The nomes of the Delta which had taken a foremost part in the rising were ruthlessly raided, the priests heavily fined, and the oracle of Buto deprived of its possessions as a punishment for the encouragement freely given to the rebels.  Khabbisha disappeared, and his fate is unknown.  Achaemenes, one of the king’s brothers, was made satrap, but, as on previous occasions, the constitution of the country underwent no modification.  The temples retained their inherited domains, and the nomes continued in the hands of their hereditary princes, without a suspicion crossing the mind of Xerxes that his tolerance of the priestly institutions and the local dynasties was responsible for the maintenance of a body of chiefs ever in readiness for future insurrection (483).*

* The only detailed information on this revolt furnished by the Egyptian monuments is given in the Stele of Ptolemy, the son of Lagos.  An Apis, whose sarcophagus still exists, was buried by Khabbisha in the Serapoum in the second year of his reign, which proves that he was in possession of Memphis:  the White Wall had perhaps been deprived of its garrison in order to reinforce the army prepared against Greece, and it was possibly thus that it fell into the hands of Khabbisha.

Order was once more restored, but he was not yet entirely at liberty to pursue his own plan of action.  Classical tradition tells us, that on the occasion of his first visit to Babylon he had offended the religious prejudices of the Chaldaeans by a sacrilegious curiosity.  He had, in spite of the entreaties of the priests, forced an entrance into the ancient burial-place of Bel-Etana, and had beheld the body of the old hero preserved in oil in a glass sarcophagus, which, however, was not quite full of the liquid.  A notice posted up beside it, threatened the king who should violate the secret of the tomb with a cruel fate, unless he filled the sarcophagus to the brim, and Xerxes had attempted to accomplish this mysterious injunction, but all his efforts had failed.  The example set by Egypt and the change of sovereign are sufficient to account for the behaviour of the Babylonians; they believed that the accession of a comparatively young monarch, and the difficulties of the campaign on the banks of the Nile, afforded them a favourable occasion for throwing off the yoke.  They elected as king a certain Shamasherib, whose antecedents are unknown; but their independence was of short duration,* for Megabyzos, son of Zopyrus, who governed the province by hereditary right, forced them to disarm after a siege of a few months.

     * This Shamasherib is mentioned only on a contract dated
     from his accession, which is preserved in the British
     Museum.