Lesbos steered towards the Syrian coast, he also offered to place ships at the disposal of the Persian king for use in Egypt. Cambyses accepted the submission of Polycrates, and he sent forty well-manned ships of war.[148] Thus Cambyses had already deprived the Pharaoh of two important points of support before he had begun the war. Whether Amasis was alive at the defection of the princes of Cyprus, and of Polycrates, is doubtful. It is possible that his death, which elevated to the throne of Egypt his son Psammenitus (Psamtek III.), an untried prince in the place of a proved and experienced leader such as Amasis, was another weight in the scale on the side of defection. There was still another difficulty to remove. The Syrian coast formed a strong wall of protection for Egypt. If the fleet followed the army along the coast it found none but difficult landing-places; at present there are none in that region for the heavier ships of our days. In any case, in a numerous army such as Cambyses no doubt led, care would have to be taken for the horses and camels. It is not true that Cambyses requested a free passage from the king of the Arabians; the men in question were the chiefs of the Arabs in the peninsula of Sinai, the Midianites and Amalekites; and it was the supply of water for the army which these tribes undertook. After completing his preparations Cambyses set out early in the year 525 B.C., in order to march through the desert before the beginning of the hottest weather, and arrive in Egypt sufficiently early before the inundation.[149] As the desertion of Eurybatus aided Cyrus in the Lydian war (p. 20), so was Cambyses assisted in his preparations for the campaign against Egypt according to the narrative of Herodotus by the advice of Phanes, and according to Ctesias by the advice of Combaphes. We may here give unhesitating confidence to the definite assertion of Herodotus as it concerns his own countryman of Halicarnassus. The departure of Phanes for Egypt must have taken place in the autumn of the year 526 B.C., for it is Amasis who sends his trusted eunuch after him as far as Lycia. For the name of Psammenitus the fragment of Ctesias gives the incorrect name of Amyrtaeus (if this name of the later opponent of Persia on the Nile is not due to the excerpt), it substitutes Combaphes for Phanes, _i.e._ to all appearances the eunuch who pursues Phanes for Phanes himself. We do not find elsewhere the slightest trace that Combaphes received the vice-royalty of Egypt; on the contrary, the statements of the fragments about the cousinship of the chief eunuch of Pharaoh and the chief eunuch of Cambyses, and the repeated promise of the vice-royalty which is made to Combaphes, point to Persian poems, which had to clothe incidents of this nature in a poetical garb; we have already frequently met with the analogous promises of Arbaces to Belesys, and of Cyrus to the interpreters of dreams at Babylon.