In Herodotus' Histories there appears a story told by Egyptian priests about a Pharaoh Sesostris, who once led an army northward overland to Asia Minor, then fought his way westward until he crossed into Europe, where he defeated the Scythians and Thracians. Sesostris then returned home, leaving colonists behind at the riverPhasis in Colchis. Herodotus cautioned the reader that much of this story came second handvia Egyptian priests, but also noted that the Colchians were commonly known to be Egyptian colonists. According to Diodorus Siculus, and Strabo, he conquered the whole world, even Scythia and Ethiopia, divided Egypt into administrative districts or nomes, was a great law-giver, and introduced a caste system into Egypt and the worship of Serapis. Herodotus also relates that when Sesostris defeated an army without much resistance he erected a pillar in their capital with a vulva on it to symbolize the fact that the army fought like women. Pliny the Elder also makes mention of Sesostris, who, he claims, was defeated by Saulaces, a gold-rich king of Colchis. Herodotus describes Sesostris as the father ofthe blind king Pheron, who was less warlike than his father.
Modern research
In Manetho's Aegyptiaca, a pharaoh called "Sesostris" occupied the same position as the known pharaoh Senusret III of the Twelfth Dynasty, and his name is now usually viewed as a corruption of Senusret/Senwosret/Senwosri. In fact, he is commonly believed to be based on Senusret III, with the possible addition of memories of other namesake pharaohs of the same dynasty, as well as Seti I and Ramesses II of the much later Nineteenth Dynasty. "So far as is known no Egyptian king penetrated a day's journey beyond the Euphrates or into Asia Minor, or touched the continent of Europe". The images of Sesostris carved in stone in Ionia which Herodotus said he had seen are likely to be identified with the Luwian inscriptions of Karabel Pass, the Karabel relief, now known to have been carved by Tarkasnawa, king of the Arzawan rump state of Mira. The kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties were the greatest conquerors that Egypt ever produced, and their records are clear on the limits of Egyptian expansion. Senusret III raided into the Levant as far as Shechem, also into Ethiopia, and at Semna above the second cataract set up a stela of conquest that in its expressions recalls the stelae of Sesostris in Herodotus: Sesostris may, therefore, be the highly magnified portrait of this Pharaoh.
