* A fragment of his Annals, discovered by Pinches, mentions in the thirty-seventh year of his reign a campaign against [Ah]masu, King of Egypt; and Wiedemann, from the evidence of this document combined with the information derived from one of the monuments in the Louvre, thought that the fact of a conquest of Egypt as far as Syeno might be admitted; at that point the Egyptian general Nsihor would have defeated the Chaldaeans and repelled the invasion, and this event would have taken place during the joint reign of Apries and Amasis.  A more attentive examination of the Egyptian monument shows that it refers not to a Chaldaean war, but to a rebellion of the garrisons in the south of Egypt, including the Greek and Semitic auxiliaries.

According to Chaldaean tradition, Nebuchadrezzar actually invaded the valley of the Nile and converted Egypt into a Babylonian province, with Amasis as its satrap.* We may well believe that Amasis lost the conquests won by his predecessor in Phoenicia, if, indeed, they still belonged to Egypt at his accession:  but there is nothing to indicate that the Chaldaeans ever entered Egypt itself and repeated the Assyrian exploit of a century before.

* These events would have taken place in the twenty-third year of Nebuchadrezzar; the reigning king (Apries) being killed and his place taken by one of his generals (Amasis), who remained a satrap of the Babylonian empire.

This was Nebuchadrezzar’s last war, the last at least of which history makes any mention.  As a fact, the kings of the second Babylonian empire do not seem to have been the impetuous conquerors which we have fancied them to be.  We see them as they are depicted to us in the visions of the Hebrew prophets, who, regarding them and their nation as a scourge in the hands of God, had no colours vivid enough or images sufficiently terrible to portray them.  They had blotted out Nineveh from the list of cities, humiliated Pharaoh, and subjugated Syria, and they had done all this almost at their first appearance in the field—­such a feat as Assyria and Egypt in the plenitude of their strength had been unable to accomplish:  they had, moreover, destroyed Jerusalem and carried Judah into captivity.  There is nothing astonishing in the fact that this Nebuchadrezzar, whose history is known to us almost entirely from Jewish sources, should appear as a fated force let loose upon the world.  “O thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into the scabbard; rest and be still!  How canst thou be quiet, seeing the Lord hath given thee a charge?” But his campaigns in Syria and Africa, of which the echoes transmitted to us still seem so formidable, were not nearly so terrible in reality as those in which Blam had perished a century previously; they were, moreover, the only conflicts which troubled the peace of his reign.  The Arabian chroniclers affirm, indeed, that the fabulous wealth of Yemen had incited him to invade that region.