Topic: Egypt (7)

• PersonArshama, satrap of Egypt

  Arshama (Old Persian Aršāma; Aramaic ʾršm; Greek Arsames) was an Achaemenid prince who governed Egypt, among the empire’s richest and most rebellious provinces, through the later fifth century BCE. On the leading reconstruction he held the satrapy from about 454, after the suppression of the…

• PersonCambyses II

  Cambyses II (Old Persian Kambūjiya; r. 530–522 BCE) was the second Achaemenid Great King, elder son and heir of Cyrus the Great, who in 525 BCE conquered Egypt and added the last of the great old kingdoms of the Near East to the empire, the achievement that turned Cyrus's realm into a power…

• PlaceEgypt as a Province

  Egypt as a province of the Achaemenid Empire, the Twenty-seventh Dynasty of the Egyptian king-lists, ran from the conquest by Cambyses II (conventionally 525 BCE) to a staggered secession between 405/4 and 400/399. Artaxerxes III recovered the Delta and Memphis in 343/2, but the evidence does not…

• EventThe Conquest of Egypt by Cambyses

  The conquest of Egypt by Cambyses II, conventionally dated to 525 BCE, brought the Nile valley under Achaemenid rule. Cambyses II, the son and successor of Cyrus II, crossed the northern Sinai with Arabian assistance, defeated the forces of Psammetichus III near the Pelusiac mouth of the Nile, and…

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

  The Egyptian revolts and reconquest were the staggered secession of Egypt from Achaemenid rule between 405/4 and 400/399 BCE, roughly six decades of native dynastic independence, and the campaigns that restored Persian control of the Delta and Memphis in 343/2. Its exact seasonal course across the…

• SourceThe Elephantine Papyri

  The Elephantine Papyri are the Aramaic archives of a garrison town at the First Cataract of the Nile, where a community of Judaean soldiers and their Aramaean, Egyptian and Iranian neighbours served the Persian kings from before the conquest of Egypt until the empire lost the province at the end…

• PersonUdjahorresnet

  Udjahorresnet, an Egyptian noble of Sais (fl. c. 526–518 BCE), commanded the royal ships of the last two Saite kings and then served their Persian conquerors as chief physician, palace administrator and confidant of Cambyses II and Darius I. His autobiography, inscribed on a green-stone statue now…