Book 2: Euterpe

Chapter 1

1On the death of Cyrus, Cambyses received the kingship, being the son of Cyrus and of Cassandane, daughter of Pharnaspes; she had died before him, and Cyrus both mourned her greatly himself and proclaimed to all those he ruled that they should make mourning.

2Cambyses, being the son of this woman and of Cyrus, held the Ionians and the Aeolians to be slaves inherited from his father, and made a campaign against Egypt, taking with him others of those he ruled and also those Greeks over whom he had power.

Chapter 2

1The Egyptians, before Psammetichus became their king, believed themselves to be the first of all mankind; but when Psammetichus came to the throne and wished to know who were the first, from that time on they have held that the Phrygians came into being before them, and themselves before all the rest.

2Psammetichus, since by inquiry he could discover no means of learning who were the first of mankind, contrived a plan of this kind. He gave two newborn children of common folk to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks, with this sort of rearing, enjoining that no one utter any sound in their presence, that the children lie by themselves in a lonely dwelling, and that at the appointed hour he bring goats to them, and having given them their fill of milk, attend to everything else.

3This Psammetichus did and enjoined, wishing to hear from the children, once they were past their meaningless whimperings, what word they would first utter. And this is just what happened. For when two years had gone by while the shepherd was doing this, on his opening the door and coming in, both children fell toward him crying "bekos," reaching out their hands.

4The first few times he heard it the shepherd kept quiet; but when, as he came again and again to tend them, this word became frequent, he told his master and at his command brought the children into his presence. Psammetichus too heard it and inquired who among men call anything "bekos," and by his inquiry he found that the Phrygians call bread by that name.

5So the Egyptians agreed, judging by this test, that the Phrygians were older than they. This is what I heard from the priests of Hephaestus at Memphis. The Greeks tell many other foolish tales, among them that Psammetichus cut out the tongues of women and so reared the children in the keeping of these women.

Chapter 3

1Such, then, is what they told me about the rearing of the children; and I heard other things too at Memphis, when I came into speech with the priests of Hephaestus. I also traveled to Thebes and to Heliopolis for this very purpose, wishing to learn whether their accounts would agree with those at Memphis; for the people of Heliopolis are said to be the most learned of the Egyptians.

2Of the divine matters of their narratives I am not eager to give an account, saving only the names of the gods, since I think that all men know equally much about them; but whatever of them I do recall, I shall recall driven on by the course of my story.

Chapter 4

1As for human affairs, they said, agreeing with one another, that the Egyptians were the first of all men to discover the year, dividing the seasons that compose it into twelve parts; and these they discovered, they said, from the stars. They are wiser than the Greeks in this, in my opinion: the Greeks throw in an intercalary month every third year for the sake of the seasons, while the Egyptians, keeping twelve months of thirty days, add five days each year beyond the count, and so the cycle of the seasons comes round to its starting point again.

2They said too that the Egyptians were the first to set up the titles of twelve gods, and that the Greeks took them over from them, and that they were the first to assign altars, images, and temples to the gods and to carve living creatures in stone. Most of these things they showed by evidence to have been so. The first man to be king of Egypt, they said, was Min;

3in his day, apart from the Theban district, all Egypt was a marsh, and none of the land that now lies below the Lake of Moeris stood out above it—a lake to which one sails up from the sea in seven days along the river.

Chapter 5

1And they seemed to me to speak well about the land; for it is plain even to one who has not heard it before but sees it for himself, if he has any understanding, that the Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land won by the Egyptians and a gift of the river, and that the country above this lake as well, for a distance of three days' sailing, is of the same kind; beyond that they said nothing more of the sort, and the land is of another nature.

2For the nature of the land of Egypt is this. First, when you are still sailing toward it, a day's run out from land, if you let down a sounding line you will bring up mud and find yourself in eleven fathoms of water. So far, then, the sounding shows that there is an alluvial deposit.

Chapter 6

1Along the sea the coast of Egypt is sixty schoinoi in length; by our reckoning Egypt extends from the Gulf of Plinthine to Lake Serbonis, beside which Mount Casius stretches; the sixty schoinoi are measured from that point.

