; the opening of ancient tombs; and, at the summit, the stabbing of the Apis (treated below).^[1] The same madness is then turned on his own house and court. He murders his brother (the act examined in its own right below) and his pregnant sister-wife, in one version for a grief-laden riddle about a stripped lettuce; told by the courtier Prexaspes that the Persians think him too fond of wine, he answers by shooting Prexaspes' son through the heart to prove his aim, "Your son shall stand in the doorway; if I shoot and hit the middle of his heart, the Persians are obviously wrong"; on another occasion he "took twelve of the most prominent Persians and, for no significant reason, buried them alive up to their heads".^[4] The aged Croesus, kept at court as the wise counsellor of the dynasty, begs the young king to master himself and barely escapes the bow:

Do not thou indulge the heat of thy youth and passion in all things, but retain and hold thyself back: it is a good thing to be prudent, and forethought is wise.

Croesus, in Herodotus 3.36, trans. Macaulay^[1]

Herodotus offers his own diagnoses, divine retribution for the Apis or the "sacred disease", epilepsy, said to have afflicted the king from birth; Asheri's commentary observes that the whole cycle looks like "a complex of hellenized Persian traditions", hostile to Cambyses and reworked "by Herodotus in a moralizing and didactic way" around the classic problem of the tyrant and his counsellors.^[1][16] For the frame of the entire portrait is Herodotus's meditation on custom, with Cambyses as its counter-example: to deride what another nation holds sacred is the mark not of a strong king but of a madman.

If one should propose to all men a choice, bidding them select the best customs from all the customs that there are, each race of men, after examining them all, would select those of his own people; thus all think that their own customs are by far the best: and so it is not likely that any but a madman would make a jest of such things.

Herodotus 3.38, trans. Macaulay^[1]

Yet even the Greek tradition preserves, alongside the madman, a harsher and more interesting figure: the terrible judge. The flaying of the corrupt royal judge Sisamnes, whose skin was stretched over the seat of judgement on which his son was then made to sit, is told by Herodotus outside the madness cycle altogether, as Persian royal justice taken to its logical extreme:

Sisamnes, who had been made one of the Royal Judges, king Cambyses slew, because he had judged a cause unjustly for money, and flayed off all his skin: then after he had torn away the skin he cut leathern thongs out of it and stretched them across the seat where Sisamnes had been wont to sit to give judgment; and having stretched them in the seat, Cambyses appointed the son of that Sisamnes whom he had slain and flayed, to be judge instead of his father, enjoining him to remember in what seat he was sitting to give judgment.

Herodotus 5.25, trans. Macaulay^[1]

The rhetorical function of the whole is plain: Cambyses is the negative image of good kingship, the ruler ungoverned in himself and therefore unfit to govern others, the foil against which Herodotus's Darius, and Persian ideology's own ideal of the self-mastered king, are measured. Kuhrt's conclusion points at what the caricature conceals: through the distortion "we can catch glimpses of a man, perhaps harsh, but also an effective and just monarch".^[4]

The signature charge deserves to be heard in both voices, because it is the sharpest test of evidence the early Achaemenid period offers. Herodotus tells that Cambyses, returning humiliated from Nubia to find Memphis celebrating the epiphany of a new Apis (the sacred calf in which the god Ptah was made present), took the joy for mockery of his defeat, executed the magistrates, and called for the god:

When the priests brought the Apis, Cambyses, now half insane, drew his dagger intending to stab the Apis in the belly, but struck his thigh. Laughing, he said to the priests: 'You miserable lot, is that what your gods are - of blood and flesh and not resistant to iron? Such a god is surely worthy of the Egyptians!'

Herodotus 3.29, trans. Kuhrt^[4]

The festival was broken up, the priests flogged, and the wounded god died: "the priests punished, and Apis, wounded in the thigh, expired on the floor of the shrine", to be buried by the priests in secret.^[4]

Against this stands the testimony of the Serapeum at Saqqara, excavated in the 1850s and assembled by Posener in 1936. The official epitaph of an Apis that died in Cambyses' sixth regnal year (524 on the usual dating) records the full royal obsequies: "the god was brought in peace toward the good West and laid to rest in the necropolis in his place which is the place which his Majesty had made for him".^[12] The granite sarcophagus carries the king's own dedication, in perfect pharaonic form:

He has made a fine monument for his father Apis-Osiris with a great granite sarcophagus, dedicated by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mesutire.

