The Egyptian Revolts and Reconquest (405/4–343/2 BCE)

The one-man Twenty-eighth Dynasty begins, in Manetho's later king-list tradition, with Amyrtaeus in 405/4 BCE. That date probably registers his recognition as king in part of the Delta rather than the instant when every Persian garrison vanished. Aramaic documents from Elephantine used the regnal years of Artaxerxes II in 404, 402 and 401. The last secure formula is dated to the Persian king's fourth year. Then, in June 400, another Elephantine document is dated to the “year 5 of King Amyrtaeus”. The change of formula shows that Amyrtaeus's authority had reached Egypt's southern frontier by 401/0, or at the latest 400/399. It does not show how, or on what day, the intervening regions changed hands.^[1] This sequence begins after the earlier conquest and within an established provincial system (see the conquest by Cambyses and Egypt as a Province).

There is no surviving account of a final pitched battle between Amyrtaeus and a Persian army. At Elephantine the documentary sequence looks more like a transfer of allegiance than the destruction of the local military community: some of the same garrison population persisted under the new king. That local continuity must not be expanded into a claim that all Egypt changed peacefully. The evidence is a small southern window, and the fighting that established Amyrtaeus in the Delta has disappeared. Even the tempting connection with Cyrus the Younger's revolt in 401 remains an inference. Abrocomas had forces in Phoenicia and was diverted towards the royal army before Cunaxa; Amyrtaeus may have profited from that distraction, but no source says that it caused the completion of the Egyptian secession.^[1]

“Revolt” here covers a regional challenge, first successful in the Delta, and then the collapse of Persian recognition along the Nile. “Independence” applies once documents throughout Egypt were dated by native pharaohs. Later Greek accounts treat Egypt as a single rebel kingdom and obscure this regional movement of authority. Neither Darius II's death nor Artaxerxes II's accession determined who was recognised at Elephantine.^[2]

Amyrtaeus did not found a durable house. Nepherites of Mendes displaced him in 399 BCE and began the Twenty-ninth Dynasty; an Aramaic letter from Elephantine preserves the change of ruler. Nepherites died in 393, and a short contest followed before Acoris held the throne. The Demotic Chronicle, composed much later in priestly circles, judges these kings through their relation to temples, legitimate succession and the ordering of Egypt. It is precious evidence for Egyptian memories of kingship, but it is not a chronological record of campaigns. Its condemnations and approvals belong to a theology of rule, not to an impartial court gazette.^[3]

The short dynasties and disputed successions did not make independence unreal. Acoris could sustain an active foreign policy, work with Evagoras of Salamis and strengthen Egypt's eastern approaches. Nectanebo I, founder of the Thirtieth Dynasty in 380/379, inherited and enlarged the defensive system that confronted the great invasion of 373. His son Tachos, also called Teos, later mobilised resources for an offensive into Phoenicia. Tachos in turn lost the throne to his nephew Nectanebo II while campaigning abroad. Native kingship was politically unstable, but for six decades Persian commanders repeatedly found a defended state able to gather Egyptian troops, foreign specialists, ships, money and fortified depth.^[3]

Greek mercenaries are prominent because Greek authors cared about Greek generals and because the surviving connected narratives are Greek. They were genuinely important: Chabrias advised Egyptian defence, Iphicrates commanded mercenaries for Persia, Agesilaus and Chabrias served Tachos, and Mentor of Rhodes changed sides during the struggles that preceded reconquest. Yet armies described as “Greek” and “barbarian” in Diodorus were composite institutions. Egyptian soldiers, Persian and other imperial contingents, Phoenician and Cypriot ships, local guides and garrison communities made the campaigns possible. To narrate the period as Greek military skill rescuing one supposedly incompetent eastern king from another is to reproduce the bias of the fullest source.^[4]

