Summary
There are extraordinary circumstances in universal history. When Cambyses annexed Egypt, all of a sudden, the kingdom, restored and renewed by the Saïtes, was a proven power, its monarchy well established, its temples sumptuous, its arts splendid, its economy prosperous. The unprecedented shock did not provoke a moral collapse, and the old Pharaonic ideology found a new lease of life.
Leaders, learned priests and men of action, such as the treasurer Ptahhotep, the minister of the economy Hor, the entrepreneur Khnemibrê and the famous chief physician and admiral Oudjahorresné, - those anachronistically labelled " collaboration - recognized a fulfillment of the theoretical world of the king-pharaoh. The great king is poised to be the one who dominates and orders " all that the sun surrounds with its course " .
In monumental imagery and rhetoric, the union of the two lands and the triumph of Ra and Neith over chaos serve as a metaphor for the ecumenical empire created by Darius the Achaemenid. It's elementary plausibility that opportunism was involved, but this opportunism was neither timid nor ephemeral. This accepted match between an imaginary cosmic order and real geopolitical balances, whatever the ethnicity of the Demiurge's chosen organiser, remained an irreversible fact of pagan Egypt.
