it. The old beliefs were shaken, and a multitude of superstitions rushed
in. The corruptions introduced by the Greeks were more easy of adoption
and imitation than the sterling points of their character, their
intelligence, their unwearied energy, their love of truth. Egypt was
awakened to a new life by the novel circumstances of the Psamatik
period; but it was a fitful life, unquiet, unnatural, feverish. The
character of the men lost in dignity and strength by the discontinuance
of military training consequent upon the substitution for a native army
of an army of mercenaries. The position of the women sank through the
adoption of those ideas concerning them which their contact with
orientals had engrained into the minds of the Asiatic Greeks. The
national spirit of the people was sapped by the concentration of the
royal favour on a race of foreigners whose manners and customs were
abhorrent to them, and whom they regarded with envy and dislike. If some
improvement is to be seen on the surface of Egyptian life under the
Psamatiks, some greater activity and enterprise, some increased
intellectual stir, some improved methods in art, these ameliorations
scarcely compensate for the indications of decline which lie deeper, and
which in the sequel determined the fate of the nation.

The later years of the reign of Psamatik were coincident with a time of
extreme trouble and confusion in Asia, in the course of which the
Assyrian Monarchy came to an end, and south-western Asia was partitioned
between the Medes and the Babylonians. A tempting field was laid open
for an ambitious prince, who might well have dreamt of Syrian or even
Mesopotamian conquest, and of recalling the old glories of Seti,
Thothmes, and Amenhotep. Psamatik did go so far as to make an attack
upon Philistia, but met with so little success that he was induced to
restrain any grander aspirations which he may have cherished, and to
leave the Asiatic monarchs to settle Asiatic affairs as it pleased them.