2For those of mankind who hold the least land measure the country in fathoms, those with somewhat more in stades, those with much in parasangs, and those with land in the greatest abundance in schoinoi.

3The parasang is thirty stades, while the schoinos, an Egyptian measure, is sixty stades.

Chapter 7

1By this reckoning the coast of Egypt would be three thousand six hundred stades. From there to Heliopolis, going inland, Egypt is broad, being everywhere flat, well watered, and muddy. The road from the sea up to Heliopolis is approximately equal in length to the road from Athens that runs from the altar of the Twelve Gods to Pisa and the temple of Zeus at Olympia.

2A small difference would be found on reckoning these roads, in that they are not equal in length, of no more than fifteen stades; the road from Athens to Pisa falls short of fifteen hundred stades by fifteen, whereas the road from the sea to Heliopolis makes up the full number.

Chapter 8

1From Heliopolis inland Egypt is narrow. On one side a mountain range in Arabia stretches along, running from the north toward the south and the south wind, and always extending up toward the sea called the Red Sea; in it are the quarries from which stone was cut for the pyramids at Memphis. There the range comes to an end and bends back toward the parts I have mentioned; and at its longest, as I learned, it is a two months' journey from east to west, while its ends toward the east yield frankincense.

2Such, then, is this range; and on the Libyan side of Egypt another rocky range extends, in which the pyramids are, buried in sand, in the same way as the part of the Arabian range that runs toward the south.

3From Heliopolis onward there is no longer much of Egypt—only so much as is fourteen days' sailing upstream is narrow Egypt, being level ground between the mountains I have mentioned; it seemed to me to be at most two hundred stades across at its narrowest, from the Arabian range to the one called Libyan. Beyond this Egypt is broad again. Such is the nature of this land.

Chapter 9

1From Heliopolis to Thebes is nine days' sailing upstream, and the distance of the route is four thousand eight hundred and sixty stades, being eighty-one schoinoi.

2Adding these stades together, the coast of Egypt, as I have shown already, is three thousand six hundred stades; and I shall now show how far it is from the sea inland to Thebes: it is six thousand one hundred and twenty stades. From Thebes to the city called Elephantine it is one thousand eight hundred stades.

Chapter 10

1Most of the land I have described, as the priests said, seemed to me as well to be ground gained by the Egyptians. For the country between the mountains I have mentioned, those that lie above the city of Memphis, appeared to me to have been once a gulf of the sea, just like the regions around Ilium and Teuthrania and Ephesus and the plain of the Maeander—if one may compare small things with great.

2For of the rivers that have silted up those places, not one is worth comparing in size with one of the mouths of the Nile, which has five mouths.

3There are other rivers as well, not of the size of the Nile, which have accomplished great works; of these I can tell the names of others, and especially of the Achelous, which, flowing through Acarnania and emptying into the sea, has already made half of the Echinades islands into mainland.

Chapter 11

1In the land of Arabia, not far from Egypt, there is a gulf of the sea stretching in from the sea called the Red Sea, of such length and narrowness as I am about to describe.

2In length, for one who starts from its innermost end and sails out to the open sea, forty days are spent if he uses oars; in width, where the gulf is at its broadest, it is half a day's sail. And in it there is a flood tide and an ebb tide every day.

3I think that Egypt too was once another such gulf—the one from the northern sea running in toward Ethiopia, and the Arabian gulf, which I am about to describe, coming from the southern sea toward Syria; their inner ends very nearly break through to each other, with only a small stretch of country between them.

4If then the Nile should choose to turn its stream into this Arabian gulf, what is to keep the gulf from being silted up within twenty thousand years? For my part I believe it would be silted up even within ten thousand. And surely in all the time that has gone by before my birth, might not a gulf far greater than this have been silted up by so great a river and so industrious a one?

Chapter 12

1So about Egypt I both believe those who tell it and myself hold it to be wholly so, having seen Egypt jutting out beyond the land that lies behind it, and shells showing on the mountains and salt efflorescing on the surface, so that even the pyramids are affected by it, and the mountain above Memphis being made of sand alone.

