A check, however, was inflicted on his army by Nes-Hor, the Governor of the South, whereupon he gave up his idea of Nubian conquest.  Returning down the valley, he completed that ravage of Egypt which is described by Jeremiah and Ezekiel.  It is probable that in B.C. 565, three years after his first invasion, he took Sais and put the aged Apries to death.[30] Amasis he allowed still to reign, but only as a tributary king, and thus Egypt became “a base kingdom” (Ezek. xxix. 14), “the basest of the kingdoms” (ibid. verse 15), if its former exaltation were taken into account.

The “base kingdom” was, however, materially, as flourishing as ever.  The sense of security from foreign attack was a great encouragement to private industry and commercial enterprise.  The discontinuances of lavish expenditure on military expeditions improved the state finances, and enabled those at the head of the government to employ the money, that would otherwise have been wasted, in reproductive undertakings.  The agricultural system of Egypt was never better organized or better managed than under Amasis.  Nature seemed to conspire with man to make the time one of joy and delight, for the inundation was scarcely ever before so regularly abundant, nor were the crops ever before so plentiful.  The “twenty thousand cities,” which Herodotus assigns to the time, may be a myth; but, beyond all doubt, the tradition which told of them was based upon the fact of a period of unexampled prosperity.  Amasis’s law, that each Egyptian should appear once each year before the governor of his canton, and show the means by which he was getting an honest living, may have done something towards making industry general; but his example, his active habits, and his encouragement of art and architecture, probably did more.  His architectural works must have given constant employment to large numbers of persons as quarrymen, boatmen, bricklayers, plasterers, masons, carpenters, and master builders; his patronage of art not only gave direct occupation to a multitude of artists, but set a fashion to the more wealthy among his subjects by which the demand for objects of art was multiplied a hundredfold.  Sculptors and painters had a happy time under a king who was always building temples, erecting colossi, or sending statues or paintings of himself as presents to foreign states or foreign shrines.

The external aspect of Egypt under the reign of Amasis is thus as bright and flourishing as that which she ever wore at any former time; but, as M. Lenormant observes, this apparent prosperity did but ill conceal the decay of patriotism and the decline of all the institutions of the nation.  The kings of the Saite dynasty had thought to re-vivify Egypt, and infuse a little new blood into the old monarchy founded by Menes, by allowing the great stream of liberal ideas, whereof Greece had already made herself the propagator, to expand itself in her midst.  Without knowing it, they had by these means introduced on the