At any rate, it was resolved to make the venture.

Phoenicia, on the destruction of her distant suzerain, quietly resumed her freedom; abstained from making any act of submission to the conqueror; while, however, at the same time, she established friendly relations for commercial purposes with one of the conqueror's vassals, the prince who had been sent into Palestine to re-establish the Jews at Jerusalem.
It might have been expected that Cyrus, after his conquest of Babylon, would have immediately proceeded towards the south-west.

The reduction of Egypt had, according to Herodotus, been embraced in the designs which he formed fifteen years earlier.

The non-submission of Phoenicia must have been regarded as an act of defiance which deserved signal chastisement.

It has been suspected that the restoration of the Jews was prompted, at least in part, by political motives, and that Cyrus, when he re-established them in their country, looked to finding them of use to him in the attack which he was meditating upon Egypt.