2And the soil itself resembles neither neighboring Arabia nor Libya, nor indeed Syria—for the Syrians inhabit the seacoast of Arabia—but it is black and crumbling, being as it were mud and silt carried down from Ethiopia by the river.

3We know that Libya has redder earth and more sand, while Arabia and Syria are more clayey and rocky beneath.

Chapter 13

1The priests also told me this great proof about this land: that in the reign of King Moeris, whenever the river rose at the lowest to eight cubits, it watered Egypt below Memphis; and not yet nine hundred years had passed since Moeris died when I heard this from the priests. But now, unless the river rises at least fifteen or sixteen cubits, it does not overflow onto the land.

2It seems to me that the Egyptians who live below the Lake of Moeris, both in the other districts and in the one called the Delta, if this land keeps rising in height proportionally and continuing the same increase, will suffer for all the time to come what the Egyptians themselves once said the Greeks would suffer, since the Nile no longer floods their country.

3For learning that the whole land of the Greeks is rained on and not watered by rivers as their own is, they said that the Greeks, cheated one day of a great hope, would be terribly afflicted with famine. And this saying means that if the god does not choose to rain on them but sends them drought, the Greeks will be destroyed by famine; for they have no other recourse of water save from Zeus alone.

Chapter 14

1And this that the Egyptians say of the Greeks is rightly said. Come now, let me tell how it is with the Egyptians themselves: if the land below Memphis (for that is the part that rises) should rise in height in proportion to the time already past, as I said before, what will the Egyptians who live there do but starve—if the land neither receives rain nor is the river able to overflow into their fields?

2For as it is, these people gather the fruit of the earth with less labor than any other men in the world and than the rest of the Egyptians; for they neither break furrows with the plow and so take pains, nor hoe, nor do any of the other work that other men do about a crop, but when the river of its own accord comes and waters their fields, and having watered them recedes again, then each sows his own field and turns pigs into it; and when the pigs have trodden the seed into the ground, from that time he waits for the harvest, and then threshes the grain with the pigs and so gathers it in.

Chapter 15

1If then we choose to follow the opinions of the Ionians, who say that the Delta alone is Egypt, holding that its coast runs from the watch-post called Perseus to the Pelusian Taricheia, where it is forty schoinoi, and that from the sea it extends inland to the city of Cercasorus, where the Nile splits and flows toward Pelusium and toward Canobus—and that the rest of Egypt belongs partly to Libya and partly to Arabia—then by using this argument we would show that the Egyptians had no land in former times.

2For their Delta at least, as the Egyptians themselves say and as I agree, is alluvial and has, so to speak, newly appeared. If then they had no land at all, why did they busy themselves with the fancy that they were the first of mankind? Nor was there any need for them to make the test of the children, to learn what word they would speak first.

3But I do not think the Egyptians came into being at the same time as the Delta the Ionians name; rather they have existed ever since mankind came into being, and as the land advanced, many of them stayed where they were while many others moved down. Long ago, however, Thebes was called Egypt, whose circuit is six thousand one hundred and twenty stades.

Chapter 16

1If then our judgment of these matters is right, the Ionians are ill-advised about Egypt; but if the opinion of the Ionians is right, then I show that the Greeks and the Ionians themselves do not know how to reckon, who say that the whole earth has three parts, Europe, Asia, and Libya.

2For they must add a fourth part to their count, the Delta of Egypt, if it is neither of Asia nor of Libya; for by this account the Nile is not the boundary between Asia and Libya, and the Nile breaks around the apex of the Delta, so that the Delta would lie between Asia and Libya.

Chapter 17

1We put aside, then, the opinion of the Ionians; and our own account of these matters is as follows: Egypt is all the land inhabited by Egyptians, just as Cilicia is the land inhabited by Cilicians and Assyria that inhabited by Assyrians; and we know of no boundary rightly so called between Asia and Libya except the borders of Egypt.

2But if we follow the convention adopted by the Greeks, we must consider Egypt to begin at the Cataracts and the city of Elephantine and to be split in two, sharing both names; for part of it belongs to Libya and part to Asia.

