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After this Cambyses left Memphis, and went to Sais, wishing to do
that which he actually did on his arrival there. He entered the palace
of Amasis, and straightway commanded that the body of the king should
be brought forth from the sepulchre. When the attendants did according
to his commandment, he further bade them scourge the body, and prick
it with goads, and pluck the hair from it, and heap upon it all manner
of insults. The body, however, having been embalmed, resisted, and
refused to come apart, do what they would to it; so the attendants
grew weary of their work; whereupon Cambyses bade them take the corpse
and burn it. This was truly an impious command to give, for the
Persians hold fire to be a god, and never by any chance burn their
dead. Indeed this practice is unlawful, both with them and with the
Egyptians - with them for the reason above mentioned, since they deem
it wrong to give the corpse of a man to a god; and with the
Egyptians, because they believe fire to be a live animal, which eats
whatever it can seize, and then, glutted with the food, dies with the
matter which it feeds upon. Now to give a man's body to be devoured
by beasts is in no wise agreeable to their customs, and indeed this is
the very reason why they embalm their dead; namely, to prevent them
from being eaten in the grave by worms. Thus Cambyses commanded what
both nations accounted unlawful. According to the Egyptians, it was
not Amasis who was thus treated, but another of their nation who was
of about the same height. The Persians, believing this man's body
to be the king's, abused it in the fashion described above. Amasis,
they say, was warned by an oracle of what would happen to him after his
death: in order, therefore, to prevent the impending fate, he buried
the body, which afterwards received the blows, inside his own tomb
near the entrance, commanding his son to bury him, when he died, in
the furthest recess of the same sepulchre. For my own part I do not
believe that these orders were ever given by Amasis; the Egyptians,
as it seems to me, falsely assert it, to save their own dignity.
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