* Herodotus reckoned the length of the reign of Psammetichus II. at six years, in which he agrees with the Syncellus, while the abbreviators of Manetho fix it at seventeen years.  The results given by the reading of a stele of the Louvre enable us to settle that the figure 6 is to be preferred to the other, and to reckon the length of the reign at five years and a half.

His name is met with everywhere on the banks of the Nile—­at Karnak, where he completed the decoration of the great columns of Taharqa, at Abydos, at Heliopolis, and on the monuments that have come from that town, such as the obelisk set up in the Campus Martius at Borne.  The personal influence of the young sovereign did not count for much in the zeal thus displayed; but the impulse that had been growing during three or four generations, since the time of the expulsion of the Assyrians, now began to have its full effect.  Egypt, well armed, well governed by able ministers, and more and more closely bound to Greece by both mercantile and friendly ties, had risen to a very high position in the estimation of its contemporaries; the inhabitants of Elis had deferred to her decision in the question whether they should take part in the Olympic games in which they were the judges, and following the advice she had given on the matter, they had excluded their own citizens from the sports so as to avoid the least suspicion of partiality in the distribution of the prizes.* The new king, probably the brother of the late Pharaoh, had his prenomen of Uahibn from his grandfather Psammetichus I., and it was this sovereign that the Greeks called indifferently Uaphres and Apries.**

* Diodorus Siculus has transferred the anecdote to Amasis, and the decision given is elsewhere attributed to one of the seven sages.  The story is a popular romance, of which Herodotus gives the version current among the Greeks in Egypt.

** According to Herodotus, Apries was the son of Psammis.  The size of the sarcophagus of Psammetichus II., suitable only for a youth, makes this filiation improbable.  Psammetichus, who came to the throne when he was hardly more than a child, could have left behind him only children of tender age, and Apries appears from the outset as a prince of full mental and physical development.

[Illustration:  422.jpg APRIES, FROM A SPHINX IN THE LOUVRE]

     Drawn by Boudier, from the bronze statuette in the Louvre
     Museum.

He was young, ambitious, greedy of fame and military glory, and longed to use the weapon that his predecessors had for some fifteen years past been carefully whetting; his emissaries, arriving at Jerusalem at the moment when the popular excitement was at its height, had little difficulty in overcoming Zede-kiah’s scruples.  Edoni, Moab, and the Philistines, who had all taken their share in the conferences of the rebel party, hesitated at the last moment, and refused to sever their relations with Babylon.  Tyre and the Ammonites alone persisted in their determination, and allied themselves with Egypt on the same terms as Judah.