# Herodotus The Persian Wars (Godley)/Book II

Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA
1. After the death of Cyrus Cambyses inherited his throne. He was the son of Cyrus and Cassandane daughter of Pharnaspes, for whom, when she died before him, Cyrus himself mourned deeply and bade all his subjects mourn also. Cambyses was the son of this woman and Cyrus. He considered the Ionians and Aeolians as slaves inherited from his father, and prepared an expedition against Egypt, taking with him, with others subject to him, some of the Greeks over whom he held sway.
2. Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed themselves to be the oldest nation on earth. But ever since he desired to learn, on becoming king, what nation was oldest, they have considered that, though they came before all other nations, the Phrygians are older still. Psammetichus, being nowise able to discover by inquiry what men had first come into being, devised a plan whereby he took two newborn children of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due season the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for when the shepherd had done as he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and entered both the children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling “Bekos.” When he first heard this he said nothing of it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master, and on command brought the children into the king’s presence. Psammetichus heard them himself, and inquired to what language this word Bekos might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed that the Phrygians were older than they. This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaestus’ temple at Memphis; the Greeks relate (among many foolish tales) that Psammetichus made the children to be reared by women whose tongues he had cut out.
3. Besides this story of the rearing of the children, I heard also other things at Memphis, in converse with the priests of Hephaestus; and I visited Thebes too and Heliopolis for this very purpose, because I desired to know if the people of those places would tell me the same tale as the priests at Memphis; for the people of Heliopolis are said to be the most learned of the Egyptians. Now, for the stories which I heard about the gods, I am not desirous to relate them, saving only the names of the deities; for I hold that no man knows about the gods more than another; and I will say no more about them than what I am constrained to say by the course of my history.
4. But as regarding human affairs, this was the account in which they all agreed: the Egyptians, they said, were the first men who reckoned by years and made the year to consist of twelve divisions of the seasons. They discovered this from the stars (so they said). And their reckoning is, to my mind, a juster one than that of the Greeks; for the Greeks add an intercalary month every other year, so that the seasons may agree; but the Egyptians, reckoning thirty days to each of the twelve months, add five days in every year over and above the number, and so the completed circle of seasons is made to agree with the calendar. Further, the Egyptians (said they) first used the appellations of twelve gods (which the Greeks afterwards borrowed from them); and it was they who first assigned to the several gods their altars and images and temples, and first carved figures on stone. They showed me most of this by plain proof. The first human king of Egypt, they said, was Min. In his time all Egypt save the Thebaic province was a marsh: all the country that we now see was then covered by water, north of the lake Moeris, which lake is seven days’ journey up the river from the sea.
5. And I think that their account of the country was true. For even though a man has not before been told it he can at once see, if he have sense, that that Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land acquired by the Egyptians, given them by the river—not only the lower country but even all the land to three days’ voyage above the aforesaid lake, which is of the same nature as the other, though the priests added not this to what they said. For this is the nature of the land of Egypt: firstly, when you approach to it from the sea and are yet a day’s run from land, if you then let down a sounding line you will bring up mud and find a depth of eleven fathoms. This shows that the deposit from the land reaches thus far.
6. Further, the length of the seacoast of Egypt itself is sixty “schoeni,” that is of Egypt as we judge it to be, reaching from the Plinthinete gulf to the Serbonian marsh, which is under the Casian mountain; between these there is this length of sixty schoeni. Men that have scanty land measure by fathoms; those that have more, by furlongs; those that have much land, by parasangs; and those who have great abundance of it, by schoeni. The parasang is of thirty furlongs’ length, and the schoenus, which is an Egyptian measure, is of sixty.
7. By this reckoning then the seaboard of Egypt will be three thousand and six hundred furlongs in length. Inland from the sea as far as Heliopolis Egypt is a wide land, all flat and watery and marshy. From the sea up to Heliopolis it is a journey about as long as the way from the altar of the twelve gods at Athens to the temple of Olympian Zeus at Pisa. If a reckoning be made there will be seen to be but a little difference of length, not more than fifteen furlongs, between these two journeys; for the journey from Athens to Pisa is fifteen furlongs short of fifteen hundred, which is the tale of furlongs between the sea and Heliopolis.
8. Beyond and above Heliopolis Egypt is a narrow land. For it is bounded on the one side by the mountains of Arabia, which bear from the north to the south, ever stretching southward towards the sea called the Red Sea. In these mountains are the quarries that were hewn out for the making of the pyramids at Memphis. This way then the mountains turn, and end in the places of which I have spoken; their greatest breadth from east to west, as I learnt, is a two months’ journey, and their easternmost boundaries yield frankincense. Such are these mountains. On the side of Libya Egypt is bounded by another range of rocky mountains, wherein are the pyramids; this is all covered with sand, and it runs in the same direction as those Arabian hills that bear southward. Beyond Heliopolis there is no great distance, that is, in Egypt; the narrow land has but a length of fourteen days’ journey up the river. Between the mountain ranges aforesaid the land is level, and where the plain is narrowest it seemed to me that there were no more than two hundred furlongs between the Arabian mountains and those that are called Libyan. Beyond this Egypt is a wide land again. Such is the nature of this country.
9. From Heliopolis to Thebes it is nine days’ journey by river, and the distance is four thousand eight hundred and sixty furlongs, or eighty-one schoeni. This then is a full statement of all the furlongs in Egypt: the seaboard is three thousand six hundred furlongs long; and I will now declare the distance inland from the sea to Thebes: it is six thousand one hundred and twenty furlongs. And between Thebes and the city called Elephantine there are eighteen hundred furlongs.
10. The greater portion, then, of this country whereof I have spoken was (as the priests told me, and I myself formed the same judgment) land acquired by the Egyptians all that lies between the ranges of mountains above Memphis to which I have referred seemed to me to have been once a gulf of the sea, just as the country about Ilion and Teuthrania and Ephesus and the plain of the Maeander, to compare these small things with great. For of the rivers that brought down the stuff to make these lands there is none worthy to be compared for greatness with one of the mouths of the Nile; and the Nile has five mouths. There are also other rivers, not so great as the Nile, that have wrought great effects; I could declare their names, but chief among them is Achelous, which, flowing through Acarnania and issuing into the sea, has already made half of the Echinades islands to be mainland.
11. Now in Arabia, not far from Egypt, there is a gulf of the sea entering in from the sea called Red, of which the length and narrowness is such as I shall show: for length, it is a forty days’ voyage for a ship rowed by oars from its inner end out to the wide sea and for breadth, it is half a day’s voyage at the widest. Every day the tide ebbs and flows therein. I hold that where now is Egypt there was once another such gulf; one entered from the northern sea towards Aethiopia, and the other, the Arabian gulf of which I will speak, bore from the south towards Syria; the ends of these gulfs pierced into the country near to each other, and but a little space of land divided them. Now if the Nile choose to turn his waters into this Arabian gulf, what hinders that it be not silted up by his stream in twenty thousand years? nay, I think that ten thousand would suffice for it. Is it then to be believed that in the ages before my birth a gulf even much greater than this could not be silted up by a river so great and so busy?
12. Therefore, as to Egypt, I believe those who so speak, and I am myself fully so persuaded; for I have seen that Egypt projects into the sea beyond the neighbouring land, and shells are plain to view on the mountains and things are coated with salt (insomuch that the very pyramids are wasted thereby), and the only sandy mountain in Egypt is that which is above Memphis; moreover, Egypt is like neither to the neighbouring land of Arabia, nor to Libya, no, nor to Syria (for the seaboard of Arabia is inhabited by Syrians); it is a land of black and crumbling earth, as if it were alluvial deposit carried down the river from Aethiopia; but we know that the soil of Libya is redder and somewhat sandy, and Arabia and Syria are lands rather of clay and stones.
13. This too that the priests told me concerning Egypt is a strong proof; when Moeris was king, if the river rose as much as eight cubits, it watered all Egypt below Memphis. Moeris was not yet nine hundred years dead when I heard this from the priests. But now, if the river rise not at the least to sixteen or fifteen cubits, the land is not flooded. And, to my thinking, the Egyptians who dwell lower down the river than the lake Moeris, and chiefly those who inhabit what is called the Delta—these, if thus this land of theirs rises in such proportion and likewise increases in extent, will (the Nile no longer flooding it) be ever after in the same plight which they themselves once said would be the case of the Greeks; for learning that all the Greek land is watered by rain, and not, like theirs, by river, they said that some day the Greeks would be disappointed of their high hopes, and miserably starve: signifying thereby that should it be heaven’s will to send the Greeks no rain and afflict them with drought, famine must come upon them, as receiving all this water from Zeus and having no other resource.
14. And this saying of the Egyptians about the Greeks was true enough. But now let me show what is the case of the Egyptians themselves: if (as I have already said) the country below Memphis—for it is this which rises—should increase in height in the same degree as formerly, will not the Egyptians who dwell in it go hungry, there being no rain in their country and the river being unable to inundate their fields? Now, indeed, there are no men, neither in the rest of Egypt, nor in the whole world, who gain from the soil with so little labour they have not the toil of breaking up the land with the plough, nor of hoeing, nor of any other work which other men do to get them a crop; the river rises of itself, waters the fields, and then sinks back again; thereupon each man sows his field and sends swine into it to tread down the seed, and waits for the harvest; then he makes the swine to thresh his grain, and so garners it.
15. Now if we agree with the opinion of the Ionians, namely that nothing but the Delta is Egypt, whereof the seaboard reaches, according to them, from what is called the watchtower of Perseus, forty schoeni to the salting factories of Pelusium, while inland it stretches as far as the city of Cercasorus, where the Nile divides and flows thence to Pelusium and Canobus (all the rest of Egypt being, they say, partly Libya and partly Arabia): if we follow this account, we can show that there was once no country for the Egyptians; for we have seem that (as the Egyptians themselves say, and as I myself judge) the Delta is alluvial land and but lately (so to say) come into being. Then if there was once no country for them, it was but a useless thought that they were the oldest nation on earth, and they needed not to make that trial to see what language the children would first utter. I hold rather that the Egyptians did not come into being with the making of that which Ionians call the Delta: they ever existed since men were first made; and as the land grew in extent many of them spread down over it, and many stayed behind. Be that as it may, the Theban province, a land of six thousand one hundred and twenty furlongs in circuit, was of old called Egypt.
16. If then our judgment of this be right, the Ionians are in error concerning Egypt; but if their opinion be right, then it is plain that they and the rest of the Greeks cannot reckon truly, when they divide the whole earth into three parts, Europe, Asia, and Libya; they must add to these yet a fourth part, the Delta of Egypt, if it belong neither to Asia nor to Libya; for by their showing the Nile is not the river that separates Asia and Libya; the Nile divides at the extreme angle of this Delta, so that this land must be between Asia and Libya.
17. Nay, we put the Ionians’ opinion aside; and our own judgment concerning the matter is this: Egypt is all that country which is inhabited by Egyptians, even as Cilicia and Assyria are the countries inhabited by Cilicians and Assyrians severally; and we know of no frontier (rightly so called) below Asia and Libya save only the borders of the Egyptians. But if we follow the belief of the Greeks, we shall consider all Egypt, down from the Cataracts and the city Elephantine, to be divided into two parts, and to claim both the names, the one part belonging to Libya and the other to Asia. For the Nile, beginning from the Cataracts, divides Egypt into two parts as it flows to the sea. Now as far as the city Cercasorus the Nile flows in one channel, but after that it parts into three. One of these, which is called the Pelusian mouth, flows eastwards; the second flows westwards, and is called the Canobic mouth. But the direct channel of the Nile, when the river in its downward course reaches the sharp point of the Delta, flows thereafter clean through the middle of the Delta into the sea; in this is seen the greatest and most famous part of its waters, and it is called the Sebennytic mouth. There are also two channels which separate themselves from the Sebennytic and so flow into the sea, by name the Saïtic and the Mendesian. The Bolbitine and Bucolic mouths are not natural but dug channels.
18. My opinion, that the extent of Egypt is such as my argument shows, is attested by the answer which (my judgment being already formed) I heard to have been given concerning Egypt by the oracle of Ammon. The men of the cities of Marea and Apis, in the part of Egypt bordering on Libya, thinking themselves to be not Egyptians but Libyans, and misliking the observance of the religious law which forbade them to eat cows’ flesh, sent to Ammon saying that they had no part or lot with Egypt: for they dwelt (said they) outside the Delta and did not consent to the ways of its people, and they wished to be suffered to eat of all foods. But the god forbade them: all the land, he said, watered by the Nile in its course was Egypt, and all who dwelt lower down than the city Elephantine and drank of that rivers water were Egyptians. Such was the oracle given to them.
19. When the Nile is in flood, it overflows not only the Delta but also the lands called Libyan and Arabian, in places as far as two days’ journey from either bank, and sometimes more than this, sometimes less. Concerning its nature, neither from the priests nor from any others could I learn anything. Yet I was zealous to hear from them why it is that the Nile comes down with a rising flood for an hundred days from the summer solstice, and when this tale of days is complete sinks again with a diminishing stream, so that the river is low for the whole winter till the summer solstice again. Concerning this matter none of the Egyptians could tell me anything, when I asked them what power the Nile has to be contrary in nature to all other rivers. Of the matters aforesaid I wished to know, and asked; also why no airs blow from it as from every other stream.
20. But some of the Greeks, wishing to be notable for cleverness, put forward three opinions about this river; of which there are two that I would not even mention, save to show only what they are. One of these will have it that the etesian winds are the cause of the rivers being in flood, because they hinder the Nile from flowing out into the sea. But there are many times when the etesian winds do not blow, yet the Nile does the same as before. And further, if the etesian winds were the cause, then, the other rivers which flow contrary to those winds should be affected in like manner even as is the Nile, and all the more, inasmuch as being smaller they have a weaker current. Yet there are many rivers in Syria and in Libya, which are nowise in the same case as the Nile.
21. The second opinion is less grounded on knowledge than that afore-mentioned, though it is more marvellous to the ear: by it, the river effects what it does because it flows from the Ocean, which flows round all the world.
22. The third opinion is the most plausible by far, yet is of all the most in error. It has no more truth in it than the others. According to this, the Nile flows from where snows melt; but it flows from Libya through the midst of Ethiopia, and issues out into Egypt; how then can it flow from snow, seeing that it comes from the hottest places to lands that are for the most part colder? nay, a man who can reason about such matters will find his chief proof, that there is no likelihood of the river’s flowing from snow, in this—that the winds blowing from Libya and Ethiopia are hot. And the second proof is, that the country is ever without rain and frost; but after snow has fallen there must needs be rain within five days; so that were there snow there would be rain in these lands. And the third proof is, that the men of the country are black by reason of the heat. Moreover, kites and swallows live there all the year round, and cranes, flying from the wintry weather of Scythia, come every year to these places to winter there. Now, were there but the least fall of snow in this country through which the Nile flows and whence it rises, none of these things would happen, as necessity proves.
23. The opinion about the Ocean is grounded in obscurity and needs no disproof; for I know of no river of Ocean; and I suppose that Homer or some older poet invented this name and brought it into his poetry.
24. If, having condemned the opinions proposed, I must now set forth what I myself think about these obscure matters, I will show what I suppose to be the cause of the Nile being in flood in the summer. During the winter the sun is driven by the storms from his customary course and passes over the inland parts of Libya. Now to make the shortest conclusion, that is all that need be said; for to whatever country this god is nearest, or over it, it is to be thought that that land is the thirstiest and that the rivers in it are diminished.
25. But stated at greater length, the truth is as I shall show. In his passage over the inland parts of Libya—the air being ever clear in that region, the land warm and the winds cool—the sun does what he was wont to do in the summer in passing through the middle of the heaven: he draws the water to himself, and having so drawn it, expels it away to the inland regions, and the winds catch it and scatter and dissolve it; and, as is to be supposed, those that blow from that country, the south and the south-west, are the most rainy of all winds. Yet I think that the sun never lets go all the water that he yearly draws up from the Nile, but keeps some back near to himself. Then as the winter becomes milder, the sun returns back to the middle of the heaven, and after that he draws from all rivers alike. Meantime the other rivers are swollen to high flood by the much water from the sky that falls into them, because the country is rained upon and cut into gullies; but in the summer they are low, lacking the rain and being drawn up too by the sun. But the Nile being fed by no rain, and being the only river in winter drawn up by the sun, at this time falls far short of the height that he had in summer; which is but natural; for in summer all other waters too and not his alone are attracted to the sun, but in the winter it is he alone who is afflicted.
