Sesostris

Sesostris was the name of a legendary king of ancient Egypt who is suppossed to have led a military expedition into parts of Europe. The story originated in the writings of Herodotus.

Legend

Herodotus cited a story told by Egyptian priests about a Pharaoh Sesostris, who once led an army northward through Syria and Turkey all the way to Colchis, westward across Southern Russia, and then south again through Romania, until he reached Bulgaria and the Eastern part of Greece. Sesostris then returned home the same way he came, leaving colonists behind at the Colchian river Phasis. Herodotus cautioned the reader that this story came second hand via Egyptian priests, but also noted that the Colchians themselves had legends of an Egyptian colonization.

According to Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus (who calls him Sesoosis), and Strabo, he conquered the whole world, even Scythia and Ethiopia, divided Egypt into administrative districts or nomes, was a great law-giver, and introduced a caste system into Egypt and the worship of Serapis.

Herodotus claims Sesostris was the father of the blind king Pheron, who was less warlike than his father.

Historical record

He has been considered a compound of Seti I and Ramesses II, kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty. In Manetho, however, a pharaoh called Sesostris occupied the same position as the known pharaoh Senusret II of the Twelfth Dynasty, and his name is now usually viewed as a corruption of Senwosri. So far as is known, no Egyptian king penetrated a days journey beyond the Euphrates or into Asia Minor, or touched the continent of Europe. The kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties were the greatest conquerors that Egypt ever produced, and their records are clear on this point. Senusret III raided south Canaan and Ethiopia, and at Semna above the second cataract set up a stela of conquest that in its expressions recalls the stelae of Sesostris in Herodotus: Sesostris may, therefore, be the highly magnified portrait of this Pharaoh.

Khyan, the powerful but poorly-documented Hyksos king of the Fifteenth dynasty of Egypt, whose prenomen was Seuserenre, is perhaps another possible prototype, for objects inscribed with his name have been found from Baghdad to Knossos.

Sesostris is evidently a mythical figure created to satisfy the pride of the Egyptians in their ancient achievements, after they had come into contact with the great conquerors of Assyria and Persia. When we recollect that the Nubian Taharqa of the 7th century BC, who was hopelessly worsted by the Assyrians, was credited by Megasthenes (4th century) and Strabo with having extended his conquests as far as India and the Pillars of Hercules, it is not surprising if the dim figures of antiquity were magnified to a less degree.

In the case of Taharqa, the miscellaneous levies which he employed himself and those which composed the Egyptian and Assyrian armies opposed to him, and the lands that Egypt and Nubia traded with, must all have been counted, partly through misunderstanding and partly through wilful perversion, to his empire.

See also

• Senusret I
• War of Vesosis and Tanausis

Bibliography

• Herodotus ii. 102-Ill; Diod. Sic. 1. 53-59; Strabo xv. p. 687; Kurt, Sethe, Sesostris, 1900, in his Unters. z. Gesch. u. Altertumskunde Agyptens, tome ii.

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