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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Cambyses II Biography CAMBYSES II (?-522 B.C.). King of the united realm of the Medes and Persians from 529 to 522 B.C. He was the grandson of Cambyses I and son of Cyrus the Great. Ascending the throne on the death of his father, he at once took the reins of government in his hands. His brother, Smerdis (OPers. Bardiya), was made Viceroy of the eastern provinces of Iran. Cambyses' first and chief design was the conquest of Egypt. He invaded this country with his armies, and in 525 B.C. defeated Psammetichus III, the King of Egypt, at Pelusium. Memphis, the capital, fell in the following year, 524 B.C., and Cambyses was soon master of the entire fertile valley of the Nile. Nubia was also subjugated, but not without great loss to his forces, and an attempt to conquer the Ethiopians proved a disastrous failure. An expedition likewise against Carthage had to be abandoned because his Phśnician allies refused to lend their naval power against their kindred. It was now that Cambyses received news that the throne of Persia had been seized, during his absence, by a Magian priest. Gaumata the Pseudo-Smerdis. The usurper impersonated Bardiya, or Smerdis, Cambyses' brother, who had been assassinated, though the people did not know it, at the instigation of Cambyses himself. Startled by this bold impersonation of one whom he believed to be dead, the guilty and crime-laden Cambyses hastened to retrace his steps to Persia, but died on the way (522 B.C.), at Ecbatana, which Herodotus (iii, 62-64) calls a city of Syria, but Josephus names Damascus. The oracle of Buto had prophesied he would die at Agbatana, but Cambyses always supposed the Median Ecbatana to be meant by this. In certain respects the accounts of Herodotus (iii. 64) and Ctesias differ as to the manner of his death, but both attribute it to an accidental self-inflicted wound. In the great Behistun inscription (i. 43) Darius says that Cambyses died by a death self-inflicted, but the word uva-marsiyus lit. ‘self-death,’ seems rather, though not necessarily, to imply suicide. Regarding the character of Cambyses, if we follow Herodotus, his behavior in Egypt was little short of that of a madman. His cruelties and sacrilegious acts, due principally to drunkenness, were atrocious. He is said to have violated the tombs of the Egyptians and even to have put some of their leading men to death, among them the captive King Psammetichus. In an outrageous manner he stabbed the sacred bull of Apis so that it died, and he caused the ministering priests to be scourged (Herod. iii. 29). But it must be added that this account is not easy to reconcile with an existing stele on which Cambyses is portrayed as giving an honorable burial to the dead god Apis. It is even claimed that he murdered his own sister, whom he had wished to marry. On the whole there can be no doubt that he was a dissolute and inhuman ruler: Consult Lincke, "Kambyses in der Sage, Litteratur and Kunst des Mittelalters" (Leipzig, 1897), in the Ebers Festschrift; and see also CYRUS; DARIUS; MEDIA; PERSIA. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. IV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 377-378. |