Cambyses' inscription on the Apis sarcophagus, Saqqara, trans. Kuhrt^[12]

On the accompanying stela Cambyses kneels before the bull in Egyptian royal dress. For the twentieth-century rehabilitation this was decisive. Briant wrote that "the tradition of the murder of the Apis by Cambyses must be completely reinterpreted in light of discoveries made at the Serapeum of Memphis"; Boyce, noting that the next Apis lived on into Darius's reign, held that "these facts together disprove the story transmitted by Herodotus"; Dandamayev states flatly that no desecration of temples by Cambyses is recorded in the contemporary Egyptian sources.^[10][5][2]

The rehabilitation, though, has itself been re-examined, and the file is no longer quite closed. The dated stelae yield an awkward sequence: the bull buried in year 6 had a successor born already in Cambyses' fifth year, an overlap of more than a year, when Egyptian conviction allowed only one living Apis at a time. Devauchelle, Depuydt and Jansen-Winkeln have variously rearranged the dates or posited an intervening bull to leave room for a killing after all; Quack's recent assessment concludes that "the considerable overlap between the burial of the second and the birth of the first one (at least 15 months) is already a sure sign that something is amiss here", and that a slain calf between the two attested bulls cannot be excluded, even if it cannot be shown.^[11] Colburn has answered that such reconstructions proceed "usually by means of calendrical gymnastics that allow for the existence of a second bull during his reign", and that "Such attempts to 'confirm' Herodotus are symptomatic of the continuing difficulty of mitigating orientalist prejudices".^[17] Where the balance lies is clear enough: what the monuments prove is that Cambyses provided, in proper form and in his own name, for the burial of an Apis, which is incompatible with the tradition of blanket sacrilege; what they cannot quite do is exclude every version of an outrage, and the certainty of the mid-twentieth-century refutation has softened. A securely anchored sequence of Apis births and burials would settle it; none exists.^[11][17]

While Cambyses was in Egypt, a shadow fell across the succession that he himself, according to the official version, had cast. The Behistun inscription of Darius makes the killing of his brother the reign's hidden crime and the hinge of everything that followed:

This Cambyses had a brother, by name Bardiya; he had the same mother, the same father as Cambyses.

Darius, Behistun (DB) §10, trans. Kuhrt^[3]

Then, without time, place or motive: "then Cambyses killed that Bardiya". The murder was kept secret, Darius says; "When Cambyses had gone to Egypt, then the people became disloyal", the Lie grew in the lands, and a magus named Gaumata rose on 11 March 522 BCE claiming to be Bardiya, seized the kingship on 1 July, and was believed.^[3] Herodotus tells the same story with the mechanism exposed: Cambyses, warned in a dream that his brother would sit on his throne, sent his most trusted man, Prexaspes, to Persia to kill him secretly, by drowning or on a hunt; the murdered prince's place was then taken by a look-alike magus whose reign the court dared not question.^[1] Ctesias has a court variant in which the substitution is Cambyses' own device, arranged with the magus Sphendadates who had denounced the brother, and the fratricide (by bull's blood) is concealed for five years.^[9]

Whether any of this is true is the deepest question of the age, treated in full at The Accession of Darius (522 BCE) and Bardiya and Gaumata: a serious body of scholarship holds that Gaumata is Darius's fiction, that the man on the throne in 522 was the real Bardiya, and that the tale of a secret murder was invented to justify Darius's own seizure of power. On that reading Cambyses' "secret murder" of his brother is itself part of the founding lie of the next reign, and the fratricide that blackens him was authored by his successor. Kuhrt observes that Darius's own account of Cambyses is "curiously neutral": Behistun charges him with the killing but paints no madman, and the lurid Cambyses belongs to later tradition, not to the dynasty's official text.^[4] What is agreed is that in the last year of Cambyses' life the throne of Persia passed, in fact or in name, to Bardiya, and that Cambyses, still in Egypt, set out for home to reclaim it.

