It was in B.C. 701, during his campaign against Hezekiah of Judah, that the Assyrian monarch met the forces of Tirhakah. The Ethiopian lord of Egypt had marched to the help of his Jewish ally, and at the little village of Eltekeh the battle took place. Tirhakah was defeated and driven back into Egypt, while Sennacherib was left to continue his campaign and reduce his rebellious vassal to obedience. In the insolence of victory he sent Hezekiah a letter declaring that, in spite of the promises of his God, Jerusalem should be delivered into the hands of its foes. Then it was that Hezekiah entered the sanctuary of the temple, and, spreading out the letter before the Lord, besought Him to save himself and the city from the Assyrian invader. The prayer was heard: Isaiah was commissioned to declare that the Assyrian king should never come into Jerusalem; and the Assyrian host perished mysteriously in a single night. Half-a-century later a similar event happened in Assyria itself. Its king, Assur-bani-pal, surrounded by insurgent enemies, was suddenly attacked by Te-umman of Elam. While he was keeping the festival of the goddess Istar at Arbela, a message was brought to him from the Elamite monarch that he was on his march to destroy Assyria and its gods. Thereupon Assur-bani-pal went into the temple of the goddess, and, bowing to the ground before her, with tears implored her help. Istar listened to the prayer, and that night a seer dreamed a dream wherein she appeared and bade him announce to the king that Istar of Arbela, with quivers behind her shoulders and the bow and mace in her hand, would fight in front of him and overthrow his foes. The prophecy was fulfilled, and before long the Elamite army was crushed, and the head of Te-umman sent in triumph to Nineveh. In Judah and Assyria we are dealing with history, in the story of Sethos with a folk-tale, and it is impossible therefore not to believe that the conduct of the priest of Ptah has been modelled upon that of Hezekiah and Assur-bani-pal. The basis of it is Semitic rather than Egyptian; it would have been told more appropriately of Sennacherib than of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Perhaps it had its source among the Phœnicians of the Tyrian camp at Memphis, or even among the Egyptianised Jews who carried Jeremiah into Egypt. Whatever may have been its origin, it does not belong to the realm of history. Even with the appearance of Psammetikhos upon the stage, the Egyptian history of Herodotos does not yet commence. Before it can do so, he has to finish his wanderings and his sight-seeing, to be quit of his dragomen and of the topographical chronology that he built upon their stories. Through Herakleopolis lay the entrance to the Fayyûm, and the Fayyûm united the folk-lore of the guides with the sober history of the Greek epoch in Egypt.