26. I am persuaded therefore that the sun is the cause of these matters. The dryness of the air in these parts is also caused by the sun, to my thinking, because he burns his passage through it; so it is that it is always summer in the inland part of Libya. But were the stations of the seasons changed, so that the south wind and the summer had their station where now the north wind and winter are set, and the north wind was where the south wind is now,—if this were so, the sun when driven from mid-heaven by the winter and the north wind would pass over the inland parts of Europe as he now passes over Libya, and I think that in his passage over all Europe he would work the same effect on the Ister as he now does on the Nile.
27. And for the reason why no air blows from the river, this is my opinion: it is not natural that any air blow from very hot places; airs ever come from that which is very cold.
28. Be these matters, then, as they are and as they were made to be in the beginning. But as to the sources of the Nile, none that conversed with me, neither Egyptian, nor Libyan, nor Greek, professed to know them, except only the recorder of the sacred treasures of Athene in the Egyptian city of Sais. He, I thought, jested with me when he said that he had exact knowledge; but this was his story:—Between the city of Syene in the Thebaid and Elephantine there are two hills with sharp peaks, the one called Crophi and the other Mophi. The springs of the Nile, which are unfathomed, rise between these hills; and half the water flows towards Egypt northwards, the other half southwards towards Ethiopia. That this source cannot be fathomed, Psammetichus king of Egypt proved by experiment: for he had a rope woven of many a thousand fathoms’ length and let down into the spring, but he could not reach to the bottom. Thus, then, if the recorder spoke truth, he showed, as I think, that here are strong eddies and an upward flow of water, and the rushing of the stream against the hills makes the sounding-line when let down unable to reach the bottom.
29. From no other man could I learn anything. But this much I learnt by the farthest inquiry that I could make, by my own travel and sight as far as the city of Elephantine, and beyond that by question and hearsay:—Beyond Elephantine, as one travels inland, the land rises. Here one must pass with the boat roped on both sides as men harness an ox; and if the rope break, the boat is carried away by the strength of the current. This part of the river is a four days’ journey by boat, and the Nile here is winding like the Maeander; a length of twelve schoeni must be passed in the aforesaid fashion. After that you will come to a level plain, where there is an island in the Nile, called Tachompso. Above Elephantine the country now begins to be inhabited by Ethiopians, and half the people of the island are Ethiopians and half Egyptians. Near to the island is a great lake, on the shores of which dwell nomad Ethiopians. Having crossed this, you will come to the stream of the Nile, which issues into this lake. Then you will disembark and journey along the river bank for forty days; for there are sharp projecting rocks in the Nile and many reefs, through which no boat can pass. Having traversed this part in forty days as I have said, you will take boat again and so travel for twelve days till you come to a great city called Meroe, which is said to be the capital of all Ethiopia. The people of the place worship no other gods but Zeus and Dionysus; these they greatly honour, and they have a place of divination sacred to Zeus; they send out armies whenever and whithersoever this god by oracle commands them.
30. From this city you will make a journey by water of equal distance with that by which you came from Elephantine to the capital city of Ethiopia, and you will come to the land of the Deserters. These Deserters are called Asmach, which signifies, in our language, those who stand on the left hand of the king. These once, to the number of two hundred and forty thousand Egyptians of fighting age, revolted and joined themselves to the Ethiopians. The reason was this:—In the reign of Psammetichus there were garrisons posted at Elephantine on the side of Ethiopia, at Daphnae of Pelusium on the side of Arabia and Assyria, and at Marea on the side of Libya. And still in my time the Persians hold these posts as they were held in the days of Psammetichus; there are Persian guards at Elephantine and at Daphnae. Now the Egyptians had been on guard for three years, and none came to relieve them; so taking counsel and making common cause, they revolted from Psammetichus and went to Ethiopia. Psammetichus heard of it and pursued after them; and when he overtook them he besought them with many words not to desert the gods of their fathers and their children and wives. Then one of them, so the story goes, said, pointing to his manly part, that wherever this should be they would have wives and children. So they came to Ethiopia, and gave themselves up to the king of the country; who, to make them a gift in return, bade them dispossess certain Ethiopians with whom he was at feud, and occupy their land. These Ethiopians then learnt Egyptian customs and have become milder-mannered by intermixture with the Egyptians.
31. For as far as a distance of four months’ travel, then, by land and water, there is knowledge of the Nile, besides the part of it that is in Egypt So many months, as reckoning shows, lasts the journey from Elephantine to the country of the Deserters aforesaid. The river flows from the west and the sun’s setting. Beyond this none has clear knowledge to declare; for all that country is desert, by reason of heat.
32. But this I heard from certain men of Cyrene, who told me that they had gone to the oracle of Ammon, and there conversed with Etearchus king of the Ammonians, and that from other matters of discourse they came to speak of the Nile, how no one knows the source of it. Then Etearchus told them that once he had been visited by certain Nasamonians. These are a Libyan people, inhabiting the country of the Syrtis and the country a little way to the east of the Syrtis. When these Nasamonians on their coming were questioned if they brought any news concerning the Libyan desert, they told Etearchus that there had been among them certain sons of their chief men, proud and violent youths, who, when they came to man’s estate, besides planning other wild adventures, had chosen by lot five of their company to visit the deserts of Libya, and see what they might beyond the utmost range of travellers. It must be known that all the northern seacoast of Libya—from Egypt as far as the promontory of Soloeis, which is the end of Libya—is inhabited through its whole length by Libyans, many tribes of them, except the part held by Greeks and Phoenicians; the region of Libya above the sea and the men of the seacoast is infested by wild beasts; and farther inland than the wild-beast country all is sand, exceeding waterless and wholly desert. This then was the story told by the young men:—When they left their companions, being well supplied with water and provisions, they journeyed first through the inhabited country, and having passed this they came to the region of wild beasts. After this, they travelled over the desert, towards the west, and crossed a wide sandy region, till after many days they saw trees growing in a plain; when they came to these and were plucking the fruit of the trees, they were met by little men of stature smaller than common, who took them and led them away. The Nasamonians did not know these men’s language nor did the escort know the language of the Nasamonians. The men led them across great marshes, which having crossed they came to a city where all the people were of like stature with the escort, and black. A great river ran past this city, from the west towards the rising sun; crocodiles could be seen in it.
33. This is enough to say concerning the story told by Etearchus the Ammonian; except that he said that the Nasamonians returned—as the men of Cyrene told me—and that the people to whose country they came were all wizards; as to the river that ran past the city, Etearchus guessed it to be the Nile; and that is but reasonable. For the Nile flows from Libya, and right through the midst of that country; and as I guess, reasoning as to things unknown from visible signs, it takes its rise from the same measure of distance as the Ister. That river flows from the land of the Celtae and the city of Pyrene through the very midst of Europe; now the Celtae dwell beyond the pillars of Heracles, being neighbours of the Cynesii, who are the westernmost of all nations inhabiting Europe. The Ister, then, flows clean across Europe and ends its course in the Euxine sea, at Istria, which is inhabited by Milesian colonists.
34. As it flows through inhabited country, its course is known to many; but none can speak of the source of the Nile; for Libya, through which it runs, is uninhabited and desert. Concerning its course I have told all that I could learn by inquiry; and it issues into Egypt. Now Egypt lies about opposite to the mountainous part of Cilicia; whence it is a straight five days’ journey for an unburdened man to Sinope on the Euxine; and Sinope lies over against the place where the Ister falls into the sea. Thus I suppose the course of the Nile in its passage through Libya to be like the course of the Ister.
35. It is sufficient to say thus much concerning the Nile. But concerning Egypt I will now speak at length, because nowhere are there so many marvellous things, nor in the whole world beside are there to be seen so many works of unspeakable greatness; therefore I shall say the more concerning Egypt.
As the Egyptians have a climate peculiar to themselves, and their river is different in its nature from all other rivers, so have they made all their customs and laws of a kind contrary for the most part to those of all other men. Among them, the women buy and sell, the men abide at home and weave; and whereas in weaving all others push the woof upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards. Men carry burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. Women make water standing, men sitting. They relieve nature indoors, and eat out of doors in the streets, giving the reason, that things unseemly but necessary should be done in secret, things not unseemly should be done openly. No woman is dedicated to the service of any god or goddess; men are dedicated to all deities male or female. Sons are not compelled against their will to support their parents, but daughters must do so though they be unwilling.
36. Everywhere else, priests of the gods wear their hair long; in Egypt they are shaven. With all other men, in mourning for the dead those most nearly concerned have their heads shaven; Egyptians are shaven at other times, but after a death they let their hair and beard grow. The Egyptians are the only people who keep their animals with them in the house. Whereas all others live on wheat and barley, it is the greatest disgrace for an Egyptian so to live; they make food from a coarse grain which some call spelt. They knead dough with their feet, and gather mud and dung with their hands. The Egyptians and those who have learnt it from them are the only people who practise circumcision. Every man has two garments, every woman only one. The rings and sheets of sails are made fast elsewhere outside the boat, but inside it in Egypt. The Greeks write and calculate by moving the hand from left to right; the Egyptians do contrariwise; yet they say that their way of writing is towards the right, and the Greek way towards the left. They use two kinds of writing; one is called sacred, the other common.
37. They are beyond measure religious, more than any other nation; and these are among their customs:—They drink from cups of bronze, which they cleanse out daily; this is done not by some but by all. They are especially careful ever to wear newly-washed linen raiment. They practise circumcision for cleanliness’ sake; for they set cleanness above seemliness. Their priests shave the whole body every other day, that no lice or aught else that is foul may infest them in their service of the gods. The priests wear a single linen garment and sandals of papyrus: they may take no other kind of clothing or footwear. Twice a day and twice every night they wash in cold water. Their religious observances are, one may say, innumerable. But also they receive many benefits; they neither consume nor spend aught of their own; sacred food is cooked for them, to each man is brought every day flesh of beeves and geese in great abundance, and wine of grapes too is given to them. They may not eat fish. The Egyptians sow no beans in their country; if any grow, they will not eat them either raw or cooked; the priests cannot endure even to see them, considering beans an unclean kind of pulse. Many (not one alone) are dedicated to the service of each god. One of these is the high priest; and when a high priest dies his son succeeds to his office.
38. They hold that bulls belong to Epaphus, and therefore test them thus to see if there be as much as one black hair on them; if there be, the bull is deemed not pure; one of the priests, appointed to this task, examines the beast, making it to stand and to lie, and drawing out its tongue, to know whether it bear none of the stated signs which I shall declare hereafter. He looks also to the hairs of the tail, to see if they grow naturally. If it be pure in all these respects, the priest marks it by wrapping papyrus round the horns, then smears it with sealing-earth and stamps it with his ring; and after this they lead the bull away. But the penalty is death for sacrificing a bull that the priest has not marked. Such is the manner of proving the beast; I will now show how it is sacrificed.
39. Having brought the marked beast to the altar where the Sacrifice is to be, they kindle a fire; then they pour wine on the altar over the victim and call upon the god; then they cut its throat, and having so done they sever the head from the body. They flay the carcase of the victim, then invoke many curses on its head and carry the same away. Where there is a market, and Greek traders in the place, the head is taken to the market and sold; where there are no Greeks, it is thrown into the river. The imprecation which they utter over the heads is, that whatever ill threatens themselves, who sacrifice, or the whole of Egypt, may fall upon that head. In respect of the heads of sacrificed beasts and the libation of wine, the practice of all Egyptians is the same in all sacrifices; and from this ordinance no Egyptian will taste of the head of anything that had life.
40. But in regard to the disembowelling and burning of the victims, there is a different way for each sacrifice. I will now, however, speak of that goddess whom they deem the greatest, and in whose honour they keep highest festival. The ox being flayed, after prayer made as aforesaid they take out the whole stomach, leaving the entrails in the carcase and the fat, and cut off the legs, the end of the loin, the shoulders, and the neck. Having done this, they fill what remains of the carcase of the ox with pure bread, honey, raisins, figs, frankincense, myrrh, and other kinds of incense, and then burn it, pouring much oil on it. They fast before the sacrifice, and while it is burning they all make lamentation; and when their lamentation is over, they set out a meal of what is left of the victim.
41. All Egyptians sacrifice unblemished bulls and bull-calves; they may not sacrifice cows; these are sacred to Isis. For the images of Isis are in woman’s form, horned like an ox, as the Greeks picture Io, and cows are held by far the most sacred of all beasts of the herd by all Egyptians alike. For this reason no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek man, or use a knife, or a spit, or a caldron belonging to a Greek, or taste the flesh of an unblemished ox that has been cut up with a Greek knife. Oxen that die are dealt with in the following way:—Cows are cast into the river, bulls are buried by each city in its suburbs, with one or both horns uncovered for a sign: then, when the carcase is decomposed, and the time appointed is at hand, a boat comes to each city from the island called Prosopitis, an island in the Delta, of nine schoeni in circuit. There are many other towns in Prosopitis; that one from which come the boats to gather the bones of the bulls is called Atarbechis; there stands in it a temple of Aphrodite of great sanctity. From this town many go about, some to one town and some to another, and dig up the bones, which they then carry away and all bury in one place. As they bury the oxen, so they do with all other beasts at death. Such is their ordinance respecting these also; for they, too, may not be killed.
42. All that have among them a temple of Zeus of Thebes, or are of the Theban province, sacrifice goats but will not touch sheep. For no gods are worshipped in common by the whole of Egypt save only Isis and Osiris, whom they say to be Dionysus; these are worshipped by all alike. Those who have a temple of Mendes or are of the Mendesian province sacrifice sheep, but will not touch goats. The Thebans, and those who by the Theban example will not touch sheep give the following reason for their ordinance: Heracles (they say) would by all means look upon Zeus, and Zeus would not be seen by him. At last, being earnestly entreated by Heracles, Zeus contrived a device, whereby he showed himself displaying the head and wearing the fleece of a ram which he had flayed and beheaded. It is from this that the Egyptian images of Zeus have a ram’s head; and in this the Egyptians are imitated by the Ammonians, who are colonists from Egypt and Ethiopia and speak a language compounded of the tongues of both countries. It was from this, I think, that the Ammonians got their name too; for Amun is the Egyptian name for Zeus. The Thebans, then, hold rams sacred for this reason, and do not sacrifice them. But on one day in the year, at the festival of Zeus, they cut in pieces and flay a single ram and put the fleece on the image of Zeus, as in the story; then they bring an image of Heracles near to it. Having done this, all that are about the temple mourn for the ram, and presently bury it in a sacred coffer.
43. Concerning Heracles, I heard it said that he was one of the twelve gods. But I could nowhere in Egypt hear anything concerning the other Heracles, whom the Greeks know. I have indeed many proofs that the name of Heracles did not come from Hellas to Egypt, but from Egypt to Hellas (and in Hellas to those Greeks who gave the name Heracles to the son of Amphitryon); and this is the chief among them—that Amphitryon and Alcmene, the parents of this Heracles, were both by descent Egyptian; and that the Egyptians deny knowledge of the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, nor are these gods reckoned among the gods of Egypt. Yet had they got the name of any deity from the Greeks, it was these more than any that they were like to remember, if indeed they were already making sea voyages and the Greeks too had seafaring men, as I suppose and judge; so that the names of these gods would have been even better known to the Egyptians than the name of Heracles. Nay, Heracles is a very ancient god in Egypt; as the Egyptians themselves say, the change of the eight gods to the twelve, of whom they deem Heracles one, was made seventeen thousand years before the reign of Amasis.
