The Greeks, who had helped to conquer the throne, were particularly favoured. Encouraged by the example of the Ionian and Carian adventurers whose services he had paid so well, some Milesian colonists anchored thirty ships at the entrance of the Bolbitinic mouth of the Nile, and there founded a fortified trading establishment. To facilitate commercial relations for the future, Psamthek confided some Egyptian children to the Greeks established in Egypt, that they might learn Greek, and thus arose those interpreters who formed a distinct class in the towns of the Delta. It even appears, according to Diodorus, that Psamthek had his own children taught Greek. The intercourse of the Greeks with the Egyptians became from that time so constant that from the reign of Psammetichus, says Herodotus, we know with certainty all that passed in that country. The accession of Psamthek and the XXVIth Dynasty is fixed at the year 655 before the Christian era, and it is only from this period that we have certain dates for the history of Egypt. The complete chronology of the XXVIth Dynasty has been recovered in the monuments of the tomb of Apis, discovered by Mariette Bey, in the excavation of the Serapeum of Memphis, and now in the Louvre. This chronology differs somewhat sensibly from that which it had been possible to draw up from Manetho’s lists, so that we are, says De Rougé, obliged to distrust figures preserved in those lists, which a few years ago were regarded as an infallible criterion. An attempt has been made to restore to them the credit they had lost as an instrument of chronology, by attaching to them an undisputed synchronism. According to the calculation of M. Biot, a rising of the star Sothis (Sirius), indicated at Thebes under Ramses III, towards the commencement of the XXth Dynasty, would fall at the beginning of the thirteenth century B.C.