The Late Period of Egypt: Foreign Rulers and the End of Native Power
The Late Period of ancient Egypt (664–332 BCE) was the long twilight of native Egyptian civilization, dominated by the Twenty-Fifth (Nubian), Twenty-Sixth (Saite), and final Persian dynasties. It began with the expulsion of the Kushite pharaohs from the Delta and ended with the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. In between, the Nile Valley was ruled in turn by Egyptians, Libyans, Nubians, Assyrians, and Persians, and yet, paradoxically, it produced one of the most remarkable cultural renaissances in the ancient world. The Saite “Renaissance” of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty was one of the most creative periods in Egyptian art. For context, start with our broader guide to ancient Egyptian civilization.
Setting the Scene: Egypt at the End of the New Kingdom
By 664 BCE, Egypt had been in slow decline for more than four centuries. The great warrior pharaohs of the New Kingdom were long gone, and the country had spent the previous three hundred years, the Third Intermediate Period, divided between Libyan rulers in the Delta and Theban high priests of Amun in the south.
The Libyan pharaohs of the Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Dynasties ruled from the Delta. Thebes, meanwhile, was controlled by a powerful line of Theban high priests of Amun who had gradually made themselves kings in all but name. Egypt was split, weak, and deeply vulnerable to invasion.
The Twenty-Fifth Dynasty: The Nubian Pharaohs
The first great foreign rulers of the Late Period were not Libyans or Persians but Nubians: the kings of Kush, the kingdom that had grown up to the south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan. The Kushite kings had been neighbors and rivals of Egypt for centuries; for much of the New Kingdom, they had themselves been subjects of the pharaohs.
The founder of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty was Piye (Piankhi), a Kushite king who marched north around 716–715 BCE in the revised high chronology (the older low chronology of 747 BCE is now considered too early by most specialists), defeated a coalition of Libyan princes, and conquered Egypt. He did not stay in Egypt; he returned to his capital at Napata in modern Sudan. But his successors, Shabaka, Shebitku, and Taharqa, ruled Egypt as pharaohs.
The Kushite pharaohs were deeply devoted to Egyptian culture. They built temples in the traditional style at Karnak, adopted Egyptian royal titles, and supported the cult of Amun. Taharqa in particular was a great builder: he added the famous colonnade at Karnak and built pyramids at Nuri in modern Sudan, modeled on the Egyptian originals.
The Kushite pharaohs, however, ran afoul of the rising power of Assyria. The Assyrian king Esarhaddon invaded Egypt in 671 BCE, captured Memphis, and forced Taharqa to flee to Kush. A second Assyrian invasion in 663 BCE, this time led by Ashurbanipal, sacked Thebes itself, a city that had not been captured by an enemy in nearly a thousand years.
The Twenty-Sixth Dynasty: The Saite Renaissance
The Assyrian invasions gave the Egyptians a chance to liberate themselves. A local ruler named Psamtik I, from the city of Sais in the western Delta, allied with the Assyrians, then with the Nubians, and finally with Greek mercenaries to reunify the country. He is conventionally counted as the first pharaoh of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (664–525 BCE), also called the Saite Dynasty after his capital city.
The Saite pharaohs presided over a remarkable cultural revival often called the Saite Renaissance. They were deeply conservative in matters of culture and religion. They revived the art styles of the Old Kingdom, recopied ancient religious and literary texts, and sponsored the writing of new ones in deliberately archaic language. The famous “Dream of Nectanebo” and the Brooklyn Museum Papyrus, with its illustrations of fantastic creatures, date from this period.
The Saite pharaohs also built a powerful navy, reorganized the army with the help of Greek and Carian mercenaries, and re-established Egyptian control over parts of Nubia and the Levant. Psamtik I, Necho II, and Psamtik II were the most important rulers of the dynasty. Necho II is especially remembered for attempting to dig a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, and for sponsoring a Phoenician expedition that circumnavigated Africa.
The Persian Conquest
In 525 BCE, the Persian king Cambyses II invaded Egypt and defeated Psamtik III, the last Saite pharaoh, at the Battle of Pelusium. Egypt became a province of the Achaemenid Empire, and the Twenty-Seventh Dynasty was established.
The first Persian period of Egyptian rule (525–404 BCE) was marked by foreign occupation, heavy taxation, and Egyptian resentment. The Persian kings took the pharaonic title, but they were not Egyptian, did not perform the traditional religious rituals, and were remembered by later Egyptian sources as harsh and oppressive. Cambyses II was accused of murdering the sacred Apis bull, an act that was considered sacrilege.
