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Cambyses II

Cambyses II

525 BCE522 BCE · Late-Period

Cambyses II was the Persian (Achaemenid) great king who conquered Egypt in 525 BCE and ruled it as the first pharaoh of the Persian Dynasty 27. He is included here as a pharaoh of Egypt, though his primary record belongs to the Persian world. The Greek historian Herodotus portrays him as a sacrilegious madman who outraged Egyptian religion, but Egyptian sources, notably the inscription of the official Udjahorresnet, indicate a more pragmatic accommodation with native institutions; the contrast is a caution against taking the hostile Greek portrait as fact.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Cambyses II’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

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