the gods, and worshipped them very zealously, that there was an oracle of Zeus in their country, and that it was only by its command that they went to war, are completely established by the monuments of Napata. They show that the worship of Ammon, the god of Thebes and upper Egypt, and that of Osiris whom the Greeks, as we know, compared with their Dionysus, were zealously prosecuted. From inscriptions and intelligence of other kinds we have also ample information of the influence of the priests, and the importance of the oracle in the kingdom of Napata. The fame of the priesthood at Napata may be the basis of the "pious Ethiopians" of Homer; the same piety, though further removed, is shown in Herodotus' narrative of the long-lived Ethiopians. When Cambyses, so Strabo tells us, had made himself master of Egypt, he advanced to Meroe (Napata), and it is said that he gave the name to the city in honour of his wife, or his sister, as others say, who was buried there. Diodorus indeed tells us that Cambyses founded the famous city of Meroe, and gave it the name of Meroe after his mother.[163] Josephus also observes that Cambyses changed the name of the royal city of the Ethiopians and called it Meroe.[164] However unfounded may be the assertion that the name of Meroe proceeded from Cambyses--for we find it used two centuries previously by the Assyrians--it is quite clear from these statements that Cambyses did advance as far as the old metropolis of the Ethiopians and brought it into his power; that he conquered and maintained the kingdom of Napata. Indeed Herodotus tells us elsewhere himself that he advanced far beyond Napata to the south. "In his campaign against the long-lived Ethiopians," we are told in this passage, "Cambyses subjugated the Ethiopians who dwell around the sacred Nysa, and hold festivals in honour of Dionysus." The position of the mythical Nysa, we cannot, it is true, define more precisely than that a Homeric hymn puts it above the fountains of the Nile,[165] and Herodotus himself places it above Egypt in Ethiopia;[166] but inasmuch as these Ethiopians of Nysa wore leopard and lion skins, according to Herodotus, and were armed with clubs; as their arrow-heads were made of sharp stones, and their lances of the horns of antelopes; as they painted themselves half red and half white in battle;[167] as they had to pay to the Persians every third year two hundred logs of ebony, twenty large tusks of elephants, five boys, and two choenixes of unrefined gold,[168] Cambyses must have penetrated into the land of the negroes, the zone of ebony and the elephant. On the middle course of the Nile in Nubia, and above Napata, there were tribes akin to the Egyptians; the land of the negroes began about the union of the White and Blue Nile. The monuments of Egypt comprise both populations under the name Cush, the name of the land of the south, and they exhibit these southern nations as partly red and partly black.