The Egyptians revolted several times. The revolts of Amyrtaeus and others eventually forced the Persians to withdraw, and a brief period of native rule followed: the Twenty-Eighth, Twenty-Ninth, and Thirtieth Dynasties (404–343 BCE). The last great native pharaoh was Nectanebo II, who built extensively at Philae and elsewhere before being defeated by a second Persian invasion in 343 BCE.
The Second Persian Period and the Arrival of Alexander
The second Persian period (343–332 BCE) was brief and brutal. The Persian king Artaxerxes III reconquered Egypt savagely, looting the temples, removing the sacred books, and imposing heavy tribute. Egyptian resentment grew.
It was in this context that Alexander the Great arrived. In 332 BCE, Alexander marched into Egypt at the head of a Macedonian-Greek army, and the Persian satrap surrendered without a fight. Alexander was crowned pharaoh at Memphis and treated with great honor by the Egyptian priesthood. For the broader context of this transition, see our long-tail page on Persian and Greek influence on the Late Period.
Alexander founded the city of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast in 331 BCE, and it would become one of the great cities of the ancient world and one of the intellectual capitals of the Greek-speaking world. After Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, his generals divided his empire, and Egypt eventually fell to Ptolemy I Soter, who founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty. The Ptolemies ruled Egypt for nearly three hundred years, ending with the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE.
Egyptian Culture in the Late Period
The Late Period may have been politically turbulent, but culturally it was extraordinarily vibrant. The Saite Renaissance, the Twenty-Ninth and Thirtieth Dynasty revivals, and the last century of native Egyptian rule produced a remarkable body of art, literature, and religious thought. Egyptian artists of this period looked back to the Old and Middle Kingdoms for inspiration, but they also created works of remarkable originality.
The sarcophagi of the Late Period are some of the most elaborate ever produced. The statues of priests and priestesses from Karnak and elsewhere show a new realism and a new interest in individuality. The Late Period also saw the rise of new religious movements, including the cult of the Apis bull at Memphis and the cult of Isis, which would later spread throughout the Greco-Roman world.
The Egyptian language itself, in the form of Coptic, would survive for centuries as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. The Coptic alphabet, derived from the Greek alphabet with some additional Demotic signs, is the last form of the ancient Egyptian writing system. For a closer look at how that system was finally decoded, see our guide to Champollion’s decoding of the Rosetta Stone.
I would argue that the Saite Renaissance is the most under-appreciated chapter in Egyptian art history. Most visitors to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo walk past the Late Period galleries in a hurry to get to the Old Kingdom. They are missing some of the most striking sculpture the culture ever produced; the green-grey stone heads of the Saite priests are, in my view, the closest thing Egyptian art has to Hellenistic portraiture.
Religion and the Afterlife in the Late Period
The Late Period also saw important developments in Egyptian religion. The cult of Osiris, the dying-and-rising god of the afterlife, became more elaborate than ever. The ritual of the Opening of the Mouth, the ceremony that animated a mummy or statue, was refined in the Late Period, and the Book of the Dead reached its most developed form. To explore the broader framework, see our guide to mummies and the afterlife.
The Late Period was also the era when the Egyptian gods began to be worshipped throughout the Mediterranean. The temple of Isis at Philae would remain an important religious site for centuries after the rise of Christianity, and Isis herself would become one of the most widely worshipped deities of the Greco-Roman world. For more on the gods, see our guide to Egyptian gods and goddesses.
Art and Architecture
The architecture of the Late Period often looked to the past. The Saite pharaohs revived the styles of the Old Kingdom in their tomb architecture, and the Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty built temples at Karnak and elsewhere in the traditional style. The temple of Hathor at Dendera, however, one of the best-preserved temples in Egypt, was begun in the Late Period and is a masterpiece of Ptolemaic and later art.
The art of the Late Period is also notable for its borrowings. Egyptian artists working under the Persians and later the Ptolemies created a distinctive new style that mixed Egyptian, Persian, and Greek elements: the so-called Egypto-Persian and Egypto-Greek styles. These mixed styles would be the last great flowering of native Egyptian art.
The End of the Late Period
With the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, the Late Period technically came to an end. The Ptolemaic Dynasty that followed was Greek-speaking, ruled from Alexandria, and presented itself as a continuation of the pharaonic tradition. But in many ways, the Ptolemies were a different civilization: cosmopolitan, Greek in language and custom, ruled by a Macedonian dynasty, and oriented toward the Mediterranean rather than the Nile.
The story of ancient Egypt as a native civilization, in other words, ended in 332 BCE, though the last pharaoh to bear an Egyptian name, Nectanebo II, had been defeated by the Persians more than a decade before. The story of Egypt as a Mediterranean kingdom would continue for three more centuries, ending with the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE and the absorption of Egypt into the Roman Empire. For a focused reading of the long arc, Aidan Dodson’s Monarchs of the Nile is the most useful concise survey in English.