Necho II

Necho II was born around 700 BCE, most likely in the Nile Delta city of Sais, the power base of his family. His father was Psamtik I, the founder of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, who had reunified Egypt after decades of Assyrian domination and internal fragmentation ^[1]. The dynasty is often called the Saite Dynasty after its home city, and its kings governed a country that was politically restored but no longer the imperial power it had been under the New Kingdom.

Almost nothing survives about Necho's childhood, a common gap in the record for Egyptian royal heirs. What can be said is that he grew up during his father's long reign of more than half a century, a period in which Egypt rebuilt its administration, cultivated trade with Greek merchants, and recruited Greek and Carian mercenaries into its armies ^[2]. That cosmopolitan military and commercial world shaped the policies Necho would later pursue as king.

His grandfather, also named Necho, had ruled Sais as a local prince under Assyrian oversight and died fighting the Kushite pharaoh Tantamani around 664 BCE. The family therefore carried both a debt to Assyria and a long memory of struggle for control of Egypt, facts that help explain the younger Necho's foreign policy once he took the throne ^[1].

Psamtik I died in 610 BCE, and Necho II succeeded him without recorded opposition. He inherited a state with a professional army, a growing navy, and productive ties to the Greek trading world, but he also inherited a dangerous international situation. The Assyrian Empire, long the dominant force in the Near East, was disintegrating under attack from the Babylonians and Medes. Nineveh had fallen in 612 BCE, and the last Assyrian king, Ashur-uballit II, was clinging to a rump state at Harran ^[3].

Necho chose to support the failing Assyrians. The decision looks strange at first glance, since Assyria had once occupied Egypt, but it made strategic sense: a weakened Assyria serving as a buffer against Babylon was preferable to a powerful new empire on Egypt's doorstep. Backing Assyria also gave Egypt a pretext to reoccupy the coastal Levant, territory pharaohs had claimed since the days of Thutmose III ^[3].

In 609 BCE Necho led a large army north along the coastal road toward Harran. At Megiddo, King Josiah of Judah attempted to block his passage. The biblical books of Kings and Chronicles record that Josiah was killed in the encounter, an event with lasting consequences for Judah and for later Jewish tradition ^[4]. Necho continued north, but the joint Egyptian and Assyrian effort to retake Harran failed, and Assyria effectively ceased to exist as a state.

Despite the failure at Harran, Necho emerged from 609 BCE as master of Syria and Palestine. On his return march he deposed Jehoahaz, the son whom the people of Judah had placed on Josiah's throne, deported him to Egypt, and installed another son of Josiah, Eliakim, who took the throne name Jehoiakim and paid heavy tribute in silver and gold ^[4]. For roughly four years Egyptian garrisons and vassal kings controlled the land bridge between Africa and Asia, with Necho's forward base at Riblah on the Orontes River.

The arrangement collapsed in 605 BCE. At Carchemish on the Euphrates, the Babylonian crown prince Nebuchadnezzar attacked the Egyptian army and its Greek mercenaries and destroyed it. The Babylonian Chronicle, a cuneiform record now in the British Museum, states that the Egyptians were beaten so thoroughly that not a man escaped to his own country, an exaggeration that still conveys the scale of the defeat ^[5]. The prophet Jeremiah, a contemporary, described the rout in vivid poetry.

Nebuchadnezzar pursued the survivors south and absorbed Syria and Palestine into the new Babylonian Empire. Necho's Asian ambitions were finished, though not his capacity to defend Egypt itself. When Nebuchadnezzar attempted to invade Egypt in 601 BCE, Necho met him near the frontier and fought him to a costly standstill; the Babylonian Chronicle admits that both sides inflicted heavy losses and that Nebuchadnezzar spent the following year at home refitting his army ^[5]. Egypt remained independent, and Necho even seized the Philistine city of Gaza in a follow-up campaign mentioned by both Jeremiah and Herodotus ^[3].

Necho's most original projects were maritime. Herodotus, writing about a century and a half later, reports that the pharaoh began digging a canal from the Pelusiac branch of the Nile through the Wadi Tumilat toward the Red Sea, wide enough for two triremes to pass abreast. The historian claims that vast numbers of laborers died in the work and that Necho abandoned it after an oracle warned that he was toiling for the barbarian, meaning that foreigners would profit from it ^[6]. The Persian king Darius I later completed the route, and commemorative stelae from his reign found along the canal's course confirm that the project was real and not a Greek fable ^[2].