The wars were connected by geography. An army approaching Egypt from Asia needed the coastal road through the southern Levant, secure water and supply points across Sinai, a fleet operating from Phoenician or Cypriot bases, and a way into the shifting channels and marshes of the eastern Delta. Conversely, an Egyptian king who wished to keep invasion away from the Nile had reason to support resistance in Cyprus and Phoenicia. Money, mercenaries and ships could hold an enemy on the far side of Sinai more cheaply than a battle at Memphis.^[5]

That strategic logic did not produce one continuous anti-Persian coalition. Alliances changed, local rulers pursued their own ends, and Diodorus compresses separate risings into pictures of general rebellion. Egypt supported Evagoras on Cyprus in the earlier fourth century, but Persian success there isolated Acoris. Decades later Tachos contributed money and ships to western opponents of Artaxerxes II, then tried to carry an Egyptian army into Phoenicia. Under Nectanebo II, Sidon received Egyptian mercenaries led by Mentor. Each episode belongs to the same theatre, but not to a single centrally directed “Great Revolt”.^[5]

The first Achaemenid attempt to recover Egypt after secession is one of the least visible. Isocrates says that three royal commanders, Pharnabazus, Abrocomas and Tithraustes, remained in the field for three years and came home having achieved nothing. His purpose in the Panegyricus was to urge Greek war against Persia, so he represents the commanders as suffering more than they inflicted and withdrawing in disgrace.^[6]

The passage proves that a failed royal effort was remembered, but gives neither a battle nor a secure modern year. Dates around 385–383 BCE are often printed; a reconstruction around 390/389–388/387 is also possible. “Three years” may span parts of three campaigning or archon years rather than thirty-six continuous months. No surviving narrative identifies an invasion route, an Egyptian commander, or the point at which the operation broke down. Any detailed battle-story would be invention.^[7]

The missing operations rule out the recurrent moral pattern of an enormous Persian host delayed by a timid commander and defeated by Greek ingenuity or the Nile. Three points remain secure: Artaxerxes II sought recovery after Egypt had supported opposition in the eastern Mediterranean; three senior commanders were associated with a prolonged and unsuccessful effort; and Egypt remained independent.^[7]

The campaign of 373 is much better documented, though almost entirely by Diodorus. Years of preparation produced a joint land and naval force assembled at Ake on the Phoenician coast. Pharnabazus commanded the royal Asian contingents, while the Athenian Iphicrates commanded the Greek mercenaries. Diodorus gives immense totals, including 200,000 Asian troops, 20,000 Greeks, 300 triremes and 200 smaller ships. These figures come from one literary tradition and should not be treated as a muster roll. The scale of the preparations and the need for a large transport fleet are more secure than the numbers.^[8]

Nectanebo I had strengthened the eastern frontier, above all Pelusium, and prepared the mouths of the Nile with forts, barriers and controlled channels. Diodorus's description makes the landscape itself part of the defence:

where there were any fords by which the way lay open into Egypt by land, he brought the water over them; and, where any ship might pass, he filled up those places with stones and rubbish

Diodorus, Library 15.42, trans. Booth^[8]

The invaders did not spend the season battering at Pelusium. They moved offshore and made for the Mendesian mouth, landed a force, defeated Egyptian defenders and took the fortified site there—the small fort that Diodorus says was demolished, and which Ruzicka reconstructs as a base or bridgehead for further operations. The landing distinguishes 373 from a mere failed approach across Sinai. Persian and Greek troops had entered the Delta and opened an operational choice: drive rapidly towards Memphis with the force already ashore, or wait until the whole army and fleet were concentrated and the base secure.^[9]

Iphicrates urged the first course; Pharnabazus chose the second. Diodorus turns the dispute into his explanation for the whole failure:

there arose a difference between the generals, which brought all to nought

Diodorus, Library 15.43, trans. Booth^[8]

