keeping the road to Upper Egypt, served to introduce Ionian civilization
to the Delta in the seventh century. Indeed, to this day our knowledge
of the earliest fine painted pottery of Ionia and Caria depends largely
on the fragments of their vases imported into Egypt which have been
found at Tahpanhes, Memphis and another Greek colony, Naukratis, founded
a little later (as will be told presently) to supersede the original
Milesian factory. Though those foreign vases themselves, with their
decoration of nude figure subjects which revolted vulgar Egyptian
sentiment, did not go much beyond the Greek settlements (like the Greek
courtesans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed only to the more
cosmopolitan Saites), their art certainly influenced all the finer art
of the Saitic age, initiating a renascence whose characteristics of
excessive refinement and meticulous delicacy survived to be reinforced
in the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion of Hellenic culture.

So useful or so dangerous--at any rate so numerous--did the Greeks
become in Lower Egypt by the opening of the sixth century that a
reservation was assigned to them beside the Egyptian town of Piemro, and
to this alone, according to Herodotus, newcomers from the sea were
allowed to make their way. This foreign suburb of Piemro was named
Naukratis, and nine cities of the Asiatic Greeks founded a common
sanctuary there. Other maritime communities of the same race (probably
the more powerful, since Miletus is named among them) had their
particular sanctuaries also and their proper places. The Greeks had come
to Egypt to stay. We have learned from the remains of Naukratis that
throughout the Persian domination, which superseded the Saitic before
the close of the sixth century, a constant importation of products of
Ionia, Attica, Sparta, Cyprus and other Hellenic centres was maintained.
The place was in full life when Herodotus visited Egypt, and it
continued to prosper until the Greek race, becoming rulers of all the