Moses Leads the War on Ethiopia

When Moses, born and brought up in the way described, came to maturity, he made his virtue plain to the Egyptians, and showed that he had been born to bring them down and to raise the Hebrews up. The occasion he seized was this. The Ethiopians, the Egyptians’ nearest neighbors, invaded their country and carried off the Egyptians’ goods as plunder. The Egyptians in their rage fought them to avenge the insults they had suffered; but they were beaten in battle, and some of them were killed, while the rest ran away shamefully and so saved themselves. The Ethiopians followed in pursuit, and thinking it would be a mark of cowardice not to conquer all Egypt, they pressed on more fiercely to conquer the rest; and once they had tasted the good things of the country, they never let the war drop. Since the nearest parts had not the courage at first to fight them, they advanced as far as Memphis and the sea itself, and not one of the cities was able to resist them. [a]

The Egyptians, under this grievous oppression, turned to their oracles and prophecies. When God gave them the advice to make use of Moses the Hebrew and take his help, the king commanded his daughter to produce him, so that he might be the general of their army. She made the king swear that he would do Moses no harm, and then handed him over, thinking his help would be of great advantage to them. At the same time she reproached the priests, who had earlier urged the Egyptians to kill him and were not ashamed now to admit they needed his help.

So Moses, at the urging of both Thermuthis and the king himself, cheerfully took on the task. The sacred scribes of both nations were glad: the Egyptians’, because they hoped at one stroke to overcome their enemies by his valor and to get Moses killed by the same ruse; the Hebrews’, because they hoped to escape from the Egyptians, since Moses was to be their general. Moses got ahead of the enemy: he set out and led his army against them before they learned he was coming. He did not march along the river but overland, and there he gave a wonderful proof of his shrewdness. The ground was hard to cross because of the great number of serpents. The country breeds them in vast numbers, and is unique in some kinds that other countries do not produce — kinds worse than others in strength and harmfulness, and strange to look at; some of them even have wings, so that they strike unseen from the ground or fly overhead and fall on people unawares. Moses devised a wonderful stratagem to bring the army through safe and unharmed. He made baskets of papyrus shaped like chests, filled them with ibises, and carried them along. This bird is the greatest enemy of serpents imaginable: the serpents flee from the ibises when they come near, and as they flee they are caught and devoured by them, as if by deer. The ibises are tame creatures, and enemies only to the serpent kind. But I will say no more about the ibis now, since the Greeks themselves know this bird well. So as soon as Moses came to the land that bred these serpents, he let the ibises loose, and by their means drove the serpent kind back, using them as his helpers before the army came onto that ground. [c]

Having advanced in this way, he came upon the Ethiopians before they expected him. He joined battle with them and beat them, took from them the hopes they had of success against the Egyptians, and went on overthrowing their cities, and indeed made a great slaughter of these Ethiopians. Once the Egyptian army had tasted this success through Moses, they did not slacken their efforts, so that the Ethiopians were in danger of being reduced to slavery and every kind of destruction. At last they were driven back into Saba, a royal city of Ethiopia, which Cambyses afterward named Meroë after his own sister, and were besieged there. The place was very hard to besiege. The Nile ran all the way around it, and the other rivers, the Astapus and the Astaboras, made it very difficult for anyone trying to cross them; for the city lay inside them and was inhabited like an island. It was surrounded by a strong wall, it had the rivers to guard it from its enemies, and there were great embankments between the wall and the rivers, so that even when the waters came down with the greatest violence it could never be flooded. These embankments made it next to impossible to take the city, even for those who had got across the rivers.

While Moses was chafing at the army’s lying idle — for the enemy dared not come out to battle — this is what happened. Tharbis was the daughter of the king of the Ethiopians. She happened to see Moses as he led the army near the walls and fought with great courage. She admired the cleverness of his undertakings, and believed him to be the cause of the Egyptians’ success, when they had before despaired of recovering their freedom, and of the great danger the Ethiopians were in, after all their boasting of great achievements. She fell deeply in love with him, and under the force of that passion she sent the most trusted of all her servants to speak with him about marriage. He accepted the offer on condition that she would arrange the surrender of the city, and gave her his oath that he would take her as his wife, and that once he had taken possession of the city he would not break his oath to her. No sooner was the agreement made than it took effect. When Moses had destroyed the Ethiopians, he gave thanks to God, consummated his marriage, and led the Egyptians back to their own land.