His sequel favours the energetic Greek. Pharnabazus is made jealous of Iphicrates and incapable of seizing the moment. Yet the two proposals were conflicting, defensible strategies. A dash for Memphis offered surprise, but the small force might not have held the city and could have weakened the Mendesian base and the arrival of reinforcements. Concentration avoided that exposure but gave Nectanebo time to reinforce Memphis and strike the landing area. The disagreement was real; Diodorus's ethnic moral, Greek speed defeated by Persian caution, is not an explanation by itself.^[9]

The invasion began in spring, probably late March or early April, with roughly two months before the inundation. Delay exposed the Mendesian base to mounting Egyptian attacks as the Nile began to rise. Diodorus associates the inundation with the Etesian winds and says that the commanders consequently abandoned Egypt. Ruzicka offers a more conjectural reconstruction: strong northern winds may have disrupted the landing of reinforcements and supplies, making the base untenable in late August or September; Pharnabazus may initially have withdrawn only to the main camp east of Pelusium, intending to resume operations after the flood, before Iphicrates's flight helped turn that manoeuvre into final abandonment. The later quarrel, in which Pharnabazus blamed Iphicrates, is not proof that one man's character defeated the expedition.^[8][9]

The campaign established that Pelusium could be bypassed and a fortified landing made at another river mouth; it also exposed the risks of delay while Egyptian forces concentrated and the flood approached. No Persian document records a formal assessment or a transmission of lessons to the commanders of 343/2. Similarities and differences between the two invasions are modern comparisons built from Diodorus's narratives, not evidence for institutional memory.^[9]

Egypt did not remain only on the defensive. Tachos, or Teos, became co-ruler with his father Nectanebo I and inherited the throne in 361/360. He assembled a fleet, Greek mercenaries and a large Egyptian infantry force, hired the Spartan king Agesilaus, retained the Athenian Chabrias as naval adviser and took overall command himself. Diodorus gives round totals of 200 ships, 10,000 Greek mercenaries and 80,000 Egyptian infantry. As in his account of 373, the totals display magnitude rather than audited strength. More telling is the allocation of commands: Agesilaus over the mercenaries, Chabrias at sea, and Tachos over the whole expedition.^[10]

Mobilisation also demanded exceptional revenue. The pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica and Polyaenus, preserved as collections of fiscal devices rather than state accounts, attribute temple closures and exemptions, compulsory temple loans, house and poll taxes, a levy on wheat sales, the transfer of manufacturing tithes and the surrender of privately held gold and silver to Tachos's government. Some of that metal was struck as coin for military expenditure. The reported percentages and individual measures are not independently corroborated, so they cannot yield a budget or a total measure of the burden. They do show why the cost of ships and hired soldiers belongs inside the political history of the campaign, and why priestly or elite opposition is plausible without proving that fiscal grievances alone caused Tachos's overthrow.^[11]

The pharaoh's mobilisation reached beyond his own army. Rheomithres, acting for opponents of Artaxerxes II in Asia Minor, came to Egypt and received “five hundred talents, and fifty sail of men of war” from Tachos before betraying some of his associates to the Great King.^[10] The transfer shows Egypt as a source of naval and financial power in the western conflicts, though Diodorus's arrangement makes separate actors look like members of one enormous conspiracy. Tachos then led his own forces through the eastern frontier and into Phoenicia or southern Syria in 360/359. The offensive reversed the usual direction of the war: an Egyptian king was now trying to move the strategic boundary away from the Delta.^[11]

Two men called Tachos must be kept apart. The pharaoh Tachos/Teos, son of Nectanebo I, is the king who mobilised Egypt and campaigned in Phoenicia. An earlier Tachos, son of Glos, appears in the same book of Diodorus among rebels and settlement-builders near Leuce in western Anatolia. A shared Greek rendering of the name does not make them one person. Nor was the later Nectanebo II the pharaoh's son, as Booth's Diodorus calls him. He was Tachos's nephew, son of Tjahapimau, the brother left to manage Egypt.^[11]