44. Moreover, wishing to get clear knowledge of this matter whence it was possible so to do, I took ship to Tyre in Phoenice, where I heard that there was a very holy temple of Heracles. There I saw it, richly equipped with many other offerings, besides that in it there were two pillars, one of refined gold, one of emerald, a great pillar that shone in the night-time; and in converse with the priests I asked how long it was since their temple was built. I found that neither did their account tally with the belief of the Greeks; for they said that the temple of the god was founded when Tyre first became a city, and that was two thousand three hundred years since. At Tyre I saw yet another temple of that Heracles called the Thasian. Then I went to Thasos, too, where I found a temple of Heracles built by the Phoenicians, who made a settlement there when they voyaged in search of Europe; now they did so as much as five generations before the birth in Hellas of Heracles the son of Amphitryon. Therefore, what I have discovered by inquiry plainly shows that Heracles is an ancient god. And further: those Greeks, I think, are most in the right, who have established and practise two worships of Heracles, sacrificing to one Heracles as to an immortal, and calling him the Olympian, but to the other bringing offerings as to a dead hero.
45. But among the many ill-considered tales told by the Greeks, this is a very foolish story which they relate about Heracles—how when he came to Egypt the Egyptians crowned him and led him out in a procession to sacrifice him to Zeus; and for a while (they say) he followed quietly, but when they began the first rites of sacrifice upon him at the altar, he resisted and slew them all. Now it seems to me that by this story the Greeks show themselves wholly ignorant of the character and customs of the Egyptians; for how should they sacrifice men, who are forbidden to sacrifice even the lower animals, save only swine and bulls and bull-calves, if they be unblemished, and geese? Moreover, Heracles being alone, and still but a man, as they say, how is it natural that he should slay a countless multitude? So much I say of this matter; may no god or hero be displeased with me therefor!
46. This is the reason why the Egyptians of whom I have spoken sacrifice no goats, male or female: the Mendesians reckon Pan among the eight gods, who, they say, were before the twelve gods. Now in their painting and sculpture the image of Pan is made as among the Greeks with the head and the legs of a goat; not that he is deemed to be in truth such, or unlike to other gods; but why they so present him I have no wish to say. The Mendesians hold all goats sacred, the male even more than the female, and goatherds are held in especial honour: one he-goat is most sacred of all; when he dies it is ordained that there should be great mourning in all the Mendesian province. In the Egyptian language Mendes is the name both for the he-goat and for Pan. In my lifetime a monstrous thing happened in this province, a woman having open intercourse with a he-goat. This came to be publicly known.
47. Swine are held by the Egyptians to be unclean beasts. Firstly, if an Egyptian touch a hog in passing by, he goes to the river and dips himself in it, clothed as he is and secondly, swineherds, native born Egyptians though they be, are alone of all men forbidden to enter any Egyptian temple; nor will any give a swineherd his daughter in marriage, nor take a wife from their women; but swineherds intermarry among themselves. Nor do the Egyptians think right to sacrifice swine to any god save the Moon and Dionysus; to these they sacrifice their swine at the same time, in the same season of full moon; then they eat of the flesh. The Egyptians have an account of the reason why they sacrifice swine at this festival, yet abominate them at others; I know it, but it is not fitting that I should relate it. But this is how they sacrifice swine to the Moon: the sacrificer lays the end of the tail and the spleen and the caul together and covers them up with all the fat that he finds about the belly, then burns all with fire; as for the rest of the flesh, they eat it at the time of full moon when they sacrifice the victim; but they will not taste it on any other day. Poor men, having but slender means, mould swine of dough, which they then bake and sacrifice.
48. To Dionysus, on the evening of his festival, everyone offers a porker which he kills before his door and then gives to the swineherd himself who has sold it, for him to take away. The rest of the festival of Dionysus is ordered by the Egyptians much as it is by the Greeks, except for the dances; but in place of the phallus they have invented the use of puppets a cubit long moved by strings, which are carried about the villages by women, the male member moving and near as big as the rest of the body; a flute-player goes before, the women follow after, singing of Dionysus. There is a sacred legend which gives the reason for the appearance and motions of these puppets.
49. Now, this being so, it seems to me that Melampus son of Amytheon was not ignorant but had attained knowledge of this sacrifice. For it was Melampus who taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus, and the way of sacrificing to him, and the phallic procession; I would not in strictness say that he showed them completely the whole matter, for the later teachers added somewhat to his showing; but it was from him that the Greeks learnt to bear the phallus along in honour of Dionysus, and they got their present practice from his teaching. I think, then, that Melampus showed himself a clever man, in that he had acquired the prophetic art, and in his teaching of the worship of Dionysus, besides much else, came from Egypt with but slight change; for I will not admit that it is a chance agreement between the Egyptian ritual of Dionysus and the Greek; for were that so, the Greek ritual would be of a Greek nature and not but lately introduced. Nor yet will I hold that the Egyptians took either this or any other custom from the Greeks. But I believe that Melampus learnt the worship of Dionysus chiefly from Cadmus of Tyre and those who came with Cadmus from Phoenice to the land now called Boeotia.
50. Indeed, wellnigh all the names of the gods came to Hellas from Egypt. For I am assured by inquiry that they have come from foreign parts, and I believe that they came chiefly from Egypt. Except the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, as I have already said, and Here, and Hestia, and Themis, and the Graces and the Nereids, the names of all the gods have ever existed in Egypt. I say but what the Egyptians themselves say. The gods whose names they say they do not know were, as I think, named by the Pelasgians, save only Poseidon, of whom they learnt the knowledge from the Libyans. Alone of all nations the Libyans have had among them the name of Poseidon from the first, and they have ever honoured this god. The Egyptians, however, are not accustomed to pay any honours to heroes.
51. These customs then and others besides, which I shall show, were taken by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It was not so with the ithyphallic images of Hermes; the making of these came from the Pelasgians, from whom the Athenians were the first of all Greeks to take it, and then handed it on to others. For the Athenians were then already counted as Greeks when the Pelasgians came to dwell in the land with them, and thereby began to be considered as Greeks. Whoever has been initiated into the rites of the Cabeiri, which the Samothracians learnt from the Pelasgians and now practice, he understands what my meaning is. Samothrace was formerly inhabited by those Pelasgians who came to dwell among the Athenians, and it is from them that the Samothracians take their rites. The Athenians, then, were the first Greeks to make ithyphallic images of Hermes, and this they did because the Pelasgians taught them. The Pelasgians told a certain sacred tale about this, which is set forth in the Samothracian mysteries.
52. Formerly, in all their sacrifices, the Pelasgians called upon gods (this I know, for I was told at Dodona) without giving name or appellation to any; for they had not as yet heard of such. They called them gods because all things and the due assignment thereof were by them set in order. Then, after a long while, they learnt the names first of the rest of the gods, which came to them from Egypt, and, much later, the name of Dionysus; and presently they inquired of the oracle at Dodona concerning the names; for this place of divination is held to be the most ancient in Hellas, and at that time it was the only one. When the Pelasgians, then, inquired at Dodona if they should adopt the names that had come from foreign parts, the oracle bade them use the names. From that time onwards they used the names of the gods in their sacrifices; and the Greeks received these later from the Pelasgians.
53. But whence each of the gods came into being, or whether they had all for ever existed, and what outward forms they had, the Greeks knew not till (so to say) a very little while ago for I suppose that the time of Hesiod and Homer was not more than four hundred years before my own; and these are they who taught the Greeks of the descent of the gods, and gave to all their several names, and honours, and arts, and declared their outward forms. But those poets who are said to be older than Hesiod and Homer were, to my thinking, of later birth. The earlier part of all this is what the priestesses of Dodona tell; the later, that which concerns Hesiod and Homer, is what I myself say.
54. But as concerning the oracles in Hellas, and that one which is in Libya, this is the account given by the Egyptians. The priests of Zeus of Thebes told me that two priestesses had been carried away from Thebes by Phoenicians; one of them (so, they said, they had learnt) was taken away and sold in Libya, and the other in Hellas; these women, they said, were the first founders of places of divination in the countries aforesaid. When I asked them how it was that they could speak with so certain knowledge, they said in reply that their people had sought diligently for these women, and had never been able to find them, but had learnt later the tale which was now told to me.
55. That, then, I heard from the Theban priests; and what follows, is told by the prophetesses of Dodona: to wit, that two black doves had come flying from Thebes in Egypt, one to Libya and one to Dodona this last settled on an oak tree, and uttered there human speech, declaring that there must be there a place of divination from Zeus; the people of Dodona understood that the message was divine, and therefore they established the oracular shrine. The dove which came to Libya bade the Libyans (so they say) to make an oracle of Amnion; this also is sacred to Zeus. Such was the tale told by the Dodonaean priestesses, of whom the eldest was Promeneia and the next in age Timarete, and the youngest Nicandra; and the rest of the servants of the temple at Dodona likewise held it true.
56. But this is my own belief about it. If the Phoenicians did in truth carry away the sacred women and sell one in Libya and one in Hellas, then to my thinking the part of what is now Hellas, but was formerly called Pelasgia, where this last was sold, was Thesprotia; and presently, being there in slavery, she established a shrine of Zeus under an oak that was growing there; for it was reasonable that as she had been a handmaid of the temple of Zeus at Thebes she should remember that temple in the land to which she had come. After this she taught divination, as soon as she understood the Greek language and she said that her sister had been sold in Libya by the same Phoenicians who sold her.
57. I suppose that these women were called “doves” by the people of Dodona because they spoke a strange language, and the people thought it like the cries of birds; presently the woman spoke what they could understand, and that is why they say that the dove uttered human speech; as long as she spoke in her foreign language, they thought her voice was like the voice of a bird. For how could a dove utter the speech of men? The tale that the dove was black signifies that the woman was Egyptian.
58. The fashions of divination at Thebes of Egypt and Dodona are like to one another; moreover the practice of divining from the sacrificed victim has also come from Egypt. It would seem too that the Egyptians were the first people to establish solemn assemblies, and processions, and services; the Greeks learnt all this from them. I hold this proved, because the Egyptian ceremonies are manifestly very ancient, and the Greek are of late origin.
59. The Egyptians hold solemn assemblies not once in the year, but often. The chiefest of these and the most zealously celebrated is at the town of Bubastis in honour of Artemis, and the next is that in honour of Isis at Busiris. This town is in the middle of the Egyptian Delta, and there is in it a very great temple of Isis, who is in the Greek language, Demeter. The third greatest festival is at Sais in honour of Athene; the fourth is the festival of the sun at Heliopolis, the fifth of Leto at Buto, and the sixth of Ares at Papremis.
60. When the people are on their way to Bubastis they go by river, men and women together, a great number of each in every boat. Some of the women make a noise with rattles, others play flutes all the way, while the rest of the women, and the men, sing and clap their hands. As they journey by river to Bubastis, whenever they come near any other town they bring their boat near the bank; then some of the women do as I have said, while some shout mockery of the women of the town; others dance, and others stand up and expose their persons. This they do whenever they come beside any riverside town. But when they have reached Bubastis, they make a festival with great sacrifices, and more wine is drunk at this feast than in the whole year beside. Men and women (but not children) are wont to assemble there to the number of seven hundred thousand, as the people of the place say.
61. Such is their practice there; I have already told how they keep the feast of Isis at Busiris. There, after the sacrifice, all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it were profane for me to say who it is for whom they lament. Carian dwellers in Egypt do even more than this, for they cut their foreheads with knives; showing thereby, that they are not Egyptians but strangers.
62. When they assemble at Sais, on the night of the sacrifice, they all keep lamps burning in the open air round about their houses. These lamps are saucers full of salt and oil, the wick floating thereon, and burning all night. This is called the Feast of Lamps. Egyptians who do not come to this assemblage are careful on the night of sacrifice to keep their own lamps burning, and so they are alight not only at Sais but throughout all Egypt. A sacred tale is told showing why this night is thus lit up and honoured.
63. When the people go to Heliopolis and Buto they offer sacrifice only. At Papremis sacrifice is offered and rites performed as elsewhere; but when the sun is sinking, while a few of the priests are left to busy themselves with the image, the greater number of them beset the entrance of the temple, with clubs of wood in their hands; they are confronted by more than a thousand men, all performing vows and all carrying wooden clubs like the rest. The image of the god, in a little wooden gilt casket, is carried on the day before this from the temple to another sacred chamber. The few who are left with the image draw a four-wheeled cart carrying it in its casket; the other priests stand in the temple porch and prevent its entrance; the votaries take the part of the god, and smite the priests, who resist. There is hard fighting with clubs, and heads are broken, and as I think (though the Egyptians told me no life was lost), many die of their wounds. The assemblage, say the people of the country, took its rise thus:—The mother of Ares dwelt in this temple; Ares had been reared away from her, and when he grew to manhood came to hold converse with his mother; but as her attendants, never having seen him before, kept him off and would not suffer him to pass, Ares brought men from another town, roughly handled the attendants, and gained access to his mother. From this, they say, arose this custom of a battle of blows at the festival in honour of Ares.
64. Further, it was the Egyptians who first made it a matter of religious observance not to have intercourse with women in temples, nor enter a temple after such intercourse without washing. Nearly all other men are less careful in this matter than are the Egyptians and Greeks, and hold a man to be like any other animal; for beasts and birds (they say) are seen to mate both in the temples and the sacred precincts; now were this displeasing to the god neither would the beasts do so. This is the reason given by others for practices which I for my part mislike; but the Egyptians in this and in all other matters are exceeding strict against desecration of their temples.
65. Though Egypt has Libya on its borders, it is not a country of many animals. All of them are held sacred some of these are part of mens’ households and some not; but were I to declare the reason why they are dedicated, I should be brought to speak of matters of divinity, of which I am especially unwilling to treat; I have never touched upon such save where necessity has compelled me. But I. will now show how it is customary to deal with the animals. Men and women are appointed guardians to provide nourishment for each kind severally; a son inherits this office from his father. Townsmen in each place, when they pay their vows, make prayer to the god to whom the animal is dedicated, shaving the whole or the half or the third part of their children’s heads, and weighing the hair in a balance against a sum of silver; then whatever be the weight in silver of the hair is given to the female guardian of the creatures, who buys fish with it, cuts them up and feeds them therewith. Thus is food provided for them. Whoever kills one of these creatures with intention is punished with death; if he kill by mischance he pays whatever penalty the priests appoint. Whoever kills an ibis or a hawk, with intention or without, must die for it.
66. There are many household animals; and there would be many more, were it not for what happens to the cats. When the females have kittened they will not consort with the males; and these seek them but cannot get their will of them; so their device is to steal and carry off and kill the kittens (but they do not eat what they have killed). The mothers, deprived of their young and desiring to have more will then consort with the males; for they are creatures that love offspring. And when a fire breaks out very strange things happen to the cats. The Egyptians stand round in a broken line, thinking more of the cats than of quenching the burning; but the cats slip through or leap over the men and spring into the fire. When this happens, there is great mourning in Egypt. Dwellers in a house where a cat has died a natural death shave their eyebrows and no more; where a dog has so died, the head and the whole body are shaven.
67. Dead cats are taken away into sacred buildings, where they are embalmed and buried, in the town of Bubastis; bitches are buried in sacred coffins by the townsmen, in their several towns; and the like is done with ichneumons. Shrewmice and hawks are taken away to Buto, ibises to the city of Hermes. There are but few bears, and the wolves are little bigger than foxes; both these are buried wherever they are found lying.
68. I will now show what kind of creature is the crocodile. For the four winter months it eats nothing. It has four feet, and lives both on land and in the water, for it lays eggs and hatches them out on land, and it passes the greater part of the day on dry ground, and the night in the river, the water being warmer than the air and dew. No mortal creature known to us grows from so small a beginning to such greatness; for its eggs are not much bigger than goose eggs, and the young crocodile is of a bigness answering thereto, but it grows to a length of seventeen cubits and more. It has eyes like pigs’ eyes, and great teeth and tusks answering to the bigness of its body. It is the only animal that has no tongue. Nor does it move the lower jaw. It is the only creature that brings the upper jaw down upon the lower. It has also strong claws, and a scaly impenetrable hide on its back. It is blind in the water, but very keen of sight in the air. Since it lives in the water, its mouth is all full within of leeches. All birds and beasts flee from it, except only the sandpiper, with which it is at peace, because this bird does the crocodile a service; for whenever the crocodile comes ashore out of the water and then opens its mouth (and this it does for the most part to catch the west wind), the sandpiper goes into its mouth and eats the leeches; the crocodile is pleased by this service and does the sandpiper no harm.