He never arrived. The end is dated only loosely. Behistun's sequence implies that Cambyses was still alive when the pretender took the kingship on 1 July 522; the Babylonian scribes tell a quieter story, dating by Cambyses until 23 April 522 and then, without any recorded convulsion, by Bardiya, so that a death in the spring, followed by an ordinary succession, is equally possible, and the four-month usurpation may be Darius's framing rather than lived Babylonian experience.^[6][4] On the place the sources broadly agree: Syria, on the road home (Josephus says Damascus; Ctesias, alone, has him die at Babylon).^[7]

Of the manner of death Behistun says only this, in a phrase that has been argued over since decipherment: "After that, Cambyses died his own death."^[3] Nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century readers took the Old Persian uvāmaršiyuš amariyatā as suicide (so still Kent's "died by his own hand") or as a self-inflicted accident. The philology has since settled: comparative parallels across the Indo-Iranian languages, and now a Persepolis Fortification tablet in which the identical Elamite phrase is used of an ordinary official whose death nobody needed to explain, show the idiom to be a plain, uncharged way of saying that a man died and no one killed him. As Stolper sums up the field, "there is nearly complete agreement among academic philologists that in the Bisotun texts 'died his own death' means 'died a natural death.'"; the old assertion "that Cambyses died by his own hand, is wrong".^[18]

The Greek tradition could not leave it so quiet. Herodotus supplies an accident and moralises it into symmetry: mounting his horse to march against the usurper, "as he leaped onto the horse, the cap of the sword scabbard fell off and the naked blade pierced his thigh. He was wounded in exactly the spot where earlier he had struck the Egyptian god Apis". Learning that the town where he lay was called Agbatana, and remembering an oracle that he would end his life at Ecbatana (he had always assumed the Median capital), the king came at last to his senses: "This is the place where Cambyses, son of Cyrus, is fated to die." Twenty days later "the bone became gangrenous and the thigh rotted quickly. It killed Cambyses, son of Cyrus", who died confessing the murder of his brother, urging the Persians not to let the kingship pass to the Medes, and leaving no child of either sex.^[4] Ctesias moves the scene to Babylon and strips it of grandeur: "When he arrived in Babylon and, to pass the time, was carving some wood with a knife, it struck his thigh up to the muscle, and he died after eleven days."^[9] Justin draws the moral baldly, the wound as expiation for fratricide and sacrilege. The wound-in-the-thigh that answers the Apis's wound is literature, not autopsy; the circumstances cannot be recovered, and the flat Behistun phrase is all the contemporary record allows.^[18]

Cambyses' death without an heir is the point on which the whole subsequent history turns. He left no son; his brother was dead (by the official account) or reigning (by the sceptics'); and into that vacancy stepped a coup. On 29 September 522 BCE Darius, son of Hystaspes of a collateral Achaemenid line, together with six fellow nobles killed the king they called the false Bardiya and took the throne, upon which the whole empire rose in a single year of revolt; in Egypt, the disorder threw up its own ephemeral pharaoh, Petubastis, whose rising the Behistun catalogue does not even record.^[3][11] Everything the next two reigns are remembered for (the reorganisation into satrapies, the daric, the Royal Road, Persepolis, the ideology of the Truth against the Lie carved at Behistun) is the work of the dynasty that came to power in the gap his death tore open. He is, in that sense, indispensable to what followed: the king whose conquest completed the empire and whose sudden end remade its ruling house. That the transition was violent, contested, and justified by a story that may be a lie is the founding fact of the Achaemenid golden age, and it begins with the body of Cambyses on the road out of Egypt.

The hostility came from at least three directions, and it can be watched compounding. The Persian aristocracy resented his centralising severity, and hellenised Persian court stories fed Herodotus his tyrant-and-counsellor cycle.^[16] The Egyptian priesthoods he had impoverished nursed the grievance of the revenue decree, and within a century the invader had been assimilated to an old native literary pattern, the description of chaos (Chaosbeschreibung) that Egyptian tradition draped over every period of foreign rule; Dillery argued that Herodotus's Egyptian informants fitted Cambyses to the template, and later Egypt made him a stock villain alongside Nebuchadnezzar in the Coptic Cambyses Romance.^[17] And Darius, though his inscription is studiedly flat about his predecessor, had every interest in a discredited house of Cyrus; Dandamayev's summary is that the Greek assessment "reflects Persian and Egyptian propaganda against Cambyses", slander from two directions that became history.^[2]

Set the contemporary documents beside the narrative and a different and duller figure appears: an effective, harsh, centralising conqueror who created Persia's navy, added Egypt and "the sea" to the empire, ruled through Egyptian royal institutions, provided honours for an Apis burial, disciplined temple finances, and overreached in the African deserts. The documents offer firmer ground for administration and ritual than the legend, but the man left no account from which a complete portrait could be recovered.^[10] He is the mirror-image of his successor: where Darius survives as an overwhelming self-portrait in stone that has to be distrusted, Cambyses survives only in the portraits his enemies drew, which have to be corrected. Reading him is an exercise in weighing a hostile tradition against a fragmentary record, and that, as much as the conquest of Egypt, is why he belongs at the head of the reign.