It was probably during this period of eclipse that two popular stories of an earlier date were revised and received the shape in which they have come down to us[529], and in which also they very possibly have a bearing on the history of the Herodotean Sethon. Their hero is Satni Khamois, son of Ramses II, who protects the king his father not by force of arms but by learning and magic.
Satni and Sethon both save their country where the military had failed. “The military chieftains of the chief ones of Egypt were standing before him (Pharaoh Usimares) each one according to his rank at court” when the Ethiopian came and threatened to “report the inferiority of Egypt in his country, the land of the Negroes.” And just as the captains and the courtiers proved helpless against the Assyrians in the days of Sethon, so did they against the Ethiopians in the days of Satni. This is the connecting link. The value of the Satni story for the history of Sethon is that it probably gives the atmosphere of the Sethon period, and that being so it helps to show that Sethon was already pursuing in many ways the Saite policy. Griffith for instance has observed that Satni is not presented in a very heroic light. But neither did any of the later Saites adopt the heroic pose. Nothing could be less like the grand monarque than Psamtek as pictured on a relief in the British Museum (above fig. 11)[530] or Amasis as pictured in the pages of Herodotus[531]. [Sidenote: recall in tone those told of Amasis, the last great Saite pharaoh.] The same picture of Amasis is presented to us by the popular Egyptian stories. “Is it possible,” his courtiers ask, “that if it happens to the king to be drunk more than any man in the world, no man in the world can approach the king for business[532]?”
Amasis, who was virtually the last of the Saites, is said to have been a man of the people[533]. In the days of Sethon (Satni Tafnekhte), who perhaps heads the dynasty, a story of the Satni Khamois cycle told how that royal prince had personally visited the kingdom of the dead to learn the lesson of Dives and Lazarus[534].
[Sidenote: Conclusions as to the early history of the Saite dynasty.]
This concludes our examination of the history of the early Saites. It points to a consistent policy carried out with a remarkable combination of perseverance and versatility by a succession of rulers who may have been all of a single family and who certainly inherited in unbroken succession the same aims and the same essential method of attaining them, which was marked out for them by the place and the age they lived in. The Saite power grew to be supreme in Egypt while Ethiopians and Assyrians were contending for the land. From force of circumstances Sais had to be a military power. But the city owed its victory over its rivals between 721 and 670 B.C. first and foremost to the fact that it lay off the main track of war. As always when Egypt is involved in a great war it is the Eastern frontier that faces the main enemy. Sais was not always able to remain neutral, but lying right away in the West it was able at least to preserve and even to develop its commerce. It seized its opportunity and did so. The commercial code of Bocchoris, the hucksters and artizans and tradespeople of Sethon, and the cargoes of Psammetichus mark three great stages in the development, at the end of which, to quote the words of Maspero, “the valley of the Nile becomes a vast workshop, where work was carried on with unparalleled activity[535].”