Necho II (Wehemibre)
610 BCE–595 BCE · Late-Period · Sais
Necho II (throne-name Wehemibre) was a Saite king of Dynasty 26 in the Late Period, reigning around 610-595 BCE, whose ambitious reign reached well beyond Egypt. He campaigned in the Levant, where his forces are recorded as having killed King Josiah of Judah at Megiddo (609 BCE), before being checked by the rising power of Babylon at the Battle of Carchemish (605 BCE). At home he attempted to cut a canal linking the Nile to the Red Sea, and, according to the Greek historian Herodotus, he commissioned a Phoenician fleet that may have circumnavigated Africa, sailing right around the continent. The identification of Necho with the pharaoh who killed Josiah is a scholarly cross-stream proposal; the African circumnavigation is a report preserved by Herodotus and should be treated as such.
Did you know?
The pharaoh who sent a fleet around Africa
Around 600 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus reports, the pharaoh Necho II dispatched a Phoenician fleet that set out from the Red Sea, sailed down and around the entire coast of Africa, and returned some three years later through the Strait of Gibraltar — if it happened, a feat not matched until Europeans rounded the Cape of Good Hope more than two thousand years later. Necho II also began cutting a canal to link the Nile to the Red Sea, a project left unfinished in his reign.
How we know
Necho II reigned c. 610-595 BCE (26th Dynasty); Herodotus, Histories 4.42, reports the Phoenician circumnavigation (~3 years, returning via the Pillars of Heracles) and 2.158 the abandoned Nile-Red Sea canal, later completed by Darius I (r. 522-486 BCE). 600 BCE to Vasco da Gama's rounding of the Cape 1497-98 CE.
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Sais
What they did here
The Saite royal capital.
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In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Necho II (Wehemibre)’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Necho II (Wehemibre)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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