The campaign collapsed through a revolt behind and within it. Tjahapimau promoted his son Nectanebo, who commanded the Egyptian part of the expedition, as king. A separate claimant from Mendes appears in Plutarch's Life of Agesilaus, creating at least a moment of three-sided conflict. Agesilaus shifted his support to Nectanebo; Tachos fled through Arabia to Artaxerxes II, who reportedly pardoned him and employed him as a general. Diodorus then confuses the result, saying Tachos was restored, while the Egyptian succession and the rest of the tradition show Nectanebo II on the throne. The contradiction cannot be harmonised into a clean restoration story.^[12]

Tachos's failure was not the defeat of his army by a Persian force. The expedition unravelled because control of Egypt and loyalty within its command changed while the king was abroad. Fiscal pressure, dynastic rivalry and the risks of leaving a regent at home may all have contributed, but the surviving narratives do not permit a simple popular-revolt explanation. Nectanebo II emerged as the last native pharaoh of the period; Tachos survived at the Persian court; and the Syrian expedition ended with a dynastic transfer in Egypt.^[13]

A further campaign sometimes placed at the end of Artaxerxes II's reign, perhaps led by the crown prince Ochus before he became Artaxerxes III, is preserved only through confused later chronology. It may belong to the aftermath of Tachos's flight, but its date, commander and even execution remain uncertain. It should not be turned into a securely documented fourth invasion. The first firmly dated attempt under Artaxerxes III is the one in the winter of 351/350.^[12]

Artaxerxes III led a substantial force against Egypt in person in 351/350. Contemporary polemic preserves the defeat more clearly than any operation. Isocrates, urging Philip II of Macedon to lead a war in Asia, taunted the Great King for assembling a great army and presented his retreat as both military defeat and public ridicule.^[14]

The taunt records the contemporary reputation of defeat. It supplies no field operations. Diodorus confirms a failure in the same general period, and an Egyptian Apis-embalming text may place Nectanebo II away fighting the Persian king while his eldest son acted for him in a ceremony. No connected narrative supplies a secure route, battle sequence, force total or cause. Even the often repeated claim that the Greek commanders Diophantus and Lamius won the campaign for Nectanebo rests on a short retrospective notice without operational detail.^[15]

Four points are secure for 351/350: Artaxerxes III personally attempted recovery; Nectanebo II retained Egypt; the Persian army withdrew; and Greek orators exploited the result as proof of royal incompetence. Whether the invaders failed at the frontier, entered the Delta, encountered the inundation or lost a battle cannot be recovered. The gap is especially important because Diodorus later makes Nectanebo's confidence after this victory a cause of his defeat in 343. That moral link belongs to the later narrative, not to known events of the first campaign.^[16]

The way to a renewed invasion ran first through Phoenicia and Cyprus. Diodorus describes Sidon and other Phoenician communities rebelling after oppressive behaviour by royal officials, then seeking Nectanebo II as an ally. The pharaoh sent 4,000 Greek mercenaries under Mentor of Rhodes. Mentor and the Sidonian forces initially defeated the royal commanders Mazaeus and Belesys. Cypriot kings also resisted Persian authority, and Egyptian support joined crises on both sides of the sea-lane from Phoenicia to the Delta.^[17]

Diodorus's account compresses events and explains them through speeches, insults and betrayals. A short Babylonian record supplies an independent chronological peg. In Artaxerxes's year 14, ABC 9 records that “the prisoners-of-war, which the king took [from] Sidon to Babylon and Susa [were brought.]”.^[18]

Tashritu in Artaxerxes III's fourteenth year ran from 11 October to 9 November 345. ABC 9 dates successive arrivals of Sidonian captives to 23 and 26 October. The entry independently fixes the deportation in that month. It does not prove every detail in Diodorus's story of King Tennes betraying the city, the mass suicide by fire or Artaxerxes's motives. It does anchor Sidon's subjugation before the final Egyptian campaign.^[18]

