Cambyses Conquers Egypt at Pelusium
Cyrus's son and heir adds the Nile to a Persian empire that already stretches from Anatolia to Central Asia
Quick facts
- Date
- 525 BCE
- Key battle
- Pelusium
- Defeated pharaoh
- Psammetichus III
- Egyptian collaborator
- Wedjahor-Resne
What happened
Cambyses II, Cyrus's son and successor, invaded Egypt in 525 BCE after Egypt's aging pharaoh Amasis died and was succeeded by his son Psammetichus III. The Egyptian admiral Wedjahor-Resne, according to livius.org's account of the ancient sources, had already been courted by Cambyses and would later serve as his right-hand man after the conquest. The two armies met at Pelusium in the eastern Nile Delta; the Egyptians were defeated and fell back to Memphis, which the Persians took after a long siege. Psammetichus III was captured alive and treated with a degree of honor. Cambyses then traveled to the Egyptian city of Sais to be crowned pharaoh in the traditional Egyptian style, following the same pattern his father had used at Babylon of adopting local ceremonial legitimacy rather than simply imposing foreign rule. The Greek historian Herodotus later portrayed Cambyses as sacrilegious and half-mad in Egypt, including a story that he killed the sacred Apis bull, but this account appears to draw heavily on hostile Egyptian oral tradition and is not backed by contemporary Egyptian sources.
Why it matters
Egypt's conquest made the Achaemenid Empire the first state in history to control both Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley simultaneously, and it became the empire's Twenty-Seventh Dynasty in Egyptian records. Cambyses' adoption of a pharaonic throne name shows the same governing strategy Cyrus used at Babylon: rule through existing religious and administrative structures rather than erasing them.
How we know
Herodotus provides the fullest narrative but wrote generations later and relied partly on Egyptian informants hostile to Persian rule; the Egyptian collaborator Wedjahor-Resne left his own inscribed account, which portrays Cambyses far more favorably and is treated by modern historians as a useful corrective to Herodotus's hostile portrait.
Sources
- Livius.org (Jona Lendering). Cambyses II · Reputable sourcelivius.org · The domain "livius.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Cambyses II · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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