the words of the oracle came to their remembrance, and they exiled the imprudent prince to the marshes along the sea-coast, and forbade him ever to quit them.  He secretly consulted the oracle of Isis of Buto to know what he might expect from the gods, and she replied that the means of revenge would reach him from the sea, on the day when brazen soldiers should issue from its waters.  He thought at first that the priests were mocking him, but shortly afterwards Ionian and Carian pirates, clad in their coats of mail, landed not far from his abode.  The messenger who brought tidings of their advent had never before seen a soldier fully armed, and reported that brazen men had issued from the waves and were pillaging the country.  Psammetichus, realising at once that the prediction was being fulfilled, ran to meet the strangers, enrolled them in his service, and with their aid overthrew successively his eleven rivals.*

* The account given by Diodorus of these events is in general derived from that of Herodotus, with additional details borrowed directly or indirectly from some historian of the same epoch, perhaps Hellanicus of Mitylene:  the reason of the persecution endured by Psammetichus is, according to him, not the fear of seeing the prediction fulfilled, but jealousy of the wealth the Saite prince had acquired by his commerce with the Greeks.  I have separated the narrative of Herodotus from his account of the Labyrinth which did not originally belong to it, but was connected with a different cycle of legends.  The original romance was part of the cycle which grew up around the oracle of Buto, so celebrated in Egypt at the Persian epoch, several other fragments of which are preserved in Herodotus; it had been mixed up with one of the versions of the stories relating to the Labyrinth, probably by some dragoman of the Fayyum.  The number twelve does not correspond with the information furnished by the Assyrian texts, which enumerate more than twenty Egyptian princes; it is perhaps of Greek origin, like the twelve great gods which the informants of Herodotus tried to make out in Egypt, and was introduced into the Egyptian version by a Greek interpreter.

A brazen helmet and an oracle had dethroned him; another oracle and brazen men had replaced him on his throne.  A shorter version of these events made no mention of the twelve kings, but related instead that a certain Pharaoh named Tementhes had been warned by the oracle of Amon to beware of cocks.  Now Psammetichus had as a companion in exile a Carian named Pigres, and in conversing with him one day, he learned by chance that the Carians had been the first people to wear crested helmets; he recalled at once the words of the oracle, and hired from Asia a number of these “cocks,” with whose assistance he revolted and overthrew his suzerain in battle under the walls of Memphis, close to the temple of Isis.  Such is the legendary account of the Saite renaissance; its true history is not yet clearly and precisely known.  Egypt was in a state of complete disintegration when Psammetichus at length revived the ambitious projects of his family, but the dissolution of the various component parts had not everywhere taken place in the same manner.