Alongside the canal, Necho built war fleets on both of Egypt's seas. Herodotus states that he constructed triremes for service in the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea, and archaeologists and naval historians have debated whether these were the earliest triremes anywhere, possibly built with Greek or Phoenician technical help ^[7]. Whatever their exact design, the fleets mark a deliberate shift: an Egyptian king investing in sea power as the land route to Asia closed.

The combination of canal, fleets, and Red Sea ambitions points to a coherent commercial strategy. Egypt sat between the Mediterranean world, where Greek trade was expanding rapidly, and the incense and gold routes of Arabia and East Africa. Necho evidently intended his kingdom to profit from both ^[2].

The most famous story attached to Necho II is the circumnavigation of Africa. Herodotus relates that the pharaoh dispatched Phoenician sailors from the Red Sea with orders to sail around Libya, the Greek name for the African continent, and return through the Pillars of Heracles into the Mediterranean. The crews reportedly stopped each autumn to sow and harvest grain, completing the journey in the third year ^[6].

Herodotus adds a detail he personally found unbelievable: the sailors claimed that as they rounded the southern end of the continent, the sun stood on their right hand, that is, to the north. Modern readers have noticed that this is exactly what a westward-sailing crew in the southern hemisphere would observe, and the very fact that Herodotus doubted it has persuaded many scholars that the report preserves a genuine observation rather than an invention ^[6].

Historians remain divided. Some, including the Egyptologist Alan B. Lloyd in his commentary on Herodotus, have questioned whether ships of the early sixth century BCE could have managed the currents and provisioning of such a voyage. Others regard the feat as difficult but achievable for experienced Phoenician seamen ^[7]. If the voyage happened, no one repeated it successfully until Vasco da Gama's era two thousand years later, which makes it one of the most remarkable Necho II facts on record.

After the confrontation with Babylon in 601 BCE, Necho turned away from grand campaigns in Asia and concentrated on Egypt's defenses, its economy, and its western and southern approaches. The garrison and trading systems his father had built, including the Greek merchant settlement at Naukratis in the Delta, continued to knit Egypt into the wider Mediterranean economy ^[2].

Necho's principal wife was Khedebneithirbinet I, known from her funerary equipment, and his heir was his son Psamtik II. Building inscriptions from his reign are surprisingly scarce for a king of his energy; some scholars suspect that Psamtik II, who campaigned to erase certain memories of his father, had Necho's name removed from monuments, though the reasons remain debated ^[1]. Objects bearing his cartouches have nonetheless been found from the Delta to the Levant, and a fragment naming him even reached Carthage.

Necho II died in 595 BCE after a reign of fifteen years and was presumably buried at Sais, where the royal tombs of the dynasty stood in the temple precinct of the goddess Neith. Those tombs were destroyed in antiquity, and his burial has never been found ^[1]. Psamtik II succeeded him peacefully.

Anyone asking who was Necho II encounters a paradox: a king remembered less through Egyptian monuments than through the writings of his neighbors and enemies. The Hebrew Bible preserves him as the pharaoh who killed Josiah and taxed Judah; the Babylonian Chronicle records his defeat at Carchemish and his stubborn defense of Egypt; Herodotus preserves the canal, the triremes, and the African voyage ^[4][5][6]. Together these sources sketch a ruler of unusual ambition operating at a hinge point of Near Eastern history.

His strategic failures had long consequences. The collapse at Carchemish handed the Levant to Babylon, set in motion the chain of revolts that ended with Nebuchadnezzar's destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and fixed Egypt's frontier at its ancient line for a generation. Yet his defense of that frontier in 601 BCE preserved Egyptian independence for another seventy years, until the Persian conquest of 525 BCE ^[3].

Among Necho II achievements, the maritime program has aged best. The Nile to Red Sea canal anticipated by twenty-four centuries the logic of the Suez Canal, and the reported circumnavigation of Africa, whether or not every detail is accurate, testifies that an Egyptian court of the sixth century BCE could imagine the continent as something a ship might sail around. Modern Egyptologists such as Roberto B. Gozzoli have re-examined his reign and argued that the thin monumental record reflects later erasure rather than a lack of accomplishment, a rehabilitation that continues in current scholarship on the Saite period ^[1].