Cambyses II

Cambyses II (Old Persian Kambūjiya, Elamite Kanbuziya, Akkadian Kambuziya, Aramaic Knbwzy) ruled the Achaemenid empire from 530 to 522 BCE, the second of its Great Kings and the only one to reign with almost no voice of his own surviving. No Old Persian inscription of his is known; he built no Behistun. What we have of him is refracted through two incompatible mirrors (the hostile Greek narrative of Herodotus and the contemporary documents of the lands he ruled), and the gap between them makes his reign the sharpest lesson in this compendium on how the record is made and how a king can be lost inside it. He was the conqueror of Egypt, the man who completed the empire his father Cyrus had begun; he was also, in the memory the Greeks fixed on him, the archetype of the mad Eastern despot. Neither portrait can simply be trusted, and this entry keeps the seam between them open.

Son and heir of Cyrus

Cambyses was the elder son of Cyrus the Great and Cassandane (Herodotus 2.1, 3.2); the report of Ctesias that his mother was Amytis, a daughter of the Median king Astyages, the Iranica article judges unreliable. By the Behistun inscription he had a full brother, Bardiya, of the same mother and father (DB 1.30), the prince whose fate would become the pivot of the succession. Following Persian royal custom as the Greeks describe it, Cambyses married his own full sisters Atossa and Roxane, and also Phaidyme, daughter of the noble Otanes (Herodotus 3.31, 68).

He was groomed for rule from within his father's lifetime. On the Cyrus Cylinder Cyrus states that Marduk, the supreme god of Babylon, had blessed not only himself but 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 from the hands of Marduk in Esagila, the god's temple. (A famous reconstruction by A. L. Oppenheim, in which Cambyses defiantly entered the temple armed and in Elamite dress out of religious hostility, the Iranica article flags as unreliable, Boyce rejected it, and the compendium sets it aside.) The Babylonian documents show him king of Babylon for only about nine months of 538 before Cyrus removed him from the office for reasons unknown, and even then only of the city and the north; yet he went on spending much of his time in Babylon and Sippar, and legal texts of the 530s name the steward, the scribe-interpreter, the agents and the seal-cutter of "the crown prince Cambyses." He was, in short, a working heir with his own household and lands long before the throne came to him. When Cyrus rode east against the Massagetai in 530, he took Cambyses part of the way and then, as heir, sent him back to Persia before the fatal battle (Herodotus 1.208); Cyrus fell, and Cambyses became Great King.

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, the Persians on their first three kings, trans. Macaulay 1890)

The conquest of Egypt (525 BCE)

The great deed of the reign, and the reason Cambyses matters to the shape of the empire, was the conquest of Egypt, the one major old kingdom of the Near East that Cyrus had left untaken. In 525 BCE Cambyses marched against it. His army won a major battle in the spring at Pelusium, in the eastern Delta (Herodotus 3.10); the Egyptians fell back on Memphis as the Persians pressed inland, and by summer the whole country was in Persian hands. The Libyans and the Greek cities of Cyrene and Barca submitted of their own accord. At the end of August Cambyses was formally installed as king of Egypt, taking the pharaonic titulary in due Egyptian form, "king of Upper and Lower Egypt," descendant of the gods Ra, Horus and Osiris, and, through his Egyptian collaborator Udjahorresnet, the Horus-name Smatawy ("Uniter of the Two Lands") and the throne-name Mesutire ("Offspring of Ra"). He went to Sais, the old Saite capital, to take part in the rites of the goddess Neith, prostrated himself before her at the coronation, and offered sacrifice to the Egyptian gods.

The defeated pharaoh was Psammetichus III (Herodotus's Psammenitus), who had come to the throne only months before, on the death of his father Amasis. Herodotus tells his fate as a scene of cruelty tempered at the last: Cambyses set the captured king's daughter among the water-carriers and led his son out to death to test him, and when Psammenitus bore his children's humiliation dry-eyed but wept at the sight of an old friend fallen to beggary, Cambyses was moved and spared him, until the young king was found stirring revolt and made to drink bull's blood. Whatever the truth of the anecdote, its shape is Greek: the barbarian king's caprice, cruelty and sudden clemency braided together for a moral. The conquest itself Persian propaganda dressed as legitimate union: the story was put about that Cambyses was himself the son of Cyrus by an Egyptian princess, Nitetis, daughter of the pharaoh Apries, and so a rightful heir to the Egyptian throne (Herodotus 3.1–3). With Egypt, Cyrus's realm became an empire straddling Asia and Africa, and the frontier the Persians would hold, contest and lose over two centuries reached the First Cataract of the Nile.