3For the Nile, beginning at the Cataracts, flows through the middle of Egypt, splitting it, and empties into the sea. Up to the city of Cercasorus the Nile flows as a single stream, but from that city it splits into three channels.

4One of them turns toward the east, called the Pelusian mouth; the second of the channels heads west, and this is called the Canobic mouth. And the straight course of the Nile is this: coming from above it reaches the apex of the Delta, and from there it splits the Delta in the middle and empties into the sea, contributing neither the smallest share of its water nor being the least famous; it is called the Sebennytic mouth.

5There are also two other mouths branching off from the Sebennytic and running to the sea; their names are these: the one is called the Saitic, the other the Mendesian.

6The Bolbitine mouth and the Bucolic are not natural mouths but have been dug.

Chapter 18

1And the oracle of Ammon bears witness to my judgment that Egypt is as large as I declare it to be by my account; and this I learned after forming my own opinion about Egypt.

2For the people of the cities of Marea and Apis, who live on the borders of Egypt next to Libya, considering themselves to be Libyans and not Egyptians, and annoyed by the rules of the sacred rites, and wishing not to be debarred from eating the flesh of cows, sent to Ammon, saying that they had nothing in common with the Egyptians: for they lived outside the Delta and shared none of their customs, and they wished to be free to eat of everything.

3But the god would not allow them to do this, saying that Egypt is the land which the Nile waters when it overflows, and that the Egyptians are those who, dwelling below the city of Elephantine, drink from this river. This was the answer given them.

Chapter 19

1When it floods, the Nile overflows not only the Delta but also parts of the region called Libyan and of the Arabian, to a distance of two days' journey on either side, and sometimes more and sometimes less. About the nature of the river I was able to learn nothing either from the priests or from anyone else.

2I was eager to learn these things from them: why the Nile, rising, comes down beginning at the summer solstice for a hundred days, and when it has reached this number of days it turns back and withdraws, leaving its channel low, so that it stays small through the whole winter until the summer solstice comes round again.

3Of these matters I could learn nothing from the Egyptians, asking them what power the Nile has to be contrary in nature to the other rivers; wishing to know both what has been said of this and why it alone of all rivers gives off no breezes, I made my inquiry.

Chapter 20

1But some notable Greeks, wishing to be thought clever, have expounded three theories about this water; two of these I do not think worth mentioning, except only so far as to indicate them.

2The first of them says that the Etesian winds are the cause of the river's flooding, preventing the Nile from flowing out to the sea. Yet often the Etesian winds have not blown at all, and the Nile does the same thing.

3Besides, if the Etesian winds were the cause, then the other rivers too, as many as flow against the Etesian winds, should suffer the same as the Nile, and even more so, in proportion as they are smaller and carry weaker streams. There are many rivers in Syria and many in Libya which suffer nothing of the kind that the Nile does.

Chapter 21

1The second theory is less informed than the one just mentioned, though more marvelous in the telling: it says that the river flows from Ocean and so contrives these things, and that Ocean flows around the whole earth.

Chapter 22

1The third of the theories, though much the most plausible, is the most mistaken; for it says nothing true either, claiming that the Nile flows from melting snow—the river which flows out of Libya through the midst of the Ethiopians and empties into Egypt.

2How then could it flow from snow, when it flows from the hottest regions to the cooler ones for the most part? To a man able to reason about such things it is clear that it is not likely to flow from snow; first and greatest of proofs the winds supply, blowing warm from these regions.

3Second, that the country remains always without rain and without frost; whereas when snow has fallen, it must rain within five days, so that if it snowed, those regions would be rained upon; and third, that the people are black from the heat.

4Kites and swallows are present throughout the year and do not leave, and cranes, fleeing the winter that comes in the Scythian country, travel to pass the winter in these regions. If then it snowed, even as little as the country through which the Nile flows and from which it begins to flow, none of this would be so, as the compulsion of the facts proves.

Chapter 23

1The man who spoke of Ocean, carrying his tale off into the invisible, has no proof to show; for I know of no river Ocean, but think that Homer or one of the poets before him invented the name and brought it into his poetry.

