The House of Ptolemy

In the autumn of the year 332 BC an army of Macedonians and Greeks, numbering some 40,000 men, invaded Egypt. It was led by the young king of Macedonia, Alexander, who had gone forth two years before, Captain-General of the states of Hellas, to assail the huge Persian Empire. Before he reached Egypt he had defeated an army gathered by the Persian satraps on the river Granicus in Asia Minor and an army commanded by the Great King himself at Issus on the Syrian coast. By the autumn of 332 the Persian power had disappeared from the coast-lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, except from Egypt. There Mazakes still ruled as satrap in the name of the Great King (perhaps as the lieutenant of the satrap Sabakes who had left Egypt to join Darius at Issus). It was necessary for Alexander to obtain possession of Egypt, and perhaps of Cyrene, farther west, before he plunged into the countries of the East, because his enemies were still strong at sea, and he had no fleet with which to counter them; the only plan which would secure his base would be for him to hold all the ports round the Eastern Mediterranean and leave the hostile fleets in the air with no place in which they could refit or provision. Thus it was that the army of Ionians, as the Egyptians called the Greeks, appeared in the old land of the Pharaohs...