These troops, returning home from a disastrous military expedition to Cyrene in Libya, suspected that they had been betrayed in order that Apries, the reigning king, might rule more absolutely by means of his Greek mercenaries; many Egyptians fully sympathized with them.

[11][12][13] An inscription confirms the struggle between the native Egyptian and the foreign soldiery, and proves that Apries was killed and honourably buried in the fourth year of Amasis (c. 567 BCE).

[14] Some information is known about the family origins of Amasis: his mother was a certain Tashereniset, as a bust of her, today located in the British Museum, shows.

[20] He assigned the commercial colony of Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile to the Greeks, and when the temple of Delphi was burnt, he contributed 1,000 talents to the rebuilding.

He also married a Greek princess named Ladice daughter of King Battus III and made alliances with Polycrates of Samos and Croesus of Lydia.

Herodotus, who visited Egypt less than a century after Amasis II's death, writes that: It is said that it was during the reign of Ahmose II (Amasis) that Egypt attained its highest level of prosperity both in respect of what the river gave the land and in respect of what the land yielded to men and that the number of inhabited cities at that time reached in total 20,000.

[23][11][12] It is believed that Amasis managed to repel this invasion, forcing Nebuchadnezzar II to retire plans to conquer his kingdom.

)[25][13] Amasis was later faced with another formidable enemy with the rise of Persia under Cyrus who ascended to the throne in 559 BCE; his final years were preoccupied by the threat of the impending Persian onslaught against Egypt.

[26] The final assault instead fell upon his son Psamtik III, whom the Persians defeated in 525 BCE after he had reigned for only six months.

He was buried at the royal necropolis of Sais within the temple enclosure of Neith, and while his tomb has not been rediscovered, Herodotus describes it for us: [It is] a great cloistered building of stone, decorated with pillars carved in the imitation of palm-trees, and other costly ornaments.

This done, he proceeded to have it treated with every possible indignity, such as beating it with whips, sticking it with goads, and plucking its hairs... As the body had been embalmed and would not fall to pieces under the blows, Cambyses had it burned.

'In those tales Amasis was presented as a non-conventional Pharaoh, behaving in ways unbecoming to a king but gifted with practical wisdom and cunning, a trickster on the throne or a kind of comic Egyptian Solomon'.

[30] For example, Herodotus relates that, when the Egyptians disrespected Amasis for having been born a commoner, he had his golden footbath (ποδανιπτήρ) melted down, made into a statue of a god, and placed in the centre of city where people would worship it.