Africa beyond Egypt: Ammon and Nubia

Egypt taken, Cambyses turned to the rest of Africa, and here even the hostile tradition records real disaster rather than mere cruelty. He sent an expedition west against the oracle-oasis of Ammon (Siwa); the army, Herodotus says, was lost in a sandstorm and never seen again (3.26), the "lost army of Cambyses" that has drawn searchers ever since. He led a second campaign south into Nubia (Kush) with, in Herodotus's telling, provisions too thin for the march (3.17, 25); the expedition failed and a large part of the army was lost, though Cambyses did annex northern Nubia beyond the First Cataract. A tale of a place still called "Cambyses' Depot" near the Third Cataract in Roman times the Iranica article treats with caution, as a probable confusion of a similar name. The African campaigns are the historical core beneath the Greek picture of a king rushing at the impossible: overreach and hard loss, not derangement, but loss enough to feed the legend.

The mad tyrant: the Greek tradition

The portrait that fixed Cambyses in Western memory is Herodotus's, and it is savage. The classical authors, Herodotus above all (3.27–29), and after him Strabo (17.1.27) and others, describe his time in Egypt as an orgy of sacrilege: he plundered temples, mocked the gods, opened and abused royal tombs, had the mummy of Amasis exhumed and burned. The signature outrage is the killing of the Apis bull. Herodotus tells that Cambyses, returning humiliated from Nubia to find the Egyptians rejoicing at the epiphany of a new Apis (the sacred calf in which the god was made present) took their joy for mockery of his defeat, drew his dagger and stabbed the bull in the thigh, laughing at a god of flesh that could bleed; the wound festered, the Apis died, and Cambyses' madness (Herodotus says he was mad already, perhaps from the "sacred disease," epilepsy) deepened into the murders of his own kin, his brother and his sister-wife among them. The stabbing of Apis became the emblem of the whole tradition: the impious conqueror who lifts his hand against another people's god.

Herodotus frames the impiety with a principle that is, in effect, the empire's own charter of tolerance turned against Cambyses as its counter-example: that 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, on the customs of nations, trans. Macaulay 1890)

Into the same reign the tradition set its portraits of Cambyses' arbitrary, terrible justice. The most vivid is the flaying of the corrupt royal judge Sisamnes, whose punishment the king turned into a standing warning:

"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 1890)

And it gave him a wise counsellor he could not hear: the aged Croesus, the fallen king of Lydia kept at the Persian court, who begs the young king to master his own temper and is nearly killed for the advice:

"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." (Herodotus 3.36, Croesus counselling Cambyses, trans. Macaulay 1890)

The rhetorical function of all this 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.

The Egyptian evidence: a king who respected the cults

Against the Greek portrait stands the contemporary Egyptian and Babylonian record, and it tells a markedly different story, the anti-Persian propaganda problem in its sharpest form. As the Iranica article states flatly, no desecration of temples by Cambyses is recorded in the contemporary Egyptian sources. The decisive counter-evidence is the Apis burial itself. According to the official epitaph on its sarcophagus, an Apis bull died in the summer of 525 BCE and was buried in a granite sarcophagus made at Cambyses' own order, the conqueror providing, in proper form, for the god the Greeks say he murdered; and that Apis' successor lived on to die four years after Cambyses' own death. The sacred bull was not stabbed to death in a fit of rage; it was interred with royal honours by the king's command. Egyptian legal and administrative texts from the first years of Persian rule confirm that the conquest did no serious harm to the economic life of the country.

