Cambyses Romance

The Cambyses Romance is an anonymous Sahidic Coptic prose narrative composed no later than the 7th century AD.

It is a fictionalized account of the invasion of Egypt by the Persian king Cambyses II in 525 BC that blends various traditions.

[2] The surviving text begins with Cambyses sending a letter to the people of the land where the sun rises demanding their subjection.

On the advice of Bothor, the people send a letter of rejection to Cambyses, preferring to maintain their alliance with, or perhaps vassalage to, Egypt.

His plan is to forge a letter in the name of the pharaoh ordering the Egyptians to assemble for a festival in honour of Apis and then fall on them.

Ludin Jansen argued that the original version was written in Demotic in the 2nd century BC and only much later reworked in Coptic.

[18] That the author was an Aramaic or Syriac speaker is implied by his use of the nickname sanouth (glossed as 'cowardly') for Cambyses, which is Semitic, not Egyptian.

[18] Oscar Lemm first proposed that the author of the Romance based his depiction of Cambyses and the Egyptians' martial valour on the Histories of Herodotus, with elements borrowed from the Book of Jeremiah.

[19] Besides these, the sources of the Romance include the Antiquities of Josephus, the Book of Judith and native Egyptian traditions as also found in the Apocalypse of Elijah and John of Nikiu.