from 3 - The major regions of the empire
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
The historian's life may have few pleasures, but one of its compensations is that he is allowed to eavesdrop. Let us therefore take advantage of this to read the thoughts of Cambyses, as he waits at Acre early in 525 B.C., on the eve of his invasion of Egypt. As doubts begin to overwhelm him, he surveys the difficulties ahead. ‘I am undertaking’, he thinks to himself, ‘something more hazardous than the Medes and the Persians have ever attempted: the conquest of a land six hundred miles long, fed by a river whose very origins are unknown, and whose antiquity is beyond grasp. Worse than this, it contains some three million people, and perhaps more, not to mention its foreign communities, all of whom will need to be governed wisely if they are not to revolt and cause us interminable problems. Its cities are strongly fortified with ramparts, and there are twenty thousand towns; the mouths of its strange river flood unpredictably, and can be controlled by canals and dykes without our knowledge. Whole armies could perish there. True, the Assyrians before us invaded this puzzling country, but that was a short-lived affair and produced nothing but a few obelisks. They did not even dare to dismiss the local governors, who revolted as soon as their backs were turned. The Babylonians came to grief three times at least on its north-east frontier. If this were not enough, there are also the trackless deserts, which few of our men have ever seen.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.