The fullest native witness is Udjahorresnet, a priest, chief physician and naval commander of Sais who had served the last Saite pharaohs and then served Cambyses and Darius. His autobiographical statue-inscription (the "Vatican naophorous," now in the Vatican Museums) presents a Cambyses who did the opposite of sacrilege: Udjahorresnet composed the king's Egyptian titulary, brought him to Sais to make the offerings to Neith "as every beneficent king has done," and had him expel the foreign squatters who had settled improperly on the temple's grounds and restore its purifications and endowments. This is a pious, legitimate pharaoh, working through the very Egyptian institutions the Greek tradition says he trampled, and it flatly contradicts Herodotus's "mad Cambyses." Even a hostile Egyptian source concedes the limit of his impiety: the Jewish garrison at Elephantine, a full century later, still remembered that when Cambyses cast down the temples of Egypt's gods he had spared theirs:

"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 Elephantine papyri, the petition of Yedoniah to Bigvai, Cowley no. 30, trans. Cowley 1923)

Even this Egyptian memory of destruction is contested, and it must be weighed against the Apis burial and Udjahorresnet's testimony; where the Greek picture is one of blanket sacrilege, the Egyptian evidence at most points to a hard fiscal blow. For the so-called Demotic Chronicle (a Ptolemaic text, centuries later, and to be used with care) records what may be the real grievance behind the legend: Cambyses sharply reduced the vast revenues in silver and in kind that the Saite pharaohs had lavished on the Egyptian temples, leaving only three leading temples their full privileges. There, most likely, is the germ of the whole tradition. The priesthoods he impoverished had every motive to blacken him, and the stories of murdered gods and violated tombs grew, over the generations, from the ledger. As the Iranica article puts it, the Greek assessment "reflects Persian and Egyptian propaganda against Cambyses": disliked by the Persian tribal aristocracy for centralising power in his own hands, and hated by the Egyptian priests whose incomes he cut, he was slandered from two directions at once, and the slander became history.

The death of Bardiya and the road home

While Cambyses was in Egypt, a shadow fell across the succession that he himself, according to the official version, had cast. By the Behistun inscription of Darius, Cambyses had before his departure secretly killed his own full brother Bardiya (the Greek Smerdis), and the killing was kept hidden, so that when a magus named Gaumata rose on 11 March 522 BCE claiming to be Bardiya, the people, not knowing the true prince was dead, followed him. Whether any of this is true is the deepest question of the age, and the compendium treats it in full at The Accession of Darius (522 BCE): a serious body of scholarship holds that Gaumata is Darius's fiction, that the man on the throne 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. 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. It is clear from Behistun and from Babylonian legal documents that Cambyses died after 1 July 522 BCE, on the road back through Syria. Behistun records the fact in three flat words whose ambiguity has never been resolved:

"Afterwards, Cambyses died his own death." (Darius I, the Behistun inscription, DB §11, on the death of Cambyses)

Scholars read the phrase as natural death, or suicide, or accident. Herodotus supplies the accident and moralises it: mounting his horse to march against the usurper, Cambyses accidentally stabbed himself in the thigh (the very wound, the story pointedly notes, that he had dealt the Apis bull) and, as gangrene set in, called it the god's requital; three weeks later he died at a place the Greeks called Agbatana in Syria, leaving no children (Herodotus 3.62, 64, 66). Ctesias, characteristically, dissents and has him die of an accident at home in Babylon. The circumstances cannot be recovered; what matters for the shape of the period is that the second Great King died abruptly, far from Persia, childless, with the throne already in other hands.

The succession crisis he left

Cambyses' death without an heir is the hinge on which the whole subsequent history turns. He left no son; his brother Bardiya 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 (the Seven) killed the king they called the false Bardiya and took the throne, upon which the whole empire rose in a single year of revolt. Everything that follows in this compendium's period (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 Cambyses' childless death tore open. He is, in that sense, the necessary hinge: 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.

Reputation and the problem of the hostile source

Cambyses is the clearest instance in this whole period of a historical problem the compendium returns to again and again: a king known almost entirely through his enemies. The Persian aristocracy resented his centralising of power; the Egyptian priesthoods he had impoverished nursed a grievance that grew into legend; the Greeks, inheriting and elaborating both, made him the type of the mad Eastern despot, and it is their Cambyses (the stabber of Apis, the mocker of gods, the murderer of his own blood) that entered the Western imagination and held it for two and a half millennia. Set the contemporary documents beside the narrative and a different and duller figure appears: an effective, harsh, centralising conqueror who added Egypt to the empire, observed its cults with propriety, buried its sacred bull, and overreached and lost armies in the African deserts. The truth is almost certainly nearer the documents than the legend, but it cannot be fully recovered, because the man left no account of himself. He is the mirror-image of his successor: where Darius survives as an overwhelming self-portrait in stone that we must learn to distrust, Cambyses survives only in the portraits his enemies drew, which we must learn to correct. 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.