Amasis, who had been raised to the throne by so unexpected a stroke of fortune, was a genial and pleasure-loving man—fond of the wine-cup and the merry jest, but he governed Egypt well and prudently during a reign of more than forty years. When he died he bequeathed to his son Psammetichus III. ‘the inheritance of a lost kingdom.’[100] The Persians entered Egypt, and in a desperate battle at Pelusium the Egyptians were defeated; Memphis was then captured with great slaughter. The unfortunate Psammetichus, who had only reigned six months, was taken prisoner; it is said that he was put to death later on upon a charge of conspiracy. Cambyses assumed an Egyptian title, and reigned over the land as the first monarch of the twenty-seventh, or Persian dynasty. He appears at first to have treated his new subjects with forbearance; he visited the celebrated temple at Sais, inquired into the rites and mysteries of the worship of Neith, and redressed certain grievances of which the priests complained.[101] But to the passionate ambition of Cambyses, the possession of Egypt was only a stepping-stone to the accomplishment of other and far-reaching schemes. He designed to march westward against the rising city of Carthage; to occupy the oasis of Amen, and to conquer the kingdom of Ethiopia. But his Phœnician mercenaries refused to be led against their kinsmen at Carthage; the army, 50,000 strong, which he despatched across the desert, was lost in the burning sands, and the forces which he himself led against Ethiopia were repulsed, and suffered terribly on the retreat from the ravages of famine. The survivors appear to have vented some of their ill-will upon the monuments and statues of Thebes as they passed through on the way to Memphis. The mood in which Cambyses entered that city may be imagined; mortified and exasperated as he was, he found the whole city given up to festivities and rejoicings, and concluded that they must be celebrating his disastrous defeat. Thereupon his fury turned to madness; and when he heard that the people were celebrating the finding of an Apis, he ordered the priests to be scourged, and the chief men of the city to be slain. Then he ordered the sacred bull to be brought into his presence, and stabbed him with his own dagger. There can be little doubt that in an excess of madness, Cambyses wrought terrible havoc on the temples and monuments of the land, though he may not have been guilty of all that was laid to his charge by a people who execrated his memory, and regarded his madness as the just visitation of Heaven. But suddenly there came news of an insurrection in Persia, and Cambyses instantly started for his capital. At Ecbatana, as he was mounting his horse, he stabbed himself (voluntarily or accidentally) with his own dagger—with the same weapon with which he had killed the Apis, the awe-struck Egyptians told Herodotus, and in the very same part of the body.