After Psammetichus had passed several years there, awaiting a favourable opportunity to revenge himself for this affront, a messenger brought him advice that brazen men were landed in Egypt. These were Grecian soldiers, Carians and Ionians, who had been cast upon the coast of Egypt by a storm, and were completely covered with helmets, cuirasses, and other arms of brass. Psammetichus immediately called to mind an oracle which had answered him, that he should be succoured by brazen men from the sea-coast. He did not doubt that the prediction was now fulfilled. He made a league with these strangers; engaged them by great promises to stay with him; privately levied other forces, and put these Greeks at their head. Giving battle to the eleven kings, he defeated them, and remained sole possessor of Egypt. As this prince owed his success to the Ionians and Carians, he settled them in Egypt, from which all foreigners had been excluded; and by assigning them sufficient lands and fixed revenues, he made them forget their native country. By his order Egyptian children were put under their care, to learn the Greek tongue; and on this occasion, and by this means, the Egyptians began to have a correspondence with the Greeks; and from that era the Egyptian history, which till then had been intermixed with pompous fables, by the artifices of the priests, begins, according to Herodotus, to speak with greater truth and certainty. As soon as Psammetichus was settled on the throne, he engaged in war against the king of Assyria, on the subject of the boundaries of the two empires. This war was of long continuance. Ever since Syria had been conquered by the Assyrians, Palestine, being the only country that separated the two kingdoms, was the subject of continual discord, as afterwards it was between the Ptolemies and Seleucidæ. They were eternally contending for it, and it was alternately won by the stronger. Psammetichus, seeing himself the peaceable possessor of all Egypt, and having restored the ancient form of government, thought it high time for him to look to his frontiers, and to secure them against the Assyrians, his neighbours, whose power increased daily. For this purpose he entered Palestine at the head of an army. Perhaps we are to refer to the beginning of this war an incident related by Diodorus, that the Egyptians, provoked to see the Greeks posted on the right wing by the king himself, in preference to them, quitted his service to the number of upwards of two hundred thousand men, and retired into Ethiopia, where they met with a good settlement.