69. Some of the Egyptians hold crocodiles sacred, others do not so, but treat them as enemies. The dwellers about Thebes and the lake Moeris deem them to be very sacred. There, in every place one crocodile is kept, trained to be tame; they put ornaments of glass and gold on its ears and bracelets on its forefeet, provide for it special food and offerings, and give the creatures the best of treatment while they live; after death the crocodiles are embalmed and buried in sacred coffins. But about Elephantine they are not held sacred, and are even eaten. The Egyptians do not call them crocodiles, but champsae. The Ionians called them crocodiles, from their likeness to the lizards which they have in their walls.
70. There are many and various ways of crocodile hunting; I will write only of that one way which I think most worthy of mention:—The hunter baits a hook with a chine of pork, and lets it float into the midst of the river; he himself stays on the bank with a young live pig, which he beats. Hearing the cries of the pig, the crocodile goes after the sound, and meets the chine, which it swallows; then the hunters pull the line. When the crocodile is drawn ashore, first of all the hunter smears its eyes over with mud; when this is done the quarry is very easily mastered, which, without that, is no light matter.
71. River horses are sacred in the province of Papremis, but not elsewhere in Egypt. For their outward form, they are four-footed, with cloven hoofs like oxen; their noses are blunt; they are maned like horses, with tusks showing, and have a horse’s tail and a horse’s neigh; their bigness is that of the biggest oxen. Their hide is so thick that when it is dried spearshafts are made of it.
72. Otters also are found in the river, which the Egyptians deem sacred; and they hold sacred that fish too which is called the scale-fish, and the eel. These, and the fox-goose among birds, are said to be sacred to the god of the Nile.
73. Another bird also is sacred; it is called the phoenix. I myself have never seen it, but only pictures of it; for the bird comes but seldom into Egypt, once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden but mostly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and bigness. The Egyptians tell a tale of this bird’s devices which I do not believe. He comes, they say, from Arabia bringing his father to the Sun’s temple enclosed in myrrh, and there buries him. His manner of bringing is this: first he moulds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, and when he has proved its weight by lifting it he then hollows out the egg and puts his father in it, covering over with more myrrh the hollow in which the body lies; so the egg being with his father in it of the same weight as before, the phoenix, after enclosing him, carries him to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. Such is the tale of what is done by this bird.
74. Near Thebes there are sacred snakes, harmless to men, small in size and bearing two horns on the top of their heads. These, when they die, are buried in the temple of Zeus, to whom they are said to be sacred.
75. Not far from the town of Buto, there is a place in Arabia to which I went to learn about the winged serpents. When I came thither, I saw innumerable bones and backbones of serpents; many heaps of backbones there were, great and small and smaller still. This place, where lay the backbones scattered, is where a narrow mountain pass opens into a great plain, which is joined to the plain of Egypt. Winged serpents are said to fly at the beginning of spring, from Arabia, making for Egypt; but the ibis birds encounter the invaders in this pass and kill them. The Arabians say that the ibis is greatly honoured by the Egyptians for this service, and the Egyptians give the same reason for honouring these birds.
76. Now this is the appearance of the ibis. It is all deep black, with legs like a crane’s, and a beak strongly hooked; its size is that of a landrail. Such is the outward form of the ibis which fights with the serpents. Those that most consort with men (for the ibis is of two kinds) have all the head and neck bare of feathers; their plumage is white, save the head and neck and the tips of wings and tail (these being deep black); the legs and beak of the bird are like those of the other ibis. The serpents are like water-snakes. Their wings are not feathered but most like the wings of a bat.
I have now said enough concerning creatures that are sacred.
77. Among the Egyptians themselves, those who dwell in the cultivated country are the most careful of all men to preserve the memory of the past, and none whom I have questioned have so many chronicles. I will now speak of the manner of life which they use. For three following days in every month they purge themselves, pursuing after health by means of emetics and drenches; for they think it is from the food which they eat that all sicknesses come to men. Even without this, the Egyptians are the healthiest of all men, next to the Libyans; the reason of which to my thinking is that the climate in all seasons is the same; for change is the great cause of men’s falling sick, more especially changes of seasons. They eat bread, making loaves which they call “cyllestis” of coarse grain. For wine, they use a drink made of barley; for they have no vines in their country. They eat fish uncooked, either dried in the sun or preserved with brine. Quails and ducks and small birds are salted and eaten raw; all other kinds of birds, as well as fish (except those that the Egyptians hold sacred) are eaten roast and boiled.
78. At rich men’s banquets, after dinner a man carries round a wooden image of a corpse in a coffin, painted and carved in exact imitation, a cubit or two cubits long. This he shows to each of the company, saying “Drink and make merry, but look on this; for such shalt thou be when thou art dead.” Such is the custom at their drinking-bouts.
79. They keep the ordinances of their fathers, and add none others to them. Among other notable customs of theirs is this, that they have one song, the Linus-song, which is sung in Phoenice and Cyprus and elsewhere; each nation has a name of its own for this, but it is the same song that the Greeks sing, and call Linus; wherefore it is to me one of the many strange things in Egypt, whence the Egyptians got the name. Plainly they have ever sung this song; the name for Linus in Egyptian is Maneros. The Egyptians told me that Maneros was the only son of their first king, who died untimely, and this dirge was sung by the Egyptians in his honour; and this, they said, was their earliest and their only chant.
80. There is a custom too which no Greeks save the Lacedaemonians have in common with the Egyptians:—younger men, when they meet their elders, turn aside and give place to them in the way, and rise from their seats when an older man approaches. But they have another custom which is nowhere known in Greece: passers-by do not address each other, but salute by lowering the hand to the knee.
81. They wear linen tunics with fringes hanging about the legs, called “calasiris,” and loose white woollen mantles over these. But nothing of wool is brought into temples, or buried with them; that is forbidden. In this they follow the same rule as the ritual called Orphic and Bacchic, but which is in truth Egyptian and Pythagorean; for neither may those initiated into these rites be buried in woollen wrappings. There is a sacred legend about this.
82. I pass to other inventions of the Egyptians. They assign each month and each day to some god; they can tell what fortune and what end and what disposition a man shall have according to the day of his birth. This has given material to Greeks who deal in poetry. They have made themselves more omens than all other nations together; when an ominous thing happens they take note of the outcome and write it down; and if something of a like kind happen again they think it will have a like result.
83. As to the art of divination among them, it belongs to some of the gods, but to no one among men; there are in their country oracles of Heracles, Apollo, Athene, Artemis, Ares, and Zeus, and (which is the most honoured of all) of Leto in the town of Buto. Nevertheless they have diverse ways of divination, not one only.
84. The practice of medicine is so divided among them, that each physician is a healer of one disease and no more. All the country is full of physicians, some of the eye, some of the teeth, some of what pertains to the belly, and some of the hidden diseases.
85. They mourn and bury the dead as I will show. Whenever a man of note is lost to his house by death, all the womenkind of the house daub their faces or heads with mud; then, with all the women of their kin, they leave the corpse in the house, and roam about the city lamenting, with their garments girt round them and their breasts showing; and the men too lament in their place, with garments girt likewise. When this is done, they take the dead body to be embalmed.
86. There are men whose whole business this is and who have this special craft. These, when a dead body is brought to them, show the bringers wooden models of corpses, painted in exact imitation; the most perfect manner of embalming belongs, they say, to One whose name it were profane for me to speak in treating of such matters; the second way, which they show, is less perfect than the first, and cheaper, and the third is the least costly of all. Having shown these, they ask the bringers of the body in which fashion they desire to have it prepared. The bearers, having agreed in a price, go their ways, and the workmen, left behind in their place, embalm the body. If they do this in the most perfect way, they first draw out part of the brain through the nostrils with an iron hook, and inject certain drugs into the rest. Then, making a cut near the flank with a sharp knife of Ethiopian stone, they take out all the intestines, and clean the belly, rinsing it with palm wine and bruised spices; and presently, filling the belly with pure ground myrrh and casia and any other spices, save only frankincense, they sew up the anus. Having done this, they conceal the body for seventy days, embalmed in saltpetre; no longer time is allowed for the embalming; and when the seventy days are past they wash the body and wrap the whole of it in bandages of fine linen cloth, anointed with gum, which the Egyptians mostly use instead of glue; which done, they give back the dead man to his friends. These make a hollow wooden figure like a man, in which they enclose the corpse, shut it up, and preserve it safe in a coffin-chamber, placed erect against a wall.
87. This is how they prepare the dead who have wished for the most costly fashion; those whose wish was for the middle and less costly way are prepared in another fashion. The embalmers charge their syringes with cedar oil and therewith fill the belly of the dead man, making no cut, nor removing the intestines, but injecting the drench through the anus and checking it from returning; then they embalm the body for the appointed days; on the last day they let the oil which they poured in pass out again. It has so great power that it brings away the inner parts and intestines all dissolved; the flesh is eaten away by the saltpetre, and in the end nothing is left of the body but skin and bone. Then the embalmers give back the dead body with no more ado.
88. When they use the third manner of embalming, which is the preparation of the poorer dead, they cleanse the belly with a purge, embalm the body for the seventy days and then give it back to be taken away.
89. Wives of notable men, and women of great beauty and reputation, are not at once given over to the embalmers, but only after they have been dead for three or four days; this is done, that the embalmers may not have carnal intercourse with them. For it is said that one was found having intercourse with a woman newly dead, and was denounced by his fellow-workman.
90. When anyone, be he Egyptian or stranger, is known to have been carried off by a crocodile or drowned by the river itself, such an one must by all means be embalmed and tended as fairly as may be and buried in a sacred coffin by the townsmen of the place where he is cast up; nor may any of his kinsfolk or his friends touch him, but his body is deemed something more than human, and is handled and buried by the priests of the Nile themselves.
91. The Egyptians shun the use of Greek customs, and (to speak generally) the customs of any other men whatever. Yet, though the rest are careful of this, there is a great city called Chemmis, in the Theban province, near the New City; in this city is a square temple of Perseus son of Danae, in a grove of palm trees. The colonnade before this temple is of stone, very great; and there stand at the entrance two great stone statues. In this outer court there is a shrine with an image of Perseus standing in it. The people of this Chemmis say that Perseus is often seen up and down this land, and often within the temple, and that the sandal he wears is found, and it is two cubits long; when that is seen, all Egypt prospers. This is what they say; and their doings in honour of Perseus are Greek, in that they celebrate games comprising every form of contest, and offer animals and cloaks and skins as prizes. When I asked why Perseus appeared to. them alone, and why, unlike all other Egyptians, they celebrate games, they told me that Perseus was by lineage of their city; for Danaus and Lynceus, who voyaged to Greece, were of Chemmis; and they traced descent from these down to Perseus. They told too how when he came to Egypt for the reason alleged also by the Greeks—namely, to bring the Gorgon’s head from Libya—he came to Chemmis too and recognised all his kin; and how before he came to Egypt he had heard the name of Chemmis from his mother. It was at his bidding, said they, that they celebrated the games.
92. All these are the customs of Egyptians who dwell above the marsh country. Those who inhabit the marshes have the same customs as the rest, both in other respects, and in that each man has one wife, as in Greece. They have, besides, devised means to make their food less costly. When the river is in flood and overflows the plains, many lilies, which the Egyptians call lotus, grow in the water. They pluck these and dry them in the sun, then they crush the poppy-like centre of the plant and bake loaves of it. The root also of this lotus is eatable, and of a sweetish taste; it is round, and of the bigness of an apple. Other lilies also grow in the river, which are like roses; the fruit of these is found in a calyx springing from the root by a separate stalk, and is most like to a comb made by wasps; this produces many eatable seeds as big as an olive-stone, which are eaten both fresh and dried. They use also the byblus which grows annually: it is plucked from the marshes, the top of it cut off and turned to other ends, and the lower part, about a cubit’s length, eaten or sold. Those who wish to use the byblus at its very best bake it before eating in a redhot oven. Some live on fish alone. They catch the fish, take out the intestines, then dry them in the sun and eat them dried.
93. Fish that go in shoals do not often come to birth in the river; they are reared in the lakes, and this is the way with them: when the desire of spawning comes on them, they swim out to sea in shoals, the males leading, and throwing out their seed, while the females come after and swallow it and so conceive. When the females have become pregnant in the sea, then all the fish swim back to their homes; but now it is the females and not the males who lead the way, going before in a shoal, and (like the males) throwing off ever and anon a few of their eggs (which are like millet-seeds), which the males devour as they follow. These millet-seeds, or eggs, are fish. It is from the surviving eggs, which are not devoured, that the fish which grow come to the birth. Those fish that are caught while swimming seawards show bruises on the left side of their heads; those that are caught returning, on the right side. This happens to them because as they swim seawards they keep close to the left bank, and hold to the same bank also in their return, grazing it and touching it as much as they may, I suppose lest the current should make them miss their course. When the Nile begins to rise, hollow and marshy places near the river are the first to begin to fill, the water trickling through from the river, and as soon as they are flooded they are suddenly full of little fishes. Whence it is like that these come into being I believe that I can guess. When the Nile falls, the fish have spawned into the mud before they leave it with the last of the water; and as the time comes round, and in the next year the flood comes again, this spawn at once gives birth to these fishes.
94. So much then for the fishes. The Egyptians who live about the marshes use an oil drawn from the castor-berry, which they call kiki. They sow this plant on the banks of the rivers and lakes; it grows wild in Hellas; in Egypt it produces abundant but ill-smelling fruit, which is gathered, and either bruised and pressed, or boiled after roasting, and the liquid that comes from it collected. This is thick and as useful as oil for lamps, and gives off a strong smell.
95. Gnats are abundant; this is how the Egyptians protect themselves against them: those who dwell higher up than the marshy country are well served by the towers whither they ascend to sleep, for the winds prevent the gnats from flying aloft; those living about the marshes have a different device, instead of the towers. Every man of them has a net, with which he catches fish by day, and for the night he sets it round the bed where he rests, then creeps under it and so sleeps. If he sleep wrapped in a garment or cloth, the gnats bite through it; but through the net they do not even try at all to bite.
96. The boats in which they carry cargo are made of the acacia, which is in form most like to the lotus of Cyrene, and its sap is gum. Of this tree they cut logs of two cubits length and lay them like courses of bricks, and build the boat by making these two-cubit logs fast to long and close-set stakes; and having so built they set crossbeams athwart and on the logs. They use no ribs. They caulk the seams within with byblus. There is one rudder, passing through a hole in the boat’s keel. The mast is of acacia-wood and the sails of byblus. These boats cannot move upstream unless a brisk breeze continue; they are towed from the bank; but downstream they are thus managed: they have a raft made of tamarisk wood, fastened together with matting of reeds, and a pierced stone of about two talents’ weight; the raft is let go to float down ahead of the boat, made fast to it by a rope, and the stone is made fast also by a rope to the after part of the boat. So, driven by the current, the raft floats swiftly and tows the “baris” (which is the name of these boats,) and the stone dragging behind on the river bottom keeps the boat’s course straight. There are many of these boats; some are of many thousand talents’ burden.
97. When the Nile overflows the land, the towns alone are seen high and dry above the water, very like to the islands in the Aegean sea. These alone stand out, the rest of Egypt being a sheet of water. So when this happens folk are ferried not, as is their wont, in the course of the stream, but clean over the plain. From Naucratis indeed to Memphis the boat going upwards passes close by the pyramids themselves; the usual course is not this, but by the Delta’s point and the town Cercasorus: but your voyage from the sea and Canobus to Naucratis will take you over the plain near the town of Anthylla and that which is called Archandrus’ town.