Chapter 24

1Since then I must find fault with the opinions set out before me and declare my own view of things unseen, I shall tell why it seems to me that the Nile floods in summer: the sun, driven in winter from his ancient course by the storms, passes over upper Libya.

2To put it as briefly as possible, the whole matter has been stated; for whatever region this god is nearest to and passes over, that region naturally is most in want of water, and its local river streams dwindle.

Chapter 25

1To make it plain at greater length, it is as follows. The sun, passing over upper Libya, does this: since the air over these regions is always clear and the country is warm and the winds are cold, in passing through he does what summer normally does when it passes through the middle of the sky.

2For it draws the water to itself, and having drawn it up it drives it to the upper regions; and the winds, taking it up and scattering it, dissolve it. And it is natural that the winds that blow from this region, the south and the southwest, are by far the rainiest of all winds.

3It seems to me, moreover, that the sun does not send away all the year's water from the Nile every time, but keeps some back around himself. And when the winter grows mild, the sun goes back to the middle of the sky, and from then on he draws equally from all the rivers.

4Until then the rivers flow in full force, since much rain water mixes with them, as the land is rained upon and cut by ravines; but in summer, when the rains fail them and they are drawn by the sun, they are weak.

5The Nile, however, being without rain and drawn by the sun alone of rivers at this season, naturally flows much lower then than in summer; for in summer it is drawn equally along with all the other waters, but in winter it alone is pressed hard.

Chapter 26

1In this way I hold the sun to be the cause of these things. And the same cause, in my judgment, makes the air there dry as well, by scorching his own path; and so summer always holds upper Libya.

2But if the stations of the seasons were reversed, and in the part of the sky where now the north wind and winter have their stand, there the south wind and midday had theirs, while where the south wind now stands, there the north—if this were so, the sun, driven from the middle of the sky by winter and the north wind, would travel over upper Europe as he now travels over Libya; and passing through all Europe I believe he would do to the Ister what he now does to the Nile.

Chapter 27

1About the breeze, that it does not blow from the river, I hold this opinion: that it is not at all likely for anything to blow off from very hot regions, whereas a breeze normally blows off from something cold.

Chapter 28

1Let these matters, then, stand as they are and as they came to be at the beginning; but of the sources of the Nile no one has offered to give me knowledge, neither Egyptian nor Libyan nor Greek of those who have come into speech with me, except the scribe of the sacred records of Athena in the city of Sais in Egypt.

2He seemed to me to be joking, saying that he knew them exactly; and he spoke as follows: that there are two mountains with peaks drawn sharp to a point, lying between the city of Syene in the Thebaid and Elephantine, and the names of the mountains are Crophi and Mophi.

3And that the sources of the Nile, being bottomless, flow from between these mountains, and half of the water flows toward Egypt and the north wind, and the other half toward Ethiopia and the south.

4And that the sources are bottomless, Psammetichus king of Egypt, he said, made a test; for he had a rope of many thousand fathoms twisted and let down there, and did not reach the bottom.

5So the scribe—if indeed he spoke the truth—showed, as I understand it, that there are strong eddies there and a backwash, and that because the water dashes against the mountains, a sounding line let down cannot reach the bottom.

Chapter 29

1Of the rest I could learn nothing. But this much else I learned to the farthest point: going as far as the city of Elephantine by my own eyes, and beyond that by inquiry and hearsay.

2Above the city of Elephantine the ground is steep; there one must lash the boat on both sides and so haul it along, as one leads an ox; and if the rope snaps, the boat is gone, carried off by the force of the current.

3This stretch is a four days' voyage, and there the Nile is winding, like the Maeander; these are twelve schoinoi that one must sail through in this fashion. And then you will come to a level plain, in which the Nile flows around an island; its name is Tachompso.

4Above Elephantine the inhabitants are already Ethiopians, and they hold half of the island, while the other half is held by Egyptians. Adjoining the island is a great lake, around which nomad Ethiopians pasture their flocks; sailing through it you will come to the stream of the Nile, which empties into this lake.

5And then, going ashore, you will make a journey of forty days along the river; for sharp crags stand out in the Nile and there are many reefs, through which it is not possible to sail.

