Cambyses II Conquers Egypt

The event

Cyrus's son and successor, Cambyses II, extended Persian power in a direction his father never reached: Egypt. In 525 BC, Cambyses defeated Pharaoh Psamtik III at the Battle of Pelusium and brought the ancient land of the Nile under Persian rule as a satrapy, or province — a status Egypt would hold, with brief interruptions, for the next two centuries.

The conquest matters for biblical geography as much as for politics. With Egypt now folded into the same vast empire as Jerusalem and Judah, the entire eastern Mediterranean world that Israel's post-exilic community inhabited was, for the first time in centuries, unified under a single imperial government. Ancient historians such as Herodotus describe Cambyses as an unstable and often cruel ruler, in marked contrast to the far more measured, administratively minded reign of his successor, Darius I, who would soon reorganize the whole empire — including its relationship to the rebuilding work underway in Jerusalem.