98. Anthylla is a town of some name, and is specially assigned to the consort of the reigning king of Egypt, for the provision of her shoes. This has been done since Egypt has been under Persian dominion. The other town, I think, is named after Archandrus son of Phthius the Achaean, and son-in-law of Danaus; for it is called Archandrus’ town. It may be that there was another Archandrus; but the name is not Egyptian.
99. Thus far all I have said is the outcome of my own sight and judgment and inquiry. Henceforth I will record Egyptian chronicles, according to that which I have heard, adding thereto somewhat of what I myself have seen. The priests told me that Min was the first king of Egypt, and that first he separated Memphis from the Nile by a dam. All the river had flowed close under the sandy mountains on the Libyan side, but Min made the southern bend of it which begins about an hundred furlongs above Memphis, by damming the stream; thereby he dried up the ancient course, and carried the river by a channel so that it flowed midway between the hills. And to this day the Persians keep careful guard over this bend of the river, strengthening its dam every year, that it may keep the current in; for were the Nile to burst his dykes and overflow here, all Memphis were in danger of drowning. Then, when this first king Min had made what he thus cut off to be dry land, he first founded in it that city which is now called Memphis—for even Memphis lies in the narrow part of Egypt—and outside of it he dug a lake to its north and west, from the river (the Nile itself being the eastern boundary of the place); and secondly, he built in it the great and most noteworthy temple of Hephaestus.
100. After him came three hundred and thirty kings, whose names the priests recited from a papyrus roll. In all these many generations there were eighteen Ethiopian kings, and one queen, native to the country; the rest were all Egyptian men. The name of the queen was the same as that of the Babylonian princess, Nitocris. She, to avenge her brother (he was king of Egypt and was slain by his subjects, who then gave Nitocris the sovereignty) put many of the Egyptians to death by guile. She built a spacious underground chamber; then, with the pretence of handselling it, but with far other intent in her mind, she gave a great feast, inviting to it those Egyptians whom she knew to have been most concerned in her brother’s murder; and while they feasted she let the river in upon them by a great and secret channel. This was all that the priests told of her, save that also when she had done this she cast herself into a chamber full of hot ashes, thereby to escape vengeance.
101. But of the other kings they related no achievement or deed of great note, save of Moeris, who was the last of them. This Moeris was remembered as having built the northern forecourt of the temple of Hephaestus, and dug a lake, of as many furlongs in circuit as I shall later show; and built there pyramids also, the size of which I will mention when I speak of the lake. All this was Moeris’ work, they said; of none of the rest had they anything to record.
102. Passing over these, therefore, I will now speak of the king who came after them, Sesostris. This king, said the priests, set out with a fleet of long ships from the Arabian Gulf and subdued all the dwellers by the Red Sea, till as he sailed on he came to a sea which was too shallow for his vessels. After returning thence back to Egypt, he gathered a great army (according to the story of the priests) and marched over the mainland, subduing every nation to which he came. When those that he met were valiant men and strove hard for freedom, he set up pillars in their land whereon the inscription showed his own name and his country’s, and how he had overcome them with his own power; but when the cities had made no resistance and been easily taken, then he put an inscription on the pillars even as he had done where the nations were brave; but he drew also on them the privy parts of a woman, wishing to show clearly that the people were cowardly.
103. Thus doing he marched over the country till he had passed over from Asia to Europe and subdued the Scythians and Thracians. Thus far and no farther, I think, the Egyptian army went; for the pillars can be seen standing in their country, but in none beyond it. Thence he turned about and went back homewards; and when he came to the Phasis river, it may be (for I cannot speak with exact knowledge) that King Sesostris divided off some part of his army and left it there to dwell in the country, or it may be that some of his soldiers grew weary of his wanderings, and stayed by the Phasis.
104. For it is plain to see that the Colchians are Egyptians; and this that I say I myself noted before I heard it from others. When I began to think on this matter, I inquired of both peoples; and the Colchians remembered the Egyptians better than the Egyptians remembered the Colchians; the Egyptians said that they held the Colchians to be part of Sesostris’ army. I myself guessed it to be so, partly because they are dark-skinned and woolly-haired; though that indeed goes for nothing, seeing that other peoples, too, are such; but my better proof was that the Colchians and Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only nations that have from the first practised circumcision. The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine acknowledge of themselves that they learnt the custom from the Egyptians, and the Syrians of the valleys of the Thermodon and the Parthenius, as well as their neighbours the Macrones, say that they learnt it lately from the Colchians. These are the only nations that circumcise, and it is seen that they do even as the Egyptians. But as to the Egyptians and Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which nation learnt it from the other; for it is manifestly a very ancient custom. That the others learnt it from intercourse with Egypt I hold to be clearly proved by this—that Phoenicians who hold intercourse with Hellas cease to imitate the Egyptians in this matter and do not circumcise their children.
105. Nay, and let me speak of another matter in which the Colchians are like to the Egyptians: they and the Egyptians alone work linen, and have the same way, a way peculiar to themselves, of working it; and they are alike in all their manner of life, and in their speech. Linen has two names: the Colchian kind is called by the Greeks Sardonian; that which comes from Egypt is called Egyptian.
106. As to the pillars which Sesostris, king of Egypt, set up in the countries, most of them are no longer to be seen. But I myself saw them in the Palestine part of Syria, with the writing aforesaid and the women’s privy parts upon them. Also there are in Ionia two figures of this man carven in rock, one on the road from Ephesus to Phocaea, and the other on that from Sardis to Smyrna. In both places there is a man of a height of four cubits and a half cut in relief, with a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and the rest of his equipment answering thereto; for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian; and right across the breast from one shoulder to the other there is carven a writing in the Egyptian sacred character, saying: “I myself won this land with the might of my shoulders.” There is nothing here to show who he is and whence he comes, but it is shown elsewhere. Some of those who have seen these figures guess them to be Memnon, but they are far indeed from the truth.
107. Now when this Egyptian Sesostris (so said the priests), being on his way homewards and bringing many men of the nations whose countries he had subdued, had come in his return to Daphnae of Pelusium, his brother, to whom he had given Egypt in charge, invited him and his sons to a banquet and then piled wood round the house and set it on fire. When Sesostris was aware of this, he took counsel at once with his wife, whom (it was said) he was bringing with him; and she counselled him to lay two of his six sons on the fire and to make a bridge over the burning whereby they might pass over the bodies of the two and escape. This Sesostris did; two of his sons were thus burnt, but the rest were saved alive with their father.
108. Having returned to Egypt, and taken vengeance on his brother, Sesostris found work, as I shall show, for the multitude which he brought with him from the countries which he had subdued. It was these who dragged the great and long blocks of stone which were brought in this king’s reign to the temple of Hephaestus; and it was they who were compelled to dig all the canals which are now in Egypt, and thus, albeit with no such intent, made what was before a land of horses and carts to be now without either. For from this time Egypt, albeit a level land, could use no horses or carts, by reason of the canals being so many and going every way. The reason why the king thus intersected the country was this: those Egyptians whose towns were not on the Nile but inland from it lacked water whenever the flood left their land, and drank only brackish water from wells.
109. For this cause Egypt was intersected. This king moreover (so they said) divided the country among all the Egyptians by giving each an equal square parcel of land, and made this his source of revenue, appointing the payment of a yearly tax. And any man who was robbed by the river of a part of his land would come to Sesostris and declare what had befallen him; then the king would send men to look into it and measure the space by which the land was diminished, so that thereafter it should pay in proportion to the tax originally imposed. From this, to my thinking, the Greeks learnt the art of measuring land; the sunclock and the sundial, and the twelve divisions of the day, came to Hellas not from Egypt but from Babylonia.
110. Sesostris was the only Egyptian king who also ruled Ethiopia. To commemorate his name, he set before the temple of Hephaestus two stone statues of himself and his wife, each thirty cubits high, and statues of his four sons, each of twenty cubits. Long afterwards Darius the Persian would have set up his statue before these; but the priest of Hephaestus forbade him, saying that he had achieved nothing equal to the deeds of Sesostris the Egyptian; for Sesostris (he said) had subdued the Scythians, besides as many other nations as Darius had conquered, and Darius had not been able to overcome the Scythians; therefore it was not just that Darius should set his statue before the statues of Sesostris, whose achievements he had not equalled. Darius, it is said, let the priest have his way.
111. When Sesostris died, he was succeeded in the kingship (so said the priests) by his son Pheros. This king made no wars; and it happened that he became blind, for the following reason: the Nile came down in a flood such as never was before, rising to a height of eighteen cubits, and the water which overflowed the fields was roughened by a strong wind; then, it is said, the king was so infatuated that he took a spear and hurled it into the midst of the river eddies. Straightway after this he suffered from a disease of the eyes, and became blind. When he had been blind for ten years, an oracle from the city of Buto declared to him that the time of his punishment was drawing to an end, and that he should regain his sight by washing his eyes with the issue of a woman who had never had intercourse with any man but her own husband. Pheros made trial with his own wife first, and as he still remained blind, with all women, one after another. When he at last recovered sight, he took all the women of whom he had made trial, save only her who had made him to see again, and gathered them into one town, that which is now called “Red Clay”; where having collected them together he burnt them and the town; but the woman by whose means he had recovered sight he took to wife. Among the many offerings which he dedicated in all the noteworthy temples for his deliverance from blindness, most worthy of mention are the two marvellous stone obelisks which he set up in the temple of the Sun. Each of these is made of a single block, and is an hundred cubits high and eight cubits thick.
112. Pheros was succeeded (they said) by a man of Memphis, whose name in the Greek language was Proteus. This Proteus has a fair and well-adorned temple precinct at Memphis, lying to the south of the temple of Hephaestus. Round the precinct dwell Phoenicians of Tyre, and the whole place is called the Camp of the Tyrians. There is in the precinct of Proteus a temple entitled the temple of the Stranger Aphrodite; this I guess to be a temple of Helen, daughter of Tyndareus, partly because I have heard the story of Helen’s abiding with Proteus, and partly because it bears the name of the Stranger Aphrodite; for no other of Aphrodite’s temples is called by that name.
113. When I enquired of the priests, they told me that this was the story of Helen:—After carrying off Helen from Sparta, Alexandrus sailed away for his own country; violent winds caught him in the Aegean, and drove him into the Egyptian sea; whence (the wind not abating) he came to Egypt, to the mouth of the Nile called the Canopic mouth, and to the Sal ting-places. Now there was on the coast (and still is) a temple of Heracles; where if a servant of any man take refuge and be branded with certain sacred marks in token that he delivers himself to the god, such an one may not be touched. This law continues to-day the same as it has ever been from the first. Hearing of the temple law, certain of Alexandrus’ servants separated themselves from him, threw themselves on the mercy of the god, and brought an accusation against Alexandrus with intent to harm him, telling all the story of Helen and the wrong done to Menelaus. They laid this accusation before the priests and the warden of the Nile mouth, whose name was Thonis.
114. When Thonis heard it, he sent this message with all speed to Proteus at Memphis: “There has come hither a Teucrian stranger who has done great wrong in Hellas. He has deceived his host and robbed him of his wife, and brought her hither driven to your country by the wind, with very great store of wealth besides. Shall we suffer him to sail away unharmed, or take away from him that which he has brought?” Proteus sent back this message: “Whoever be this man who has done a wrong to his own host, seize him and bring him to me, that I may know what he will say.”
115. Hearing this, Thonis seized Alexandrus and held his ships there, and presently brought him with Helen and all the wealth, and the suppliants therewith, to Memphis. All having come thither, Proteus asked Alexandrus who he was and whence he sailed; Alexandrus told him of his lineage and the name of his country, and of his voyage, whence he sailed. Then Proteus asked him whence he had taken Helen; Alexandrus made no straightforward or truthful answer; but the men who had taken refuge with the temple disproved his tale, and related the whole story of the wrongful act. When all was said, Proteus thus gave sentence:—“Were I not careful to slay no stranger who has ever been caught by the wind and driven to my coasts, I would have avenged that Greek upon you; seeing that, O basest of men! you have done foul wrong to him who hospitably entreated you, and have entered in to the wife of your own host. Nay, and this did not suffice you; you made her to fly with you and stole her away. Nor was even this enough, but you have come hither with the plunder of your host’s house. Now, therefore, since I am careful to slay no stranger, I will not suffer you to take away this woman and these possessions; I will keep them for the Greek stranger, till such time as he shall himself come to take them away; but as for you and the companions of your voyage, I warn you to depart from my country elsewhither within three days, else I will deal with you as with enemies.”
116. This, by what the priests told me, was the manner of Helen’s coming to Proteus. And, to my thinking, Homer too knew this story; but seeing that it suited not so well with epic poetry as the tale of which he made use, he rejected it of set purpose, showing withal that he knew it. This is plain, from the passage in the Iliad (and nowhere else does he return to the story) where he relates the wanderings of Alexandrus, and shows how he with Helen was carried out of his course, among other places, to Sidon in Phoenice. This is in the story of the Feats of Diomedes, where the verses run as follows:
He makes mention of it in the Odyssey also:
and again Menelaus says to Telemachus:
In these verses the poet shows that he knew of Alexandrus’ wanderings to Egypt; for Syria borders on Egypt, and the Phoenicians, to whom Sidon belongs, dwell in Syria.
117. These verses and this passage prove most clearly that the Cyprian poems are by the hand not of Homer but of another. For the Cyprian poems relate that Alexandrus reached Ilion with Helen in three days from Sparta, having a fair wind and a smooth sea; but according to the Iliad he wandered from his course in bringing her.
118. Enough, then, of Homer and the Cyprian poems. But when I asked the priests whether the Greek account of the Trojan business were vain or true, they gave me the following answer, saying that they had inquired and knew what Menelaus himself had said:—After the rape of Helen, a great host of Greeks came to the Teucrian land on Menelaus’ behalf. Having there disembarked and encamped, they sent to Ilion messengers, of whom Menelaus himself was one. These, on coming within the city walls, demanded restitution of Helen and the possessions which Alexandrus had stolen from Menelaus and carried off, and reparation besides for the wrong done; but the Teucrians then and ever afterwards declared, with oaths and without, that neither Helen nor the goods claimed were with them, she and they being in Egypt; nor could they (so they said) justly make reparation for what was in the hands of the Egyptian king Proteus. But the Greeks thought that the Trojans mocked them, and therewith besieged the city, till they took it; and it was not till they took the fortress and found no Helen there, and heard the same declaration as before, that they gave credence to the Trojans’ first word and so sent Menelaus himself to Proteus.
119. Menelaus then came to Egypt and went up the river to Memphis; there, telling the whole truth of what had happened, he was very hospitably entertained and received back Helen unharmed and all his possessions withal. Yet, albeit so well entreated, Menelaus did the Egyptians a wrong. For when he would have sailed away he was stayed by stress of weather; and this hindrance continuing for long, he devised and did a forbidden deed, taking two children of the land and sacrificing them. When it was known that he had so done, the people hated and pursued him, and he fled away with his ships to Libya; and whither he thence betook himself the Egyptians could not say. The priests told me that they had learnt some of this tale by inquiry, but that they spoke with exact knowledge of what had happened in their own country.
120. So much was told me by the Egyptian priests. For myself, I believe their story about Helen: for I reason thus—that had Helen been in Ilion, then with or without the will of Alexandrus she would have been given back to the Greeks. For surely neither was Priam so mad, nor those nearest to him, as to consent to risk their own persons and their children and their city, that Alexandrus might have Helen to wife. Even be it granted that they were so minded in the first days, yet when not only many of the Trojans were slain in fighting against the Greeks, but Priam himself lost by death two or three or even more of his sons in every battle (if the poets are to be trusted), in this turn of affairs, had Helen been Priam’s own wife, I cannot but think (for myself) that he would have restored her to the Greeks, if by so doing he could escape from the present evil plight. Nay, nor was Alexandrus next heir to the kingship, whereby he might have been the real ruler, Priam being old; it was Hector, an older and a more valiant man than Alexandrus, who was like to receive the royal power at Priam’s death; and it was none of Hector’s business to consent to his brother’s wrongdoing, least of all when that brother was the cause of great calamity to Hector himself and the whole of Troy beside. But matters fell out as they did because the Trojans had not Helen there to give back, yet though they spoke the truth the Greeks would not believe them; for, as I am convinced and declare, the powers above ordained that the utter destruction of Troy should prove in the sight of all men that the gods do greatly punish great wrongdoing. This is my own belief and thus I declare it.
