In the adjoining country of Egypt the Greeks began to appear as merchants and travellers in the seventh century B.C. A Pharaoh, Psammetik I, the father of the Niku who sent Phoenician ships to circumnavigate Africa, had employed Greek mercenaries to assist him in establishing his claims to the throne of Egypt. He rewarded their services by allowing their countrymen to trade with the ports of the Nile delta. The city of Naukratis was founded not far from the modern Rosetta, and became almost a Greek colony. Nearly 200 years later Herodotos, a native of Halikarnassos (a Greek settlement in Asia Minor), visited Egypt and Kurene. It is probable that he ascended the Nile as far as the First Cataract. He found his fellow-countrymen settled as merchants and mechanics and also as soldiers in the delta of the Nile, and he records that the whole coast of Cyrenaica between Dernah, near the borders of Egypt, and Benghazi (Euesperides) was wholly occupied by Greek settlements. Through Herodotos and even earlier Greek writers, like Hekataios (who derived his information from the Phoenicians), vague rumours reached the Greek world of the Niger River, of ostriches[23], the dwarf races of Central Africa (then perhaps lingering about the Bahr-al-Ghazal and Nigeria), and baboons, described as “men with dogs’ heads[24].” The great development of the Persian Empire under Cyrus brought that power into eventual conflict with Egypt; and under Kambujiya (Cambyses) the Persians conquered Egypt (in 525 B.C.), besides then and subsequently dominating the western and southern parts of Arabia, from which they occasionally meddled with Ethiopia. The Persians were followed more than two hundred years later by their great conqueror, Alexander of Macedonia, who added Egypt to his empire in 332 B.C., and founded in that year in the westernmost reach of the Nile delta the great city which bears his name, and which has been at times the capital of Egypt. Alexander’s conquest was succeeded in 323 by the rule of his general, Ptolemaios Soter, who founded in 308 the famous Greek monarchy of the Ptolemies over Egypt, which lasted till near the commencement of the Christian era, when it was replaced by the domination of Rome.