[664–332 BCE] Late Period and Achaemenid Rule

We begin in the year 664 BCE. The air over the Nile Delta hangs thick with the smoke of sacked cities and the metallic tang of blood. The great Assyrian war machine has smashed its way through the land, leaving Egypt broken, its pride shattered. For centuries, the kingdom of the pharaohs had been a land of fractured power, ruled by competing Libyan chieftains. Now, it was a vassal state, humbled and bleeding. Out of this chaos, a man rises. Not from the ancient royal lines of Thebes, but from the city of Sais in the Delta. His name is Psamtik I, and he is a cunning, ruthless pragmatist. He understands a truth that will define this entire era: the old ways are no longer enough. To reclaim Egypt, he needs new tools, new weapons, and new men. He looks across the Great Green Sea and hires the one force that can match the Assyrians: bronze-clad Greek mercenaries. These hoplites, with their disciplined phalanx formations and iron will, become the fist with which Psamtik hammers Egypt back into a single, unified kingdom. By 656 BCE, he is the undisputed master of the Two Lands, inaugurating the 26th, or Saite, Dynasty. What follows is a brilliant, nostalgic renaissance. It’s as if the entire nation, having stared into the abyss, collectively decides to become more Egyptian than ever before. Artists and architects turn their backs on the recent past and look deep into history, to the golden ages of the Old and Middle Kingdoms over a thousand years prior. Statues are carved with the serene, powerful confidence of the pyramid builders. Scribes meticulously copy ancient religious texts, reviving archaic forms of the hieroglyphic script. This wasn’t just art; it was a political statement. They were declaring to the world, and to themselves, that the true, eternal Egypt had returned. For the farmer tilling the black, fertile soil left by the Nile's inundation, life remained tethered to the three seasons of the river. He paid his taxes in grain, his back ached from the sun, and his world was the village, the local temple, and the eternal cycle of planting and harvest. He wore a simple linen kilt, his wife a simple sheath dress. Their home was mudbrick, cool in the heat, and their diet was the bread and beer that had sustained their ancestors for millennia. But for the merchants and officials, the world was rapidly expanding. Psamtik and his successors threw open the doors to foreign trade. In the Delta, the port city of Naukratis was established exclusively for Greek traders. Imagine the clamor of its docks: the babble of Egyptian, Greek, and Phoenician tongues; the scent of cedarwood from Lebanon and silver from Anatolia mingling with the aroma of Nile fish drying in the sun. This influx of trade and ideas brought new wealth, but it also sowed the seeds of future conflict. Egypt was becoming dependent on foreign soldiers and foreign markets. For over a century, this delicate balance held. Pharaohs like Necho II even commissioned a fleet and, according to the historian Herodotus, sponsored a Phoenician expedition that successfully circumnavigated Africa, a staggering feat for the 6th century BCE. But this reclaimed glory was fragile, a beautiful vase standing in the path of an earthquake. A new, terrifying power was rising in the east: the Achaemenid Persian Empire. In 525 BCE, the earthquake struck. The Persian king, Cambyses II, a brilliant and brutal commander, swept towards Egypt with an unstoppable army. The final Egyptian pharaoh of the 26th Dynasty, Psamtik III, gathered his forces at the fortress of Pelusium, the gateway to Egypt. What happened next is a masterful, if possibly embellished, piece of psychological warfare. Knowing the Egyptians held cats and other animals sacred, with the goddess Bastet being a prominent feline deity, Cambyses ordered his soldiers to paint cats on their shields. The story goes further, claiming he placed a line of cats and other revered animals at the very front of his army. The Egyptian soldiers, devout to a fault, were paralyzed. To fire an arrow or thrust a spear meant risking the death of a sacred creature, an unthinkable sacrilege. Their hesitation was fatal. The Persians crashed through their lines, and Egypt fell. Persian rule was a heavy cloak. Cambyses was remembered as a tyrant, a madman who desecrated temples and mocked Egyptian religion. But his successor, Darius I, was a shrewder administrator. He respected local customs, completed grand building projects, and even finished a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, a marvel of engineering that boosted trade immeasurably. Egypt was now a ‘satrapy,’ a province in a vast empire stretching from India to Greece, its immense agricultural wealth—its grain—now feeding Persian armies and filling Persian coffers. But the spirit of the Two Lands, forged over nearly 3,000 years, could not be extinguished. For the next two centuries, the rhythm of life in Egypt was one of simmering resentment punctuated by violent rebellion. The flame of independence was fanned again and again, leading to brief, glorious moments of freedom. From 404 to 343 BCE, a series of native Egyptian dynasties—the 28th, 29th, and 30th—managed to throw off the Persian yoke. Kings like Nectanebo I and II ruled as true pharaohs, commissioning beautiful reliefs in the temples of Philae and Karnak in a last, desperate attempt to assert their Egyptian identity through stone and splendor. They fought with tenacity, hiring Greek generals and soldiers to hold the Persians at bay. It was a heroic but doomed struggle. In 343 BCE, the full might of the Persian Empire returned under Artaxerxes III. The last native pharaoh, Nectanebo II, was defeated and forced to flee south into Nubia, disappearing from history. Egypt was once again shackled. The end, when it came, was not with the fire and fury of another Persian conquest. It arrived just over a decade later, in 332 BCE, with a young, charismatic Macedonian king. His name was Alexander. As his army marched into Egypt, the people did not see him as another foreign conqueror. They saw him as a liberator from the hated Persians. They welcomed him, and the priests at the Siwa Oasis famously declared him the son of the god Amun, the legitimate Pharaoh of Egypt. The long, twilight struggle of the Late Period was over. The Achaemenid grip was broken, but so too was the line of native Egyptian rule, this time forever. A new age, the Hellenistic age, was dawning on the banks of the Nile.