121. The next to reign after Proteus (they said) was Rhampsinitus. The memorial of his name left by him was the western forecourt of the temple of Hephaestus; before this he set two statues of twenty-five cubits’ height; the northernmost of these is called by the Egyptians Summer, and the southernmost Winter; that one which they call Summer they worship and entreat well, but do contrariwise to the statue called Winter. This king (they told me) had great wealth of silver, so great that none of the later-born kings could surpass or nearly match it. That he might store his treasure safely, he made to be built a stone chamber, one of its walls abutting on the outer side of his palace. But the builder of it craftily contrived that one stone should be so placed as to be easily removed by two men or even by one. So when the chamber was finished, the king stored his treasure in it. But as time went on, the builder, being now near his end, called to him his two sons and told them how he had provided an ample livelihood for them by the art with which he had built the king’s treasure-house; he made them clearly to understand concerning the removal of the stone, and gave the measurements which would find it; saying that if they kept these in mind they would be stewards of the king’s riches. So when he was dead, his sons set to work with no long delay: coming to the palace by night, they easily found and handled the stone in the building, and took away much of the treasure. When the king opened the building, he was amazed to see the vessels lacking their full tale of treasure; yet he knew not whom to accuse, seeing that the seals were unbroken and the chamber fast shut. But when at the second and third opening of the chamber he saw the treasure grown ever less (for the thieves ceased not from plundering), he bid traps to be made and set about the vessels in which his riches lay. The thieves came as they had done before, and one of them crept in; when he came near the vessel, at once he was caught and held in the trap. Seeing his evil plight, he straightway called to his brother, and, showing him how matters stood, “Creep in quickly,” said he, “and cut off my head, lest I be seen and recognised and so bring you too to ruin.” The brother consented and did this, thinking the counsel good. Then he set the stone in place again, and went away home, carrying his brother’s head. When it was morning the king came to the chamber, and was amazed to see the thief’s headless body in the trap, yet the chamber unbroken, with no way of passing in or out; and he knew not what to do. But presently he hung the thief’s dead body on the outer wall, and set guards over it, charging them to seize and bring before him whomsoever they should see weeping or making lamentation.
But the thief’s mother, when the body had been so hung, was greatly moved: she talked with her surviving son, and bade him contrive by whatever means to loose and bring her his brother’s body, threatening that if he would not obey her she would go to the king and lay an information that he had the treasure. So when she bitterly reproached him and for all he said he could not overpersuade her, the brother devised a plot: he got his asses and loaded them with skins full of wine and then drove them before him till he came near those who guarded the hanging body; then he pulled at the feet of two or three of the skins and loosed their fastenings; and the wine so running out, he cried aloud and beat his head like one that knew not which of his asses he should deal with first. The guards, seeing the wine running freely, all took vessels and ran into the highway, where they caught the spilt wine, and thought themselves lucky; the man pretended to be angry and reviled each and all of them; but the guards speaking peaceably to him, he presently made as if he were comforted and appeased, till at last he drove his asses aside from the highway and put his gear in order. So the guards and he fell into talk, and one of them jesting with him, so that there was laughter, he gave them one of the skins: whereupon without more ado they sat down and began to drink, making him one of their company and bidding him stay and drink with them; and he consented and stayed. They drank to him merrily, and he gave them yet another of the skins, till the guards grew very drunk with the abundance of liquor, and at last being overmastered by sleep lay down in the place where they had been drinking. When the night was far spent, the thief cut down his brother’s body and then (first shaving all the guard’s right cheeks by way of insult) laid it on his asses and drove them home, having so fulfilled his mother’s commands for her.
When the king was told of the stealing away of the dead thief’s body he was very angry, and resolved by all means to find who it was that had plotted the deed. So he bade his daughter (such is the story, but I myself do not believe it) to sit in a certain room and receive alike all who came; before she had intercourse with any, she should compel him to tell her what was the cleverest trick and the greatest crime of his life; then if any told her the story of the thief she must seize him and not suffer him to pass out. The girl did as her father bade her. The thief, learning the purpose of the king’s act, was minded to get the better of him by ready cunning. He therefore cut off the arm of a man newly dead at the shoulder, and went to the king’s daughter, carrying it under his cloak, and when asked the same question as the rest, he told her that his greatest crime was the cutting off of his brother’s head when the brother was caught in a trap in the king’s treasury, and his cleverest trick the release of his brother’s hanging body by making the guards drunk. Hearing this, the princess would have laid hands on him, but the thief in the darkness giving her the dead man’s arm, she seized that, thinking that she was grasping the arm of the thief, who, having given it to her, made his escape by way of the door.
When this also came to the king’s ears, he was astonished at the man’s ingenuity and daring, and in the end, he sent a proclamation to every town, promising the thief impunity and a great reward if he would come into the king’s presence. The thief trusted the king and came before him; Rhampsinitus admired him greatly and gave him his daughter to wife for his surpassing cleverness, for as the Egyptians (said he) excelled all others in craft, so did he excel the Egyptians.
122. After this (said the priests) this king went down alive to the place which the Greeks call Hades; there he played dice with Demeter, and after both winning and losing he returned back with a gift from her of a golden napkin. From this descent of Rhampsinitus the Egyptians were said by the priests to have kept a festival after his return, which to my own knowledge they celebrate to this day, but whether it be for that cause I cannot say. On the day of this festival the priests weave a cloth and bind it for a headgear on the eyes of one among themselves, whom they then lead, wearing the cloth, into a road that goes to the temple of Demeter; they themselves return back, but this priest with his eyes bandaged is guided (say they) by two wolves to Demeter’s temple, a distance of twenty furlongs from the city, and led back again from the temple by the wolves to the same place.
123. These Egyptian stories are for the use of whosoever believes such tales: for myself, it is my rule throughout this history that I record whatever is told me as I have heard it.
It is believed in Egypt that the rulers of the lower world are Demeter and Dionysus. Moreover, the Egyptians were the first to teach that the human soul is immortal, and at the death of the body enters into some other living thing then coming to birth; and after passing through all creatures of land, sea, and air (which cycle it completes in three thousand years) it enters once more into a human body at birth. Some of the Greeks, early and late, have used this doctrine as if it were their own; I know their names, but do not here record them.
124. Till the time of Rhampsinitus Egypt (so the priests told me) was in all ways well governed and greatly prospered, but Cheops, who was the next king, brought the people to utter misery. For first he shut up all the temples, so that none could sacrifice there; and next, he compelled all the Egyptians to work for him, appointing to some to drag stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile: and the stones being carried across the river in boats, others were charged to receive and drag them to the mountains called Libyan. They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months. For ten years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task but a little lighter than the building of the pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carven with figures. The ten years aforesaid went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers on the hill whereon the pyramids stand; these the king meant to be burial-places for himself, and encompassed them with water, bringing in a channel from the Nile. The pyramid itself was twenty years in the making. Its base is square, each side eight hundred feet long, and its height is the same; the whole is of stone polished and most exactly fitted; there is no block of less than thirty feet in length.
125. This pyramid was made like a stairway with tiers, or steps. When this, its first form, was completed, the workmen used levers made of short wooden logs to raise the rest of the stones; they heaved up the blocks from the ground on to the first tier of steps; when the stone had been so raised it was set on another lever that stood on the first tier, and a lever again drew it up from this tier to the next. It may be that there was a new lever on each tier of the steps, or perhaps there was but one lever, and that easily lifted, which they carried up to each tier in turn, when they had taken out the stone; I leave this uncertain, both ways being told me. But this is certain, that the upper part of the pyramid was the first finished off, then the next below it, and last of all the base and the lowest part. There are writings on the pyramid in Egyptian characters showing how much was spent on purges and onions and garlic for the workmen; and so far as I well remember, the interpreter when he read me the writing said that sixteen hundred talents of silver had been paid. Now if that is so, how much must needs have been expended on the iron with which they worked, and the workmen’s food and clothing? seeing that the time aforesaid was spent in building, and the hewing and carrying of the stone and the digging out of the underground parts was, as I suppose, a business of long duration.
126. And so evil a man was Cheops that for lack of money he made his own daughter to sit in a chamber and exact payment (how much, I know not; for they did not tell me this). She, they say, doing her father’s bidding, was minded to leave some memorial of her own, and demanded of everyone who sought intercourse with her that he should give one stone to set in her work; and of these stones was built the pyramid that stands midmost of the three, over against the great pyramid; each side of it measures one hundred and fifty feet.
127. Cheops reigned (so the Egyptians said) for fifty years; at his death he was succeeded by his brother Chephren, who bore himself in all respects like Cheops. Chephren also built a pyramid, of a less size than his. brother’s. I have myself measured it. It has no underground chambers, nor is it entered like the other by a canal from the Nile, but the river comes in through a built passage and encircles an island, in which, they say, Cheops himself lies. This pyramid was built of the same bigness as the other, save that it falls forty feet short of it in height; it stands near to the great pyramid; the lowest layer of it is of variegated Ethiopian stone. Both of them stand on the same ridge, which is about an hundred feet high. Chephren, they said, reigned for fifty-six years.
128. Thus they reckon that for a hundred and six years Egypt was in great misery and the temples so long shut were never opened. So much do the people hate the memory of these two kings that they do not greatly wish to name them, and call the pyramids after the shepherd Philitis, who then pastured his flocks in this place.
129. The next king of Egypt, they said, was Cheops’ son Mycerinus. He, being displeased with his father’s doings, opened the temples and suffered the people, now ground down to the depth of misery, to go to their business and their sacrifices; and he was the justest judge among all the kings. It is on this account that he is praised beyond all the rulers of Egypt; for not only were his judgments just, but if any were not contented with the sentence Mycerinus would give such an one a present out of his own estate to satisfy him for his loss. Such was his practice, and so he ruled his people with clemency, yet calamities befel him, of which the first was the death of his daughter, the only child of his household. Greatly grieving over this misfortune, he desired to give her a burial something more excellent than ordinary; he made therefore a hollow cow’s image of gilded wood and placed therein the body of his dead daughter.
130. This cow was not buried in the earth but was to be seen even in my time, in the town of Sais, where it lay in an adorned chamber of the palace; incense of all kinds is offered daily before it, and a lamp burns by it all through every night. There is another chamber near to this image, where stand the statues of Mycerinus’ concubines, as the priests of Sais told me; and indeed there are about twenty colossal wooden figures there, made like naked women, but I have only the priests’ word to show who they are.
131. Some have a story about the cow and the statues, how Mycerinus conceived a passion for his own daughter and did her foul wrong, and she strangled herself for grief: then he buried her, they say, in this image of a cow; the girl’s mother cut off the hands of the attendants who had betrayed the daughter to her father, so that now (it is said) their statues are in the plight to which the living women were brought. But this I believe to be a foolish tale, especially as respects the hands of the figures. As we ourselves saw, it is time which has made the hands to drop away; they were to be seen even in my day lying on the ground before the statues.
132. As for the cow, it is covered with a purple robe, and shows only the head and neck, which are encrusted with a very thick layer of gold. Between its horns it bears the golden figure of the sun’s orb. It does not stand, but kneels; its stature is that of a live cow of great size. This image is carried out of the chamber once in every year, whenever the Egyptians make lamentation for the god whom I name not in speaking of these matters; it is then that the cow is brought out into the light, for Mycerinus’ daughter, they say, entreated him at her death that she might see the sun once a year.
133. After the grievous death of his daughter, it next happened to Mycerinus that an oracle was sent to him from the city of Buto, declaring that he had but six years to live and must die in the seventh. The king deemed this unjust, and sent back to the oracle a message of reproach, blaming the god: why must he die so soon who was pious, whereas his father and his uncle had lived long, who shut up the temples, and regarded not the gods, and destroyed men? But a second utterance from the place of divination declared to him that his good deeds were the very cause of shortening his life; for he had done what was contrary to fate; Egypt should have been afflicted for an hundred and fifty years, whereof the two kings before him had been aware, but not Mycerinus. Hearing this, he knew that his doom was fixed. Therefore he caused many lamps to be made, and would light these at nightfall and drink and make merry; by day or night he never ceased from revelling, roaming to the marsh country and the groves and wherever he heard of the likeliest places of pleasure. Thus he planned, that by turning night into day he might make his six years into twelve and so prove the oracle false.
134. This king too left a pyramid, but far smaller than his father’s; its sides form a square whereof each side is two hundred and eighty feet in length; as far as the half of its height it is of Ethiopian stone. Some Greeks say that it was built by Rhodopis, the courtesan, but they are in error; indeed it is clear to me that when they say this they do not know who Rhodopis was, else they would never have credited her with the building of a pyramid whereon what I may call an uncountable sum of talents must have been expended. And it is a further proof of their error that Rhodopis flourished in the reign of Amasis, not of Mycerinus, and thus very many years after these kings who built the pyramids. She was a Thracian by birth, slave to Iadmon, son of Hephaestopolis, a Samian, and fellow-slave of Aesopus the story-writer. For he also was owned by Iadmon; of which the chiefest proof is that when the Delphians, obeying an oracle, issued many proclamations inviting whosoever would to claim the penalty for the killing of Aesopus, none would undertake it but only another Iadmon, grandson of the first. Thus was Aesopus too shown to be the slave of Iadmon.
135. Rhodopis was brought to Egypt by Xanthes of Samos, and on her coming was for a great sum of money freed for the practice of her calling by Charaxus of Mytilene, son of Scamandronymus and brother of Sappho the poetess. Thus Rhodopis was set free and abode in Egypt, where, her charms becoming well known, she grew wealthy enough for a lady of her profession, but not for the building of such a pyramid. Seeing that to this day anyone who wishes may know what was the tenth part of her possessions, she cannot be credited with great wealth. For Rhodopis desired to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, by having something made which no one else had contrived and dedicated in a temple and presenting this at Delphi to preserve her memory; so she spent the tenth part of her substance on the making of a great number of iron ox-spits, as many as the tithe would pay for, and sent them to Delphi; these lie in a heap to this day, behind the altar set up by the Chians and in front of the shrine itself. It seems that the courtesans of Naucratis ever have the art of pleasing, for the woman of whom this story is told became so famous that all Greeks knew the name of Rhodopis, and in later days one Archidice was the theme of song throughout Greece, albeit less spoken of than the other. Charaxus, after giving Rhodopis her freedom, returned to Mytilene and was bitterly attacked by Sappho in one of her poems.
136. Enough has been said of Rhodopis. After Mycerinus, said the priests, Asuchis became king of Egypt. He built the eastern outer court of Hephaestus’ temple; this is by much the fairest and largest of all the courts, for while all have carven figures and innumerable graces of architecture, this court has far more than any. In this king’s reign as they told me, money in Egypt passed not readily from hand to hand; wherefore a law was made that a man might borrow on the security of his father’s dead body; and the law provided also, that the lender should have a lien on the whole burial-vault of the borrower, and that the penalty for the giver of this security, should he fail to repay the debt, should be that he might neither himself be buried at death nor bury any deceased of his kin either in that tomb of his fathers nor in any other. Moreover, being desirous of excelling all who ruled Egypt before him, this king left a pyramid of brick to commemorate his name, on which is this writing, cut on a stone:—“Deem me not less than the pyramids of stone; for I am as much more excellent than they as Zeus is than the other gods; for they struck a pole down into a marsh and collected what mud clave to the pole; therewith they made bricks, and thus was I built.”
