itless when the decisive moment arrived, and he
was completely crushed by the superior numbers of Xerxes.

[Illustration: 224.jpg Xerxes]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a daric in the _Cabinet des
Medailles_.

The nomes of the Delta which had taken a foremost part in the rising
were ruthlessly raided, the priests heavily fined, and the oracle of
Buto deprived of its possessions as a punishment for the encouragement
freely given to the rebels. Khabbisha disappeared, and his fate is
unknown. Achaemenes, one of the king's brothers, was made satrap, but,
as on previous occasions, the constitution of the country underwent
no modification. The temples retained their inherited domains, and the
nomes continued in the hands of their hereditary princes, without a
suspicion crossing the mind of Xerxes that his tolerance of the priestly
institutions and the local dynasties was responsible for the maintenance
of a body of chiefs ever in readiness for future insurrection (483).*

* The only detailed information on this revolt furnished by
the Egyptian monuments is given in the Stele of Ptolemy, the
son of Lagos. An Apis, whose sarcophagus still exists, was
buried by Khabbisha in the Serapoum in the second year of
his reign, which proves that he was in possession of
Memphis: the White Wall had perhaps been deprived of its
garrison in order to reinforce the army prepared against
Greece, and it was possibly thus that it fell into the hands
of Khabbisha.

Order was once more restored, but he was not yet entirely at liberty to
pursue his own plan of action. Classical tradition tells us, that on
the occasion of his first visit to Babylon he had offended the religious
prejudices of the Chaldaeans by a sacrilegious curiosity. He had, in
spite of the entreaties of the priests, forced an entrance into the
ancient burial-place of Bel-Etana, and had beheld the body of the old
hero preserved in oil in a glass sarcophagus, which, however, was not
quite full of the liquid. A notice posted up beside it, threatened the
king who should violate the secret of the tomb with a cruel fate, unless
he filled the sarcophagus to the brim, and Xerxes had attempted to
accomplish this mysterious injunction, but all his efforts had failed.
The example set by Egypt and the change of sovereign are sufficient to
account for the behaviour of the Babylonians; they believed that the
accession of a comparatively