6Having passed through this stretch in the forty days, you will embark again on another boat and sail twelve days, and then you will come to a great city named Meroe; this city is said to be the mother city of the other Ethiopians.

7The people there worship only Zeus and Dionysus of the gods, and honor them greatly, and they have an oracle of Zeus established; and they make war whenever this god commands them by oracles, and to wherever he commands, there they go.

Chapter 30

1From this city, sailing for another equal stretch of time, you will come to the deserters, in the same time as it took you to come from Elephantine to the mother city of the Ethiopians. These deserters are called Asmach; and this word means, in the Greek tongue, those who stand on the left hand of the king.

2Four and twenty myriads of the warrior Egyptians revolted to these Ethiopians for the following reason. In the reign of King Psammetichus, garrisons were set out at the city of Elephantine against the Ethiopians, and at Daphnae of Pelusium another against the Arabians and Assyrians, and at Marea another against Libya.

3Even in my own time the Persians hold the garrisons in the same way as they were in the time of Psammetichus; for Persians guard both at Elephantine and at Daphnae. The Egyptians then, after serving three years at these posts, were relieved of the garrison duty by no one; and they took counsel and, reaching a common decision, all revolted from Psammetichus and set out for Ethiopia.

4Psammetichus, learning of it, pursued them; and when he overtook them, he entreated them with many words and would not let them leave behind their ancestral gods, their children, and their wives. And one of them, it is said, took hold of his member and said that wherever that was, there they would have children and wives as well.

5When these men came to Ethiopia, they gave themselves up to the king of the Ethiopians, and he repaid them with this gift: some of the Ethiopians had fallen out with him, and these he ordered them to drive out and to settle in their land. When these had been planted among the Ethiopians, the Ethiopians grew more civilized, having learned Egyptian customs.

Chapter 31

1The Nile is known for four months of voyage and travel, apart from its stream in Egypt; for on reckoning, so many months are found to be spent by one journeying from Elephantine to these deserters. It flows from the west and the setting of the sun. Beyond this point no one can speak with certainty; for this country is desolate from the heat.

Chapter 32

1But the following I heard from men of Cyrene, who said that they went to the oracle of Ammon and came into speech with Etearchus, the king of the Ammonians, and somehow, passing from one topic to another, fell into talk about the Nile, how no one knows its sources; and Etearchus said that once some men of the Nasamonians had come to him.

2This people is Libyan, and inhabits the Syrtis and the country to the east of the Syrtis, but not for a great distance.

3When the Nasamonians came and were asked whether they had anything more to tell about the deserts of Libya, they said that among them there had been sons of chieftains, overbearing young men, who when they came of age devised many extraordinary things and in particular cast lots for five of themselves to view the deserts of Libya, and to see whether they might see anything more than those who had gone farthest.

4For of Libya, the parts along the northern sea, beginning from Egypt as far as the headland of Soloeis, which is the end of Libya, are inhabited by Libyans and by many tribes of Libyans, except as much as Greeks and Phoenicians hold; but inland from the sea and from the peoples whose lands reach down to the sea, Libya is infested with wild beasts; and beyond the wild-beast country there is sand, terribly waterless and utterly desolate.

5The young men said, then, that when they were sent off by their companions, well supplied with water and provisions, they traveled first through the inhabited country, and having passed through it came to the wild-beast country, and from there crossed the desert, making their journey toward the west wind.

6Passing through a great sandy tract in many days, they at last saw trees growing in a plain; and coming up to them they began to touch the fruit that was on the trees, and as they touched it, men of small stature came upon them, smaller than ordinary men, who seized them and led them away; and neither did the Nasamonians understand the speech of those men nor the guides that of the Nasamonians.

7And they led them through very great marshes, and having passed through these, they came to a city in which all the people were equal in stature to their guides and black in color. And beside the city flows a great river, flowing from the west toward the sunrise, and crocodiles were to be seen in it.

Chapter 33

1The account of Etearchus the Ammonian has been set forth by me thus far, except that he said that the Nasamonians returned, as the Cyrenaeans told it, and that the people to whom they came were all sorcerers.

