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Updated: May 21, 2025
Then Psammeticus tried still another plan. He sent out among the poor people of the city and found two little babies who had never heard a word spoken. He gave these to a shepherd and ordered him to bring them up among his sheep, far from the homes of men. "You must never speak a word to them," said the king; "and you must not permit any person to speak in their hearing."
Another of the great obelisks of Rome is that which stands on Monte Citorio, in front of the present Parliament House. It was brought to Rome by Augustus, who dedicated it anew to the sun, and placed it as the gnomon of a meridian in the midst of the Campus Martius. Originally it had been erected at Heliopolis in honour of Psammeticus I., who reigned about seven hundred years before Christ.
But however justly these sieges are celebrated in modern times, the antiquarian who contends for the supremacy of past ages over the present, will not fail to instance the siege of Troy and the exploits of Achilles and Agamemnon, as a more distinguished instance of perseverance than any to be met with in these degenerate days, and if he should meet with some sceptic who insists that the heroes of Homer owe their existence only to the imagination of the poet, although he can assent to no such hypothesis, yet he will also instance the siege of Azotus, on the frontiers of Egypt, which Psammeticus, meditating extensive conquests, and thinking it beneath him to leave so strong a fortress unsubdued, is related to have spent 29 years of his reign in reducing.
From the time of Psammeticus, when the Greeks were allowed to settle in Egypt, frequent intercourse and correspondence was kept up between them and their countrymen in Greece; and from this circumstance the Egyptian history may henceforth be more firmly depended upon.
It was here that Psammeticus I. established a colony of the Carian and Ionian mercenaries, by whose aid this monarch had won the throne; and this Greek city had been built as one out of three fortresses to prevent the incursions of the Arabians and Syrians. The city of Tahpanhes or Taphne is referred to in the book of Jeremiah.
He says: Were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, we scarce conceive the use thereof allowable in physic: exceeding the barbarities of Cambyses, and turning old heroes into unworthy potions. Shall Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and Cheops and Psammeticus be weighed unto us for drugs?
What, for example what of the renowned pseudo-Theocritus, Salamon Gessner, who sang of this same vale of Neto in his "Daphnis"? Alas, the good Salamon has gone the way of all derivative bores; he is dead deader than King Psammeticus; he is now moralizing in some decorous Paradise amid flocks of Dresden-China sheep and sugar-watery youths and maidens.
They were met by Psammeticus I., king of Egypt, and bribed to turn back. By Cyaxares, either these or another horde were defeated; but it was not until 605 B.C. that the region south of the Black Sea was cleared of them. The kingdom of Lydia had now come to play an important part in the affairs of western Asia.
Defeated at Pelusium, and compelled to yield up Memphis after a siege, it is said that Psammeticus, the Psammenitus of Herodotus, the unfortunate successor of the powerful Pharaohs, was obliged to look on the spectacle of his daughters in the garb of working-women, bearing water, and to see his sons, with the principal young nobles, ordered to execution. But this tale lacks confirmation.
You do not then believe what Herodotus wrote of two children, who, at the special command and appointment of Psammeticus, King of Egypt, having been kept in a petty country cottage, where they were nourished and entertained in a perpetual silence, did at last, after a certain long space of time, pronounce this word Bec, which in the Phrygian language signifieth bread.
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