Mentor's path through the crisis illustrates the mobility, and the danger, of mercenary command. He was a Rhodian who had commanded for Egypt and Sidon; after Sidon's fall he entered Artaxerxes's service, advised the royal cause and later shared command in Egypt with Bagoas. His knowledge of Egyptian defences may have informed the new plan, though assigning the plan to him personally is a modern inference. Mentor must not be confused with his brother Memnon, later prominent in the war against Alexander's Macedonians. Nor does Mentor's change of allegiance turn every Greek mercenary into a man without loyalty. Service was negotiated through rulers, cities, kinship and survival, and Egyptian kings employed foreigners in positions that remained subordinate to royal command.^[19]

Sidon's suppression was followed by the restoration of Persian control on Cyprus. Kaelin treats the pacification of those flashpoints as enabling Artaxerxes III's march against Egypt. That sequence is firmer than Diodorus's lurid story of Sidon's destruction, but it does not disclose a Persian operational plan. The surviving evidence supports a pacified Levant followed by invasion; it does not show which Phoenician or Cypriot forces were reassigned or whether Artaxerxes formulated a single programme for dismantling an Egyptian alliance system.^[20]

The successful invasion is conventionally dated to 343 BCE, but the evidence supports only a campaign in 343/2. The Delta and Memphis were recovered within that span; the precise season and transition between modern years remain uncertain. Artaxerxes commanded in person. Diodorus's enormous totals for both sides remain uncorroborated. Ruzicka accepts the three paired formations as the usable framework of the account, while treating their coordination as reconstruction: a royal main body and three operational groupings, each joining a Greek contingent to a Persian commander and imperial force.^[21][22]

The first pairing put Theban troops under Lacrates alongside the Persian Rosaces and attacked Pelusium. A second joined Argives under Nicostratus to Aristazanes, a trusted Persian royal agent; using Egyptian guides whose families were held as hostages, it passed by a concealed channel and landed beyond the direct sight of the defenders. The third joined Mentor to Bagoas, who commanded Persian and other imperial troops as well as ships. Diodorus states the organising principle plainly: every brigade had “a Greek commander, with whom was joined a Persian officer”.^[21] Unlike the single vulnerable bridgehead of 373, several forces now created simultaneous threats while the king retained a reserve and overall control.^[22]

The names require care. Mentor is the former Egyptian and Sidonian commander, not his brother Memnon. Bagoas here is a trusted royal official and field commander paired with Mentor. Diodorus later tells of a Bagoas who poisoned Artaxerxes III and made and unmade kings. Most scholarship treats him as the same man, but repetition of a name in the later Greek narrative is not independent proof of identity. The campaign evidence securely establishes only the first stage: a Bagoas in high royal confidence commanded troops in Egypt and dealt with the surrender of Delta cities.^[21]

Nectanebo II had fortified the approaches and distributed garrisons among Delta towns. Diodorus says he held a central force while Pelusium resisted. Nicostratus's landing and victory over troops sent against it persuaded Nectanebo that Memphis was exposed. He withdrew to the capital rather than risk being cut off. At Pelusium, meanwhile, Lacrates drained the defensive ditch, battered the walls and negotiated the Greek garrison's departure. A quarrel followed when Bagoas's Persian troops seized property from the departing Greeks; Artaxerxes upheld the oath and punished those responsible, at least in Diodorus's account. The episode is shaped to display Greek honour and royal justice, but also shows the difficulty of coordinating allies even in success.^[21]

Mentor and Bagoas then worked against Bubastis, whose Egyptian and Greek defenders distrusted one another. Offers of pardon to cities that surrendered, coupled with the example of Sidon for those that resisted, divided garrisons and made capitulation rational. Bubastis yielded; other Delta cities followed. The campaign was not won by one battle at Pelusium. It combined pressure on the fortress, a separate penetration through the waterways, controlled clemency and the threat of destruction. Ruzicka reconstructs the separate operations as coordinated strikes and a deliberate correction of 373, with every Greek formation balanced by a comparable Persian force under a trusted royal commander. Diodorus does not preserve a Persian operational plan, so the comparison remains a modern interpretation.^[22]