2And this river that flows past their city, Etearchus too conjectured to be the Nile; and the balance of the argument supports it. For the Nile flows out of Libya and cuts through the middle of Libya; and as I conjecture, judging what is not seen by what is visible, its starting point lies at the same distance as that of the Ister.

3For the Ister, beginning from the Celts and the city of Pyrene, flows through the middle of Europe, splitting it; the Celts live beyond the Pillars of Heracles, and border on the Cynesians, who of all the inhabitants of Europe live farthest toward the sunset.

4The Ister ends by flowing into the sea of the Euxine through the whole length of Europe, where the Milesian colonists inhabit Istria.

Chapter 34

1The Ister, then, since it flows through inhabited country, is known to many; but of the sources of the Nile no one can tell, for the Libya through which it flows is uninhabited and desolate. Of its course, as far as inquiry could reach, I have spoken; it empties into Egypt. And Egypt lies over against the mountainous part of Cilicia, more or less.

2From there to Sinope on the Euxine is a straight five days' journey for an unencumbered traveler; and Sinope lies opposite the point where the Ister empties into the sea. In this way I think the Nile, passing through the whole of Libya, is equal to the Ister.

Chapter 35

1About the Nile, then, let so much have been said; and I am going to lengthen my account of Egypt, because it has more marvels than any other land, and works beyond description in comparison with every other country; for these reasons more will be said about it.

2The Egyptians, along with a sky that is different from the sky elsewhere, and a river that has a nature unlike other rivers, have established customs and laws in almost everything opposite to other men: among them the women go to market and do the selling, while the men stay at home and weave; and others weave pushing the warp upward, but the Egyptians push it downward.

3The men carry loads on their heads, the women on their shoulders. Women pass water standing upright, men sitting down. They relieve themselves indoors in their houses, but eat outside in the streets, saying that what is shameful but necessary ought to be done in secret, while what is not shameful ought to be done openly.

4No woman serves as priest of either a male or a female god, but men serve as priests of all. Sons are under no compulsion to support their parents if they do not wish to, but daughters are under every compulsion even if they do not wish to.

Chapter 36

1Priests of the gods elsewhere let their hair grow, but in Egypt they shave. Among other peoples it is the custom, when mourning, for those whom the loss most nearly touches to shave their heads; but the Egyptians, when a death occurs, let the hair of the head and of the chin grow, though at all other times they are shaven.

2Other peoples keep their way of life apart from the beasts, but the Egyptians live side by side with them. Others live on wheat and barley; for an Egyptian to make his living from these is the greatest disgrace, and they make their food instead from olyra, which some call zeiai.

3They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands, and they gather up dung. Others leave their private parts as nature made them, except such as have learned the custom from the Egyptians; but the Egyptians circumcise. Of clothing, every man has two garments, and every woman one.

4The rings and the ropes of sails others fasten on the outside, the Egyptians on the inside. Greeks write and count with pebbles, moving the hand from left to right, the Egyptians from right to left; and though they do this, they themselves say that they move to the right and the Greeks to the left. They use two kinds of writing, of which one is called sacred and the other demotic.

Chapter 37

1Exceedingly devout above all other peoples, they observe customs such as these. They drink from bronze cups, scouring them every day—not some and not others, but all.

2They always wear newly washed linen garments, making this their especial care; and they circumcise themselves for the sake of cleanness, choosing to be clean rather than seemly. The priests shave the whole body every third day, so that no louse or any other unclean thing may be upon them while they attend the gods.

3The priests wear linen clothing only, and papyrus sandals; no other clothing nor any other sandals may they take. They bathe in cold water twice each day and twice each night, and perform besides, one might say, ten thousand other rites.

4And they enjoy no few advantages: they consume nothing of their own and spend nothing, but sacred food is cooked for them, and a great quantity of beef and of goose falls to each man every day, and wine of the vine is given them as well; but it is not lawful for them to taste fish.

5The Egyptians do not sow beans at all freely in their land, and those that grow they neither eat raw nor cooked; the priests cannot even bear to look at them, holding the pulse to be unclean. Each god is served not by one priest but by many, and one of them is the high priest; and when one dies, his son is appointed in his place.

