cities had suffered grievously:  Memphis had been besieged and taken by assault by both Pionkhi and Esar-haddon, Thebes had been twice sacked by the veterans of Assur-bani-pal, and from Syene to Pelusium there was not a township but had suffered at the hands of foreigners or of the Egyptians themselves.  The country had enjoyed a moment’s breathing-space under Sabaco, but the little good which this prince had been able to accomplish was effaced immediately after his death:  the canals and dykes had been neglected, the supervision of the police relaxed, and the population, periodically decimated or driven to take refuge in the strongholds, had often allowed the lands to lie waste, so that famine had been superadded to the other evils under which the land already groaned.  Psammetichus, having forced the feudal lords to submit to his supremacy, deprived them of the royal titles they had unduly assumed; he no longer tolerated their habits of private warfare, but restricted them to the functions of hereditary governors, which their ancestors had exercised under the conquering dynasties of former times,* and this enforced peace soon allowed the rural population to devote themselves joyfully to their regular occupations.

* During the last few years records of a certain number of persons have been discovered whose names and condition prove that they were the descendants of semi-independent princes of the Ethiopian and Bubastite periods:  e.g. a certain Akaneshu, who was prince of Sebennytos under Psammetichus I., and who very probably was the grandson of Akaneshu, prince of the same town under Pionkhi; and a Sheshonq of Busiris, who was perhaps a descendant of Sheshonq, prince of Busiris under Pionkhi.

With so fertile a soil, two or three years of security, during which the fellahin were able to sow and reap their crops free from the fear of marauding bands, sufficed to restore abundance, if not wealth, to the country, and Psammetichus succeeded in securing both these and other benefits to Egypt, thanks to the vigilant severity of his administration.  He would have been unable to accomplish these reforms had he relied only on the forces which had been at the disposal of his ancestors—­the native troops demoralised by poverty, and the undisciplined bands of Libyan mercenaries, which constituted the sole normal force of the Tanite and Bubastite Pharaohs and the barons of the Delta and Middle Egypt.  His experience of these two classes of soldiery had decided him to look elsewhere for a less precarious support, and ever since chance had brought him in contact with the Ionians and Carians, he had surrounded himself with a regular army of Hellenic and Asiatic mercenaries.  It is impossible to exaggerate the terror that the apparition of these men produced in the minds of the African peoples, or the revolution they effected, alike in peace or war, in Oriental states:  the charge of the Spanish soldiery among the lightly clad