Neither shall it be inhabited forty years. It need hardly be said that history reveals no such period of devastation. Nor, indeed, would anything but the most prosaic literalism justify us in looking for it.
We are dealing with the language of a poet-prophet, which is naturally that of hyperbole, and so the "forty years" stand, as, perhaps, elsewhere ( 3:11; 5:31, etc.), for a period of undefined duration, and the picture of a land on which no man or beast sets foot for that of a time of desolation, and consequent cessation of all the customary traffic along the Nile.
Such a period, there is reason to believe, did follow on the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar. It is implied in Ezekiel 29:17-21, which carry us to a date seventeen years later than that of the verse with which we are now dealing; and also in Jeremiah 43:10-12.
Josephus ('Contra Apion,' 1.20) speaks of Nebuchadnezzar as having invaded Libya. The reign of Amasis, which followed on the deposition of Hophra, was one of general prosperity as regards commerce and culture, but Egypt ceased to be one of the great world-powers after the time of Nebuchadnezzar and fell easily into the hands of the Persians under Cambyses.
It is noticeable that Ezekiel does not, like Isaiah (Isaiah 19:18-25), connect the future of Egypt with any Messianic expectations.