were able to sow and reap their crops free from the fear
of marauding bands, sufficed to restore abundance, if not wealth, to
the country, and Psammetichus succeeded in securing both these and
other benefits to Egypt, thanks to the vigilant severity of his
administration. He would have been unable to accomplish these reforms
had he relied only on the forces which had been at the disposal of
his ancestors--the native troops demoralised by poverty, and the
undisciplined bands of Libyan mercenaries, which constituted the sole
normal force of the Tanite and Bubastite Pharaohs and the barons of the
Delta and Middle Egypt. His experience of these two classes of soldiery
had decided him to look elsewhere for a less precarious support, and
ever since chance had brought him in contact with the Ionians and
Carians, he had surrounded himself with a regular army of Hellenic and
Asiatic mercenaries. It is impossible to exaggerate the terror that the
apparition of these men produced in the minds of the African peoples, or
the revolution they effected, alike in peace or war, in Oriental states:
the charge of the Spanish soldiery among the lightly clad foot-soldiers
of Mexico and Peru could not have caused more dismay than did that
of the hoplites from beyond the sea among the half-naked archers and
pikemen of Egypt and Libya. With their bulging corselets, the two plates
of which protected back and chest, their greaves made of a single piece
of bronze reaching from the ankle to the knee, their square or oval
bucklers covered with metal, their heavy rounded helmets fitting closely
to the head and neck, and surmounted by crests of waving plumes, they
were, in truth, men of brass, invulnerable to any Oriental weapon. Drawn
up in close array beneath their "tortoise," they received almost unhurt
the hail of arrows and stones hurled against them by the lightly armed
infantry, and then, when their own trumpet sounded the signal for
attack, and they let themselves fall with their whole weight upon the
masses of the enemy, brandishing their spears above the upper edge
of their bucklers, there was no force of native troops or company of
Mashauasha that did not waver beneath the shock and finally give
way before their attack. The Egyptians felt themselves incapable of
overcoming them except by superior numbers or by stratagem, and it was
the knowledge of their own hopeless inferiority which prevented the
feudal lords from attempting to revenge them