137. These were the acts of Asuchis. After him reigned a blind man called Any sis, of the town of that name. In his reign Egypt was invaded by Sabacos king of Ethiopia and a great army of Ethiopians. The blind man fleeing away into the marshes, the Ethiopians ruled Egypt for fifty years. It is recorded in the history of his reign that he would never put to death any Egyptian wrongdoer, but sentenced all, according to the greatness of their offence, to raise embankments in the town of which each was a native. Thus the towns came to stand yet higher than before; for having been first built on embankments made by the diggers of the canals in the reign of Sesostris, they were yet further raised in the reign of the Ethiopian. Other Egyptian towns, to my thinking, were so dealt with, but the level of Bubastis was raised more than any. In this town there is a temple of Bubastis, and it is a building most worthy of note. Other temples are greater and more costly, but none pleasanter to the eye than this. Bubastis is, in the Greek language, Artemis.
138. I will now show the form of her temple: save for the entrance, it stands on an island; two separate channels approach it from the Nile, and after coming up to the entry of the temple, they run round it on opposite sides; each of them is an hundred feet wide, and overshadowed by trees. The outer court has a height of ten fathoms, and is adorned with notable figures six cubits high. The temple is in the midst of the city, the whole circuit of which commands a view down into it; for the city’s level has been raised, but that of the temple has been left as it was from the first, so that it can be seen into from without. A stone wall, carven with figures, runs round it; within is a grove of very tall trees growing round a great shrine, wherein is the image of the goddess; the temple is a square, each side measuring a furlong. A road, paved with stone, of about three furlongs’ length leads to the entrance, running eastward through the market place, towards the temple of Hermes; this road is about four hundred feet wide, and bordered by trees reaching to heaven. Such is this temple.
139. Now the departure of the Ethiopian (they said) was accomplished on this wise. He fled away from the country, having seen in a dream one who stood over him and counselled him to gather together all the priests in Egypt and cut them in sunder. Having seen this vision, he said that he supposed it to be a manifestation sent to him by the gods, that he might commit sacrilege and so be punished by gods or men; he would not (he said) act so, but otherwise, for the time foretold for his rule over Egypt, after which he was to depart, was now fulfilled: for when he was still in Ethiopia the oracles which are inquired of by the people of that country declared to him that he was fated to reign fifty years over Egypt. Seeing that this time was now completed and that he was troubled by what he saw in his dream, Sabacos departed from Egypt of his own accord.
140. The Ethiopian having left Egypt, the blind man (it is said) was king once more, returning from the marshes, where he had dwelt fifty years on an island which he built of ashes and earth; for the Egyptians, who were severally charged to bring him food without the Ethiopian’s knowledge, were bidden by the king to bring ashes whenever they came, as their gift. This island was never discovered before the time of Amyrtaeus; all the kings before him sought it in vain for more than seven hundred years. The name of it is Elbo, and it is ten furlongs long and of an equal breadth.
141. The next king was the priest of Hephaestus, whose name was Sethos. He despised and took no account of the warrior Egyptians, thinking he would never need them; besides otherwise dishonouring them, he took away the chosen lands which had been given to them, twelve fields to each man, in the reign of former kings. So presently came king Sanacharib against Egypt, with a great host of Arabians and Assyrians; and the warrior Egyptians would not march against him. The priest, in this quandary, went into the temple shrine and there bewailed to the god’s image the peril which threatened him. In his lamentation he fell asleep, and dreamt that he saw the god standing over him and bidding him take courage, for he should suffer no ill by encountering the host of Arabia: “Myself,” said the god, “will send you champions.” So he trusted the vision, and encamped at Pelusium with such Egyptians as would follow him, for here is the road into Egypt; and none of the warriors would go with him, but only hucksters and artificers and traders. Their enemies too came thither, and one night a multitude of fieldmice swarmed over the Assyrian camp and devoured their quivers and their bows and the handles of their shields likewise, insomuch that they fled the next day unarmed and many fell. And at this day a stone statue of the Egyptian king stands in Hephaestus’ temple, with a mouse in his hand, and an inscription to this effect: “Look on me, and fear the gods.”
142. Thus far went the record given me by the Egyptians and their priests; and they showed me that the time from the first king to that priest of Hephaestus, who was the last, covered three hundred and forty-one generations of men, and that in this time such also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests. Now three hundred generations make up ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a century. And over and above the three hundred the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years. Thus the whole sum is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such thing either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt. Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to his wont; twice he rose where he now sets, and twice he set where now he rises; yet Egypt at these times underwent no change, neither in the produce of the river and the land, nor in the matter of sickness and death.
143. Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, where he made for himself a genealogy which connected him by lineage with a god in the sixteenth generation. But the priests did for him what they did for me (who had not traced my own lineage). They brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me there wooden figures which they counted up to the number they had already given, for every high priest sets there in his lifetime a statue of himself; counting and pointing to these, the priests showed me that each inherited from his father; they went through the whole tale of figures, back to the earliest from that of him who had lateliest died. Thus when Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, the priests too traced a line of descent according to the method of their counting; for they would not be persuaded by him that a man could be descended from a god; they traced descent through the whole line of three hundred and forty-five figures, not connecting it with any ancestral god or hero, but declaring each figure to be a “Piromis” the son of a “Piromis,” that is, in the Greek language, one who is in all respects a good man.
144. Thus they showed that all whose statues stood there had been good men, but wholly unlike gods. Before these men, they said, the rulers of Egypt were gods, but none had been contemporary with the human priests. Of these gods one or other had in succession been supreme; the last of them to rule the country was Osiris’ son Horus, called by the Greeks Apollo; he deposed Typhon, and was the last divine king of Egypt. Osiris is, in the Greek language, Dionysus.
145. Among the Greeks, Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan are held to be the youngest of the gods. But in Egypt Pan is the most ancient of these and is one of the eight gods who are said to be the first of all, Heracles belongs to the second dynasty (that of the so-called twelve gods), and Dionysus to the third, which came after the twelve. How many years there were between Heracles and the reign of Amasis, I have already shown; Pan is said to be earlier still; the years between Dionysus and Amasis are the fewest, and they are reckoned by the Egyptians at fifteen thousand. Of all this the Egyptians claim to have certain knowledge, seeing that they had always reckoned the years and chronicled them in writing. Now the Dionysus who was called the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, was about sixteen hundred years before my time, and Heracles son of Alcmene about nine hundred years; and Pan the son of Penelope (for according to the Greeks Penelope and Hermes were the parents of Pan) was about eight hundred years before me, and thus of a later date than the Trojan war.
146. With regard to these two, Pan and Dionysus, a man may follow whatsoever story he deems most credible; but I here declare my own opinion concerning them:—Had Dionysus son of Semele and Pan son of Penelope been made manifest in Hellas and lived there to old age, like Heracles the son of Amphitryon, it might have been said that they too (like Heracles) were but men, named after the older Pan and Dionysus, the gods of antiquity; but as it is, the Greek story has it that no sooner was Dionysus born than Zeus sewed him up in his thigh and carried him away to Nysa in Ethiopia beyond Egypt; and as for Pan, the Greeks know not what became of him after his birth. It is therefore plain to me that the Greeks learnt the names of these two gods later than the names of all the others, and trace the birth of both to the time when they gained the knowledge.
147. Thus far I have recorded what the Egyptians themselves say. I will now relate what is recorded alike by Egyptians and foreigners to have happened in that land, and I will add thereto something of what I myself have seen.
After the reign of the priest of Hephaestus the Egyptians were made free. But they could never live without a king, so they divided Egypt into twelve portions and set up twelve kings. These kings intermarried, and agreed to be close friends, undertaking not to depose one another nor to seek to possess one more than another. The reason of this agreement, which they zealously guarded, was this: at their very first establishment in their several lordships an oracle was given them that that one of them who poured a libation from a bronze vessel in the temple of Hephaestus (where, as in all the temples, it was their wont to assemble) should be king of all Egypt.
148. Moreover they resolved to preserve the memory of their names by some joint enterprise; and having so resolved they made a labyrinth, a little way beyond the lake Moeris and near the place called the City of Crocodiles. I have myself seen it, and indeed no words can tell its wonders; were all that Greeks have builded and wrought added together the whole would be seen to be a matter of less labour and cost than was this labyrinth, albeit the temples at Ephesus and Samos are noteworthy buildings. Though the pyramids were greater than words can tell, and each one of them a match for many great monuments built by Greeks, this maze surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve roofed courts, with doors over against each other: six face the north and six the south, in two continuous lines, all within one outer wall. There are also double sets of chambers, three thousand altogether, fifteen hundred above and the same number under ground. We ourselves viewed those that are above ground, and speak of what we have seen; of the underground chambers we were only told; the Egyptian wardens would by no means show them, these being, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles. Thus we can only speak from hearsay of the lower chambers; the upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human. The outlets of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us as we passed from court to apartment and from apartment to colonnade, from colonnades again to more chambers and then into yet more courts. Over all this is a roof, made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with carven figures, and every court is set round with pillars of white stone most exactly fitted together. Hard by the corner where the labyrinth ends there stands a pyramid forty fathoms high, whereon great figures are carved. A passage has been made into this underground.
149. Such is this labyrinth; and yet more marvellous is the lake Moeris, by which it stands. This lake has a circuit of three thousand six hundred furlongs, or sixty schoeni, which is as much as the whole seaboard of Egypt. Its length is from north to south; the deepest part has a depth of fifty fathoms. That it has been dug out and made by men’s hands the lake shows for itself; for almost in the middle of it stand two pyramids, so built that fifty fathoms of each are below and fifty above the water; atop of each is a colossal stone figure seated on a throne. Thus these pyramids are a hundred fathoms high; and a hundred fathoms equal a furlong of six hundred feet, the fathom measuring six feet or four cubits, the foot four spans and the cubit six spans. The water of the lake is not natural (for the country here is exceeding waterless) but brought by a channel from the Nile; six months it flows into the lake, and six back into the river. For the six months that it flows from the lake, the daily take of fish brings a silver talent into the royal treasury, and twenty minae for each day of the flow into the lake.
150. Further, the people of the country said that this lake issues by an underground stream into the Libyan Syrtis, and stretches inland towards the west along the mountains that are above Memphis. I could not anywhere see the earth taken from the digging of this lake, and this giving me matter for thought, I asked those who dwelt nearest to the lake where the stuff was that had been dug out. They told me whither it had been carried, and I readily believed them, for I had heard of a like thing happening in the Assyrian city of Ninus. Sardanapallus king of Ninus had great wealth, which he kept in an underground treasury. Certain thieves were minded to carry it off; they reckoned their course and dug an underground way from their own house to the palace, carrying the earth taken out of the dug passage at night to the Tigris, which runs past Ninus, till at length they accomplished their desire. This, I was told, had happened when the Egyptian lake was dug, save only that the work went on not by night but by day. The Egyptians bore the earth dug out by them to the Nile, to be caught and scattered (as was to be thought) by the river. Thus is this lake said to have been dug.
151. Now the twelve kings dealt justly; and as time went on they came to sacrifice in Hephaestus’ temple. On the last day of the feast, they being about to pour libations, the high priest brought out the golden vessels which they commonly used for this; but he counted wrongly and gave the twelve only eleven. So he who stood last of them, Psammetichus, got no vessel; wherefore taking off his bronze helmet he held it out and poured the libation with it. All the other kings too were wont to wear helmets, and were then helmeted; it was not in guile, then, that Psammetichus held out his headgear; but the rest marked Psammetichus’ deed, and remembered the oracle which promised the sovereignty of all Egypt to whosoever should pour libation from a vessel of bronze; wherefore, though they deemed Psammetichus not to deserve death (for they proved him and found that he had acted without intent), they resolved to strip him of the most of his power and chase him away into the marshes, and that he was not to concern himself with the rest of Egypt.
152. This Psammetichus had formerly been in Syria, whither he had fled from Sabacos the Ethiopian, who killed his father Necos; then, when the Ethiopian departed by reason of what he saw in a dream, the Egyptians of the province of Sais brought him back from Syria; and now Psammetichus was for the second time king, when it happened to him to be driven away into the marshes by the eleven kings by reason of the matter of the helmet. Therefore he held himself to have been outrageously dealt with by them and had a mind to be avenged on those who had expelled him, and he sent to inquire of the oracle of Leto in the town of Buto, which is the most infallible in Egypt; the oracle answered that he should have vengeance when he saw men of bronze coming from the sea. Psammetichus secretly disbelieved that men of bronze would come to aid him. But after no long time, certain Ionians and Carians, voyaging for plunder, were forced to put in on the coast of Egypt, where they disembarked in their mail of bronze; and an Egyptian came into the marsh country and brought news to Psammetichus (for he had never before seen mailed men) that men of bronze were come from the sea and were foraging in the plain. Psammetichus saw in this the fulfilment of the oracle; he made friends with the Ionians and Carians, and promised them great rewards if they would join him, and having won them, with the aid of such Egyptians as consented and these allies he deposed the eleven kings.
153. Having made himself master of all Egypt, he made the southern outercourt of Hephaestus’ temple at Memphis, and built over against this a court for Apis, where Apis is kept and fed whenever he appears; this court has an inner colonnade all round it and many carved figures; the roof is held up by great statues twelve cubits high for pillars. Apis is in the Greek language Epaphus.
154. The Ionians and Carians who had helped him to conquer were given by Psammetichus places to dwell in called The Camps, opposite to each other on either side of the Nile; and besides this he paid them all that he had promised. Moreover he put Egyptian boys in their hands to be taught the Greek tongue; these, learning Greek, were the ancestors of the Egyptian interpreters. The Ionians and Carians dwelt a long time in these places, which are near the sea, on the arm of the Nile called the Pelusian, a little way below the town of Bubastis. Long afterwards, king Amasis removed them thence and settled them at Memphis, to be his guard against the Egyptians. It comes of our intercourse with these settlers in Egypt (who were the first men of alien speech to settle in that country) that we Greeks have exact knowledge of the history of Egypt from the reign of Psammetichus onwards. There still remained till my time, in the places whence the Ionians and Carians were removed, the landing engines of their ships and the ruins of their houses.
155. This is the story of Psammetichus’ conquest of Egypt. I have often made mention of the Egyptian oracle, and I will now treat fully of it, for this it deserves. This Egyptian oracle is in a temple sacred to Leto, and is situated in a great city by the Sebennytic arm of the Nile, on the way up from the sea. The name of the city where is this oracle is Buto; I have already named it. In Buto there is a temple of Apollo and Artemis. The shrine of Leto in which is the oracle is itself very great, and its outer court is ten fathoms high. But I will now tell of what was the most marvellous among things visible there: in this precinct is the shrine of Leto, whereof the height and length of the walls is all made of a single stone slab each wall has an equal length and height, namely, forty cubits. Another slab makes the surface of the roof, the cornice of which is four cubits broad.
156. Thus then the shrine is the most marvellous of all things that I saw in this temple but of things of lesser note, the most wondrous is the island called Chemmis. This lies in a deep and wide lake near to the temple at Buto, and the Egyptians say that it floats. For myself I never saw it float, nor move at all, and I thought it a marvellous tale, that an island should truly float. However that be, there is a great shrine of Apollo thereon, and three altars stand there; many palm trees grow in the island, and other trees too, some yielding fruit and some not. The story told by the Egyptians to show why the island moves is this: when Typhon came seeking through the world for the son of Osiris, Leto, being one of the eight earliest gods, and dwelling in Buto where this oracle of hers is, received Apollo in charge from Isis and hid him for safety in this island which was before immovable but is now said to float. Apollo and Artemis were (they say) children of Dionysus and Isis, and Leto was made their nurse and preserver; in Egyptian, Apollo is Horus, Demeter Isis, Artemis Bubastis. It was from this and no other legend that Aeschylus son of Euphorion stole an imagination, which is in no other poet, that Artemis was the daughter of Demeter. For the aforesaid reason (say the Egyptians) the island was made to float Such is the tale.
157. Psammetichus ruled Egypt for fifty-four years; for twenty-nine of these he sat before Azotus, a great city in Syria, and besieged it till he took it. Azotus held out against a siege longer than any city of which I have heard.
