Bocchoris’ father Tafnekht[490], the first of the Saite princes (749–721 B.C.), is not known to have had any commercial interests or connexions. He is best remembered for his struggle against Pianchi, the first Ethiopian ruler to claim the throne of the Pharaohs. Of this struggle we have Pianchi’s own version, preserved in the famous Pianchi stele. While Tafnekht’s partizans were holding Memphis against the Ethiopians we hear of the employment of artizans and master masons as soldiers[491]. The force however is stated to have been small, and it is not quite certain which side it was fighting on. Tafnekht, when the struggle went against him, retired to “the islands of the sea,” from whence he was able to negotiate with Pianchi in complete safety. Tafnekht himself described the situation not without tact in a letter to Pianchi: “To whatsoever city thou hast turned thy face, thou hast not found thy servant there, until I reached the islands of the sea, trembling before thy might, and saying ‘his flame is hostile to me.’” Eventually he submitted to the Ethiopians, but the submission seems to have been little more than nominal. Pianchi after receiving it is no more heard of in the Delta, and Tafnekht, to judge from the position held after him by his son Bocchoris, must have regained considerable power. This may have had its base in naval supremacy. In the ancient list of thalassocrats, or states that successively ruled the waves, preserved to us by Syncellus, Eusebius and Jerome, the thalassocracy of Egypt falls at about this period. The only list that gives a precise date is that of Jerome, who puts it between 783 and 748 B.C. But the lists give the duration of each thalassocracy as well as absolute dates, and, as pointed out by J. L. Myres, if, instead of following the dates in years from Abraham, we calculate from the duration of the various thalassocracies, working backward from the period of the Persian wars, then the end of the Egyptian supremacy falls not in 748 but in 725[492]. This dating makes Tafnekht a thalassocrat[493], and explains how he was able to stand up against Ethiopia and the comparatively little damage that he sustained in spite of his military failures. In 715 we find another Ethiopian invading the Delta. The new prince of Sais, Bocchoris, presumably had no impregnable naval base. He was caught by the Ethiopian Sabacon and burnt or flayed alive[494]. It is only when Psamtek formed alliances with the naval power that had replaced Egypt that the Saite princes fully regained the throne of the Pharaohs. This time their power had a sounder financial basis. It lasted for nearly a century and a half, and was then suddenly destroyed at its zenith by irresistible forces from without. On the reckoning which ends Egyptian naval supremacy in 725 B.C. the command of the sea when Psamtek was building up his power was in the hands of the Carians. It is precisely the Carians, along with the Milesians (who on the same reckoning were