Nectanebo retired first to Memphis and then south. Diodorus says that he, “taking most of his possessions with him”, fled to Ethiopia, a Greek geographical label that points beyond Egypt's recognised northern centres but need not describe a single direct journey into the kingdom of Kush.^[23] Pelusium, Bubastis and the other Delta towns were in Persian hands; Memphis was occupied; Artaxerxes installed Pherendates as governor and returned to Babylon. Pherendates shares a name with a satrap of Egypt under Darius I, but no genealogy establishes that he was the same man or his descendant.^[24]

The secure military sequence is thus narrower than Diodorus's claim that Artaxerxes “possessed himself of all Egypt”. The invaders passed the eastern frontier, split the defence, took the principal Delta strongholds and forced the pharaoh from Memphis. There is no comparable narrative of Persian columns occupying every Upper Egyptian centre. Later documents make caution mandatory. The reconquest ended the recognised Thirtieth Dynasty at the principal seats of power, restored an Achaemenid governor at Memphis and reopened the Nile's resources to the Great King. It did not leave evidence for a simultaneous, permanent submission of every district.^[25]

Diodorus follows the conquest with a programme of punishment. He alleges that Artaxerxes demolished the walls of important cities, despoiled temples of gold and silver, removed sacred temple writings, and allowed Bagoas to sell them back to priests. The narrative ends with the king returning to Babylon with money and spoils.^[26]

Diodorus explicitly alleges treasury seizure, plunder at temples, the demolition of selected fortifications, deportations, and the removal or ransom of records; their extent lacks contemporary corroboration. The allegations should not be expanded into the destruction of every temple or Egyptian institution. Royal coins with a locally legible Egyptian title, and Egyptian officials who served under the new regime, show an occupying power also making claims through existing forms.^[27]

The most famous accusation is that Artaxerxes, called Ochus before his accession, killed the sacred Apis bull and ate it, or substituted an ass as an object of worship. Versions occur in Aelian and Plutarch and resemble the hostile tradition attached to Cambyses after the conquest of 525. The resemblance is a warning. A sacrilegious foreign conqueror desecrating Apis is a powerful Egyptian and Greek story-pattern, not a fact multiplied into certainty each time a later author repeats it. No contemporary record says that Artaxerxes killed the animal. The allegation belongs to the making of his reputation unless independent evidence appears.^[28]

The Demotic Chronicle offers an Egyptian memory of the return that is no less partisan, but partisan in another language of legitimacy. Its prophecy represents ponds and islands filled with mourning, destruction brought by the “Medes”, and houses taken over by them.^[29] Here Persian restoration becomes dispossession, and the “Medes” stand for foreign imperial rulers. The Chronicle was composed under later conditions and organises past kings around temple order and divine judgement. It preserves the social memory of rupture; it cannot by itself date a confiscation, count destroyed houses or identify a particular campaign order.

The stela of Somtutefnakht supplies a limited counterexample to claims of universal persecution. One Egyptian priestly official says:

You distinguished me before millions when you turned your back on Egypt. You put love of me in the heart of Asia’s ruler.

