us saith the Lord: Even so
will I break the yoke of Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon, within two
full years from off the neck of all the nations." The mirth of the
bystanders was roused, but on the morrow Jeremiah appeared with a yoke
of iron, which Jahveh had put "upon the neck of all the nations, that
they may serve Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon." Moreover, to destroy in
the minds of the exiled Jews any hope of speedy deliverance, he wrote
to them: "Let not your prophets that be in the midst of you, and your
diviners, deceive you, neither hearken ye to your dreams which ye cause
to be dreamed. For they prophesy falsely unto you in My name: I have
not sent them, saith the Lord." The prophet exhorted them to resign
themselves to their fate, at all events for the time, that the unity
of their nation might be preserved until the time when it might indeed
please Jahveh to restore it: "Build ye houses and dwell in them, and
plant gardens and eat the fruit of them: take ye wives and beget sons
and daughters, and take wives for your sons, and give your daughters to
husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply ye there
and be not diminished. And seek the peace of the city whither I have
caused you to be carried away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it:
for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace." Psammetichus II. died
in 589,* and his reign, though short, was distinguished by the activity
shown in rebuilding and embellishing the temples.

* Herodotus reckoned the length of the reign of Psammetichus
II. at six years, in which he agrees with the Syncellus,
while the abbreviators of Manetho fix it at seventeen years.
The results given by the reading of a stele of the Louvre
enable us to settle that the figure 6 is to be preferred to
the other, and to reckon the length of the reign at five
years and a half.

His name is met with everywhere on the banks of the Nile--at Karnak,
where he completed the decoration of the great columns of Taharqa, at
Abydos, at Heliopolis, and on the monuments that have come from that
town, such as the obelisk set up in the Campus Martius at Borne. The
personal influence of the young sovereign did not count for much in the
zeal thus displayed; but the impulse that had been growing during three
or four generations, since the time of the expulsion of the Assyrians,
now began to have its full effect. Egypt, well armed, well governed
by able minist