158. Psammetichus had a son Necos, who became king of Egypt. It was he who began the making of the canal into the Red Sea, which was finished by Darius the Persian. This is four days’ voyage in length, and it was dug wide enough for two triremes to move in it rowed abreast. It is fed by the Nile, and is carried from a little above Bubastis by the Arabian town of Patumus; it issues into the Red Sea. The beginning of the digging was in the part of the Egyptian plain which is nearest to Arabia; the mountains that extend to Memphis (in which mountains are the stone quarries) come close to this plain; the canal is led along the lower slope of these mountains in a long reach from west to east; passing then into a ravine it bears southward out of the hill country towards the Arabian Gulf. Now the shortest and most direct passage from the northern to the southern or Red Sea is from the Casian promontory, which is the boundary between Egypt and Syria, to the Arabian Gulf, and this is a distance of one thousand furlongs, neither more nor less; this is the most direct way, but the canal is by much longer, inasmuch as it is more crooked. In Necos’ reign a hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians perished in the digging of it. During the course of excavations, Necos ceased from the work, being stayed by a prophetic utterance that he was toiling beforehand for the barbarian. The Egyptians call all men of other languages barbarians.
159. Necos then ceased from making the canal and engaged rather in warlike preparation; some of his ships of war were built on the northern sea, and some in the Arabian Gulf, by the Red Sea coast: the landing-engines of these are still to be seen. He used these ships at need, and with his land army met and defeated the Syrians at Magdolus, taking the great Syrian city of Cadytis after the battle. He sent to Branchidae of Miletus and dedicated there to Apollo the garments in which he won these victories. Presently he died after a reign of sixteen years, and his son Psammis reigned in his stead.
160. While this Psammis was king of Egypt he was visited by ambassadors from Elis, the Eleans boasting that they had ordered the Olympic games with all the justice and fairness in the world, and claiming that even the Egyptians, albeit the wisest of all men, could not better it. When the Eleans came to Egypt and told the purpose of their coming, Psammis summoned an assembly of those who were said to be the wisest men in Egypt. These assembled, and inquired of the Eleans, who told them of the rules of the games which they must obey, and, having declared these, said they had come that if the Egyptians could invent any juster way they might learn this too. The Egyptians consulted together, and then asked the Eleans if their own townsmen took part in the contests. The Eleans answered that this was so: all Greeks from Elis or elsewhere might contend. Then the Egyptians said that this rule was wholly wide of justice: “For,” said they, “it cannot be but that you will favour your own townsmen in the contest and deal unfairly by a stranger. Nay, if you will indeed make just rules and have therefore come to Egypt, you should admit only-strangers to the contest, and not Eleans.” Such was the counsel of the Egyptians to the Eleans.
161. Psammis reigned over Egypt for six years only; he invaded Ethiopia, and immediately thereafter died, and Apries his son reigned in his stead. He was more fortunate than any former king (save only his great-grandfather Psammetichus) during his rule of twenty-five years, in which he sent an army against Sidon and did battle by sea with the king of Tyre. But when it was fated that ill should befall him, the cause of it was one that I will now deal with briefly, and at greater length in the Libyan part of this history. Apries sent a great host against Cyrene and suffered a great defeat. The Egyptians blamed him for this and rebelled against him; for they thought that Apries had knowingly sent his men to their doom, that by their so perishing he might be the safer in his rule over the rest of the Egyptians. Bitterly angered by this, those who returned home and the friends of the slain openly revolted.
162. Hearing of this, Apries sent Amasis to them to persuade them from their purpose. When Amasis came up with the Egyptians he exhorted them to desist from what they did; but while he spoke an Egyptian came behind him and put a helmet on his head, saying it was the token of royalty. And Amasis showed that this was not displeasing to him, for being made king by the rebel Egyptians he prepared to march against Apries. When Apries heard of it, he sent against Amasis an esteemed Egyptian named Patarbemis, one of his own court, charging him to take the rebel alive and bring him into his presence. Patarbemis came, and summoned Amasis, who lifted his leg with an unseemly gesture (being then on horseback) and bade the messenger take that token back to Apries. But when Patarbemis was nevertheless instant that Amasis should obey the king’s summons and go to him—such is the story—Amasis answered that he had long been making ready to do this, and Apries should be well satisfied with him: “For I will come myself,” quoth he, “and bring others with me.” Hearing this, Patarbemis could not mistake Amasis’ purpose; he saw his preparations and made haste to depart, that he might with all speed make known to the king what was afoot. When Apries saw him return without Amasis he gave him no chance to speak, but in his rage and fury bade cut off Patarbemis’ ears and nose. The rest of the Egyptians, who still favoured his cause, seeing the foul despite thus done to the man who was most esteemed among them, changed sides without more ado and delivered themselves over to Amasis.
163. This news too being brought to Apries, he armed his guard and marched against the Egyptians; he had a bodyguard of Carians and Ionians, thirty thousand of them, and his royal dwelling was in the city of Sais, a great and marvellous palace. Apries’ men marched against the Egyptians, and so did Amasis’ men against the strangers; so they came both to Momemphis, where it was their purpose to prove each other’s quality.
164. The Egyptians are divided into seven classes, severally entitled priests, warriors, cowherds, swineherds, hucksters, interpreters, and pilots. So many classes there are, each named after its vocation. The warriors are divided into Kalasiries and Hermotubies, and they belong to the following provinces (for all divisions in Egypt are made according to provinces).
165. The Hermotubies are of the provinces of Busiris, Sais, Chemmis, and Papremis, the island called Prosopitis, and half of Natho—all of these; their number, at its greatest, attained to a hundred and sixty thousand. None of these has learnt any common trade; they are free to follow arms alone.
166. The Kalasiries for their part are of the provinces of Thebes, Bubastis, Aphthis, Tanis, Mendes, Sebennys, Athribis, Pharbaïthis, Thmuis, Onuphis, Anytis, Myecphoris (this last is in an island over against the city of Bubastis)—all these; their number, at its greatest, attained to two hundred and fifty thousand men. These too may practise no trade but only war, which is their hereditary calling.
167. Now whether this separation, like other customs, has come to Greece from Egypt, I cannot exactly judge. I know that in Thrace and Scythia and Persia and Lydia and nearly all foreign countries those who learn trades and their descendants are held in less esteem than the rest of the people, and those who have nothing to do with artisans’ work, especially men who are free to practise the art of war, are highly honoured. Thus much is certain, that this opinion, which is held by all Greeks and chiefly by the Lacedaemonians, is of foreign origin. It is in Corinth that artisans are held in least contempt.
168. The warriors were the only Egyptians, except the priests, who had special privileges: for each of them there was set apart an untaxed plot of twelve acres. This acre is a square of a hundred Egyptian cubits each way, the Egyptian cubit being equal to the Samian. These lands were set apart for all; it was never the same men who cultivated them, but each in turn. A thousand Kalasiries and as many Hermotubies were the king’s annual bodyguard. These men, besides their lands, received each a daily provision of five minae’s weight of roast grain, two minae of beef, and four cups of wine. These were the gifts received by each bodyguard.
169. When Apries with his guards and Amasis with the whole force of Egyptians came to the town of Momemphis, they joined battle; and though the foreigners fought well, they were by much the fewer, and therefore were worsted. Apries, they say, supposed that not even a god could depose him from his throne; so firmly he thought he was established; and now being worsted in battle and taken captive he was brought to Sais, to the royal dwelling which belonged once to him but now to Amasis. There he was sustained for a while in the palace, and well entreated by Amasis. But presently the Egyptians complained that there was no justice in allowing one who was their own and their king’s bitterest enemy to live; whereupon Amasis gave Apries up to them, and they strangled him and then buried him in the burial-place of his fathers. This is in the temple of Athene, very near to the sanctuary, on the left of the entrance. The people of Sais buried within the temple precinct all kings who were natives of their province. The tomb of Amasis is farther from the sanctuary than the tomb of Apries and his ancestors; yet it also is within the temple court; it is a great colonnade of stone, richly adorned, the pillars whereof are wrought in the form of palm trees. In this colonnade are two portals, and the place where the coffin lies is within their doors.
170. There is also at Sais the burial-place of him whose name I deem it forbidden to utter in speaking of such a matter; it is in the temple of Athene, behind and close to the whole length of the wall of the shrine. Moreover great stone obelisks stand in the precinct; and there is a lake hard by, adorned with a stone margin and wrought to a complete circle; it is, as it seemed to me, of the bigness of the lake at Delos which they call the Round Pond.
171. On this lake they enact by night the story of the god’s sufferings, a rite which the Egyptians call the Mysteries. I could speak more exactly of these matters, for I know the truth, but I will hold my peace; nor will I say aught concerning that rite of Demeter which the Greeks call Thesmophoria, saving such part of it as I am not forbidden to mention. It was the daughters of Danaus who brought this rite out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; afterwards, when the people of Peloponnesus were driven out by the Dorians, it was lost, except in so far as it was preserved by the Arcadians alone, the Peloponnesian nation that was not driven out but left in its home.
172. Apries being thus deposed, Amasis became king; he was of a town called Siuph in the province of Saïs. Now at first he was contemned and held in but little regard by the Egyptians, as having been but a common man and of no high family; but presently he won them to him by being cunning and not arrogant. He had among his countless treasures a golden foot-bath, in which he and all those who feasted with him were ever wont to wash their feet. This he broke in pieces and made thereof a god’s image, which he set in the most fitting place in the city; and the Egyptians came ever and anon to this image and held it in great reverence. When Amasis knew what the townsmen did, he called the Egyptians together and told them that the image had been made out of the foot-bath; once (said he) his subjects had washed their feet in it and put it to yet viler uses; now they greatly revered it. “So now” (quoth he to them) “it has fared with me as with the foot-bath; once I was a common man, now I am your king; it is your duty to honour me and hold me in regard.”
173. In this manner he won the Egyptians to consent to be his slaves; and this is how he ordered his affairs: in the morning, till the filling of the market place, he wrought zealously at such business as came before him; the rest of the day he spent in drinking and jesting with his boon companions in idle and sportive mood. But this displeased his friends, who thus admonished him: “O King, you are ill guided so to demean yourself. We would have you sit aloft on a throne of pride all day doing your business; thus would the Egyptians know that they have a great man for their ruler, and you would have the better name among them; but now your behaviour is nowise royal.” “Nay,” Amasis answered them, “men that have bows bend them at need only; were bows kept for ever bent they would break, and so would be of no avail when they were needed. Such too is the nature of men. Were they to be ever at serious work nor permit themselves a fair share of sport they would go mad or silly ere they knew it; I am well aware of that, and give each of the two its turn.” Such was his answer to his friends.
174. It is said that before Amasis was a king he was a man nowise serious-minded but much given to drinking and jesting; and when his drinking and merrymaking brought him to penury, he would wander around and steal from one and another. Then those others, when he denied the charge that he had taken their possessions, would bring him to whatever place of divination was nearest them; and the oracles often declared him guilty and often acquitted him. When he became king, he took no care of the shrines of the gods who had acquitted him of theft, nor gave them aught for maintenance, nor made it his practice to sacrifice there, for he deemed them to be worthless and their oracles to be false; but he tended with all care the gods who had declared his guilt, holding them to be gods in very truth and their oracles infallible.
175. Amasis made a marvellous outer court for the temple of Athene at Saïs, surpassing, in height and grandeur, and in the size and splendour of the stones, all who had erected such buildings; moreover, he set up huge images and vast man-headed sphinxes, and brought enormous blocks of stone besides for the building. Some of these he brought from the stone quarries of Memphis; those of greatest size came from the city Elephantine, distant twenty days’ journey by river from Saïs. But let me now tell of what I hold the most marvellous of his works. He brought from Elephantine a shrine made of one single block of stone; three years it was in the bringing, and two thousand men were charged with the carriage of it, pilots all of them. This chamber measures in outer length twenty-one cubits, in breadth fourteen, in height eight. These are the outer measurements of the chamber which is made of one block; its inner length is of eighteen cubits and four-fifths of a cubit, and its height of five cubits. It lies by the entrance of the temple; the reason why it was not dragged within into the temple was (so they say), that while it was being drawn the chief builder groaned aloud for the much time spent and his weariness of the work, and Amasis taking this to heart would not suffer it to be drawn further. Some again say that a man, one of them that heaved up the shrine, was crushed by it, and therefore it was not dragged within.
176. Moreover Amasis dedicated, besides monuments of marvellous size in all the other temples of note, the huge image that lies supine before Hephaestus’ temple at Memphis; this image is seventy-five feet in length; there stand on the same base, on either side of the great image, two huge statues hewn from the same block, each of them twenty feet high. There is at Saïs another stone figure of like bigness, lying as lies the figure at Memphis. It was Amasis, too, who built the great and most marvellous temple of Isis at Memphis.
177. It is said that in the reign of Amasis Egypt attained to its greatest prosperity, in respect of what the river did for the land and the land for its people: and that the whole sum of inhabited cities in the country was twenty thousand. It was Amasis also who made the law that every Egyptian should yearly declare his means of livelihood to the ruler of his province, and, failing so to do or to prove that he had a just way of life, be punished with death. Solon the Athenian got this law from Egypt and established it among his people; may they ever keep it! for it is a perfect law.
178. Amasis became a lover of the Greeks, and besides other services which he did to some of them he gave those who came to Egypt the city of Naucratis to dwell in, and to those who voyaged to the country without desire to settle there he gave lands where they might set altars and make holy places for their gods. Of these the greatest and most famous and most visited precinct is that which is called the Hellenion, founded jointly by the Ionian cities of Chios, Teos, Phocaea, and Clazomenae, the Dorian cities of Rhodes, Cnidus, Halicarnassus, and Phaselis, and one Aeolian city, Mytilene. It is to these that the precinct belongs, and these are they that appoint wardens of the port; if any others claim rights therein they lay claim to that wherein they have no part or lot. The Aeginetans made a precinct of their own, sacred to Zeus; and so did the Samians for Here and the Milesians for Apollo.
179. Naucratis was in old time the only trading port in Egypt. Whosoever came to any other mouth of the Nile must swear that he had not come of his own will, and having so sworn must then take his ship and sail to the Canobic mouth; or, if he could not sail against contrary winds, he must carry his cargo in barges round the Delta till he came to Naucratis. In such honour was Naucratis held.
180. When the Amphictyons had contracted for three hundred talents the work of finishing the temple that now stands at Delphi (that which was formerly there having been burnt by pure mischance), it fell to the Delphians to provide a fourth part of the cost. They went about from city to city collecting gifts, and in this business they got most from Egypt; for Amasis gave them a thousand talents’ weight of astringent earth, and the Greek dwellers in Egypt twenty minae.
181. Amasis made friends and allies of the people of Cyrene. Moreover he thought fit to take himself a wife from thence; whether it was that he desired a Greek woman, or that he had other cause for winning the friendship of Cyrene, I know not; but he married one Ladice, said to be the daughter of Battus by some, of Arcesilaus by others, and by others again of Critobulus, an esteemed citizen of the place. But it so fell out that Ladice was the only woman with whom Amasis could not have intercourse; and this continuing, Amasis said to this Ladice, “Woman, you have cast a spell on me, and most assuredly you shall come to the most terrible end of all women.” So, the king’s anger not abating for all her denial, Ladice vowed in her heart to Aphrodite that she would send the goddess a statue to Cyrene if Amasis had intercourse with her that night; for that would remedy the evil; and thereafter all went well, and Amasis loved his wife much. Ladice paid her vow to the goddess; she had an image made and sent it to Cyrene, where it stood safe till my time, facing outwards from the city. Cambyses, when he had conquered Egypt and learnt who Ladice was, sent her away to Cyrene unharmed.
182. Moreover Amasis dedicated offerings in Hellas. He gave to Cyrene a gilt image of Athene and a painted picture of himself, to Athene of Lindus two stone images and a marvellous linen breast-plate, and to Here in Samos two wooden statues of himself, which stood yet in my time behind the doors in the great shrine. The offerings in Samos were dedicated by reason of the friendship between Amasis and Polycrates son of Aeaces; what he gave to Lindus was for no friendship with any man, but because it is said that the temple of Athene in Lindus was founded by the daughters of Danaus, when they landed there in their flight from the sons of Egyptus. Such were Amasis’ offerings. Moreover he was the first conqueror of Cyprus, which he made tributary to himself.