Stela of Somtutefnakht, trans. in Ruzicka^[30]

The ruler is unnamed and the passage is an elite self-presentation, so it cannot support a general account of the occupation. It does attest one Egyptian office-holder explaining his authority through the favour of an Asian king.^[30]

Greek narrative falls almost silent between Nectanebo's flight and Alexander's arrival in 332. Egyptian documents, sparse and difficult, then become decisive. Two texts invoke Nectanebo II's eighteenth regnal year, corresponding to 342/1 if his count continued normally: a Demotic loan contract and a later Edfu record of a land grant. They might show that Nectanebo retained or recovered authority in the south after losing Memphis. They might preserve a retrospective or locally continued dating system. What they cannot support is the flat statement that he vanished from Egyptian politics the moment he left Memphis.^[25]

Chababash creates a larger problem. A marriage contract from Thebes is dated to his first year, and an Apis sarcophagus from Memphis bears his second; the later Satrap Stela of Ptolemy I credits him with restoring land to the temple of Buto in the Delta and inspecting the river mouths. The contemporary dates at Thebes and Memphis, together with the retrospective Delta association, suggest wide recognition without proving simultaneous control of all Egypt. No surviving Greek historian mentions him. Chababash belongs somewhere between the reconquest of 343/2 and Alexander's arrival in 332. Quack places him shortly before the Macedonian conquest; Ruzicka tentatively reconstructs a reign from winter 338/7 to about 335, but no preferred exact date is securely established.^[31][25]

Some say Chababash briefly recovered most of Egypt; others allow a more restricted kingship whose documents travelled or were honoured beyond his effective territory. The geographic spread is difficult to reduce to a village revolt, yet it need not mean that every region was under him at once. By 334/333 a Persian satrap, Sabaces, could leave Egypt to fight Alexander, and Mazaces later held Memphis. Persian government had plainly been restored before the Macedonian conquest. Between 342 and that restoration lies an interval in which native authority either survived, returned or interrupted imperial control.^[25]

The sources do not describe a single administrative moment at which the second occupation became complete. Diodorus ends with the king's victory and departure; the Egyptian documents resume in scattered places and years. A royal army could hold Memphis, the Delta approaches and the routes by which tribute moved while distant districts negotiated, resisted or dated transactions to another king. Conversely, a native regnal formula at Thebes does not prove that Chababash commanded the Persian garrison at Memphis on the same day. Political geography has to be reconstructed from each document's place, date and purpose, without asking one object to stand for the whole Nile valley.^[25]

The victory of 343/2 destroyed the independent Egyptian state's command of the Delta, removed Nectanebo II from Memphis and installed a royal governor. Surviving evidence does not map every year's obedience from the Mediterranean to Elephantine, and the second occupation cannot be treated as a solid, unbroken block.^[31]

No single cause explains the different outcomes of 373 and 343/2. The later campaign came after the isolation of Egypt through Sidon's defeat and the reduction of Cyprus. Ruzicka reconstructs it as beginning after the inundation rather than racing it, though the precise season is not independently fixed. It retained the king's personal command and divided the attack among several paired formations, so that Pelusium could be engaged while another force penetrated the waterways. It coupled siege, manoeuvre and conditional pardon, exploiting divisions inside mixed garrisons. Mentor's prior Egyptian service may have improved intelligence, but his authorship of the whole plan is not documented.^[22]

Egyptian vulnerabilities also contributed, though not in Diodorus's moral form. Nectanebo's distributed defence could not prevent a landing beyond the principal fortress; his decision to protect Memphis opened space for Delta surrenders; Egyptian and Greek elements at Bubastis did not trust one another. None of this proves that the pharaoh was simply cowardly or incompetent. Withdrawal south preserved him and perhaps a continuing sphere of recognition. The victor's ability to offer tolerable terms to some defenders while holding Sidon's fate over others turned local decisions into a cascade.^[24]

The Greek literary contrast between ingenious mercenaries and inept eastern kings obscures the central achievement. Diodorus's narrative gives Persian commanders and forces substantive roles in the paired formations, while Ruzicka reconstructs their separate attacks as a coordinated operation under royal control.^[22] The recovery of Egypt is therefore poor evidence for terminal decline. Binder treats the reconquest as restoring imperial reach nearly to the borders held under Darius I and places the mid-fourth-century empire at a high point of power. That success was followed within a decade by a succession crisis and then a different war against Macedon.^[32]