had left most of the mercenary soldiers of Greece without employment.  Hakoris hired twenty thousand of them, and the Phoenician admirals, still occupied in blockading the ports of Cyprus, failed to intercept the vessels which brought him these reinforcements.  It was fortunate for Egypt that they did so, for the Pharaoh died in 381 B.C., and his successors, Psamuthis IL, Mutis, and Nephorites IL, each occupied the throne for a very short time, and the whole country was in confusion for rather more than two years (381-379 B.c.) during the settlement of the succession.*

* Hakoris reigned thirteen years, from 393 to 381 B.C.  The reigns of the three succeeding kings occupied only two years and four months between them, from the end of 381 to the beginning of 378.  Muthes or Mutis, who is not mentioned in all the lists of Manetho, seems to have his counterpart in the Demotic Rhapsody.  Wiedemann has inverted the order usually adopted, and proposed the following series:  Nephorites I., Muthes, Psamuthis, Hakoris, Nephorites II.  The discovery at Karnak of a small temple where Psamuthis mentions Hakoris as his predecessor shows that on this point at least Manetho was well informed.

The turbulent disposition of the great feudatory nobles, which had so frequently brought trouble upon previous Pharaohs during the Assyrian wars, was no less dangerous in this last century of Egyptian independence; it caused the fall of the Mendesian dynasty in the very face of the enemy, and the prince of Sebennytos, Nakht-har-habit, Nectanebo I., was raised to the throne by the military faction.  According to a tradition current in Ptolemaic times, this sovereign was a son of Nephorites I., who had been kept out of his heritage by the jealousy of the gods; whatever his origin, the people had no cause to repent of having accepted him as their king.  He began his reign by suppressing the slender subsidies which Evagoras had continued to receive from his predecessors, and this measure, if not generous, was at least politic.  For Cyprus was now virtually in the power of the Persians, and the blockade of a few thousand men in Salamis did not draught away a sufficiently large proportion of their effective force to be of any service to Egypt:  the money which had hitherto been devoted to the Cypriots was henceforth reserved for the direct defence of the Nile valley.  Evagoras obtained unexpectedly favourable conditions:  Artaxerxes conceded to him his title of king and the possession of his city (383 B.C.), and turned his whole attention to Nectanebo, the last of his enemies who still held out.