Egypt under Persian Rule

Egypt was ruled by the Persian kings twice: from Cambyses’ conquest in 525 BCE until a revolt ended Persian control around 404–400 BCE (the 27th Dynasty), and again from Artaxerxes III’s reconquest in 343/342 BCE until Alexander arrived in 332 BCE (the 31st Dynasty). It was the richest province in the west and the most rebellious. Egyptian documents show Persian kings presented as pharaohs and working with the Egyptian elite, while Greek writers remembered mainly cruelty and revolt.

How Cambyses won Egypt at Pelusium in 525 BCE, and what to make of the stories about his treatment of the Apis bull, is told on Cambyses conquers Egypt. This page is about the two centuries of rule that followed.

Persian kings as pharaohs

The Persians did not abolish the pharaoh: they became him. Cambyses took an Egyptian throne name, Mesutire, “offspring of Ra”, and Darius I appears in temple reliefs in full pharaonic dress offering to Egyptian gods. Egyptian priests and officials counted the years by the reign of the Persian king, as they had by their own kings. Manetho, the Egyptian priest who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek around 280 BCE, simply listed the Persians as the 27th Dynasty.

Udjahorresnet: an Egyptian in Persian service

The best witness to the first years is a green stone statue, now in the Vatican Museums, of Udjahorresnet, a priest and physician from Sais. He had commanded the royal fleet under the last native pharaohs, Amasis and Psamtik III. After the conquest he became Cambyses’ chief physician and, by his own account, composed the king’s Egyptian titulary. He persuaded Cambyses to expel foreigners who had camped in the great temple of Neith at Sais and to restore its income.

Under Darius he went to Elam, where the king was, and was then sent home to restore the “House of Life”, the temple school of scribes and doctors at Sais. Some modern writers have called him a collaborator; others see him as a member of the old elite making the best of foreign rule to protect his city and temples. Either way, his inscription shows a Persian king relying on Egyptian experts.

Darius I and Egypt

Darius was remembered well in Egypt. According to a later Demotic text, in his third year he ordered the satrap to assemble wise men from the army, priests and scribes to write down the laws of Egypt as they had stood under Amasis; the collection was copied in Demotic and Aramaic. He built or completed a temple to Amun at Hibis in the Kharga Oasis in the Western Desert, one of the few well-preserved temples of the period. He also finished a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, described on Darius’s canal.

A striking object links Egypt and Iran directly: a statue of Darius found at Susa in 1972, carved from Egyptian stone, with hieroglyphic inscriptions and figures of subject peoples on its base. It is now in the National Museum of Iran in Tehran.

How the province worked

The satrap governed from Memphis. Administration ran in Aramaic, the common language of the empire, alongside Egyptian Demotic. Herodotus says that Persian garrisons were stationed at Elephantine on the southern border, at Daphnae in the eastern Delta and at Marea in the west, as under the pharaohs before them.

The Elephantine garrison is unusually well known because papyri survive from it. Many of its soldiers were Jews, with their own temple to Yahweh. In 410 BCE Egyptian priests of the ram-god Khnum, with the help of a local Persian commander, destroyed the temple, and the Jewish community wrote to Bagohi, the governor of Judah, asking for support to rebuild it. Another group of Aramaic letters, written on leather and now in Oxford, comes from the office of Arsames, a Persian prince and satrap of Egypt in the later 5th century, and deals with his estates and servants.

Revolts and the loss of Egypt

Egypt rebelled more often than any other province. A rising at the end of Darius I’s reign, around 486 BCE, was put down by Xerxes, who made his brother Achaemenes satrap. Around 460 BCE Inaros, a Libyan prince, led a larger revolt with Athenian help; Achaemenes was killed in battle at Papremis, and it took the Persian general Megabyzus until about 454 to crush it. The details are on Artaxerxes I.

The decisive break came at the end of Darius II’s reign. Amyrtaeus of Sais rebelled around 404 BCE, and documents from Elephantine show that Persian authority there ended by about 400. For the next sixty years Egypt was independent under the 28th, 29th and 30th Dynasties, the last native pharaohs. Persian armies tried repeatedly to return, under Artaxerxes II with the satrap Pharnabazus in 373 BCE and under Artaxerxes III around 351, and failed each time.

The 31st Dynasty: the second Persian period

Artaxerxes III finally reconquered Egypt in 343/342 BCE, defeating Nectanebo II, who fled south. The campaign is told on Artaxerxes III and the reconquest of Egypt. Greek writers accuse the king of looting temples and killing the Apis bull, echoing the old stories about Cambyses; how far this is true is uncertain, and later Egyptian tradition had good reasons to paint the Persians black.

The second Persian period lasted barely ten years. A local ruler named Khababash held parts of the country around 338–336 BCE before Darius III’s officials recovered it. In 332 BCE the satrap Mazaces, with no army to resist, handed Egypt to Alexander without a fight, as described on Alexander takes Tyre, Gaza and Egypt.

How historians judge Persian rule

Older histories, relying on Herodotus and on hostile Egyptian traditions of the Ptolemaic period, described Persian rule as oppressive and sacrilegious. Egyptian evidence from the time gives a more mixed picture: kings who acted as pharaohs, temples that kept their income, and local elites who served in the administration. The frequent revolts show that many Egyptians never accepted foreign kings, but Persian rule in Egypt was not simply a military occupation. Compare Babylon under Persian rule, where the empire faced similar problems with an ancient kingdom.