Chapter 38

1The male cattle they hold to belong to Epaphus, and for this reason they test them as follows: if the priest sees so much as a single black hair upon the beast, he judges it unclean.

2This examination is made by one of the priests appointed to the task, both with the beast standing on its feet and with it lying on its back; and he draws out the tongue, to see whether it is clean of the marks that I shall declare in another account, and he looks also to the hairs of the tail, to see whether they grow as nature would have them.

3If the beast is clean in all these, the priest marks it by wrapping papyrus about the horns, then smearing sealing clay upon it and pressing his ring; and so they lead it away. But if a man sacrifices an unmarked beast, death is the penalty. The beast, then, is tested in this fashion; and this is the sacrifice they have established.

Chapter 39

1They bring the marked beast to the altar at which they mean to sacrifice, and light a fire; then they pour wine over the victim upon the fire, call upon the god, and slay it; and having slain it they cut off the head.

2They flay the body of the beast, but the head they carry away after heaping many curses upon it—to the market, where there is a market and Greek traders are staying in the country, and the bearers sell it for what it will fetch; but where no Greeks are present, they throw it into the river.

3And as they curse the heads they say this: "If any evil is about to befall the men who sacrifice or all Egypt, let it turn upon this head."

4With regard, then, to the heads of the sacrificial beasts and to the pouring of the wine, all the Egyptians use the same customs alike in all their rites; and because of this custom no Egyptian will taste the head of any other living creature.

Chapter 40

1The cutting out and the burning of the sacrificial beasts differ from rite to rite; but the one whom they hold to be the greatest divinity, and in whose honor they hold the greatest festival, that one I now proceed to describe.

2When they have flayed the ox, they pray, and then take out the whole of the entrails from the body, leaving the vitals and the fat inside it; and they cut off the legs, the tip of the loin, and the shoulders and the neck.

3When they have done this, they fill the rest of the ox's body with clean bread, honey, raisins, figs, frankincense, myrrh, and all the other incenses; and having filled it they burn it, pouring abundant oil over it.

4Having first fasted, they sacrifice; and while the offerings burn they all beat themselves; and when they have finished beating, they feast upon what is left to them of the offerings.

Chapter 41

1All the Egyptians sacrifice clean male cattle and calves, but it is not lawful for them to sacrifice the females, for these are sacred to Isis.

2The image of Isis, being in the form of a woman, has cow's horns, just as the Greeks paint Io; and all the Egyptians reverence cows alike, far more than any other cattle.

3For this reason no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek man with the mouth, nor use a Greek man's knife, or spits, or cauldron, nor taste the meat of a clean ox cut up with a Greek knife.

4They bury the cattle that die in this way: the females they cast into the river, but the males each community buries in the suburbs of its city, leaving one horn or both standing proud as a mark; and when the flesh has rotted away and the appointed time comes, a barge comes to each city from the island called Prosopitis.

5This island lies in the Delta, and its circuit is nine schoeni. In this island of Prosopitis there are many other towns, and from the one the barges come to take away the bones of the cattle; the town is named Atarbechis, and in it stands a holy sanctuary of Aphrodite.

6From this town many men go off to other towns, and digging up the bones they carry them away and bury them all in one place. In the same way as the cattle they bury the other beasts that die; for this law too has been laid down in their case, since they kill none of these either.

Chapter 42

1All those who have founded a temple of the Theban Zeus, or belong to the Theban district, abstain from sheep and sacrifice goats.

2For the Egyptians do not all worship the same gods alike, except for Isis and Osiris, whom they say is Dionysus—these all worship alike. But those who possess a temple of Mendes, or belong to the Mendesian district, abstain from goats and sacrifice sheep.

3Now the Thebans, and all who abstain from sheep for their sake, say that this law was laid down among them for the following reason: Heracles was determined at all costs to see Zeus, and Zeus was unwilling to be seen by him; but at last, when Heracles persisted, Zeus devised this.

4He flayed a ram and, having cut off its head, held it before him and, wrapping himself in the fleece, displayed himself to Heracles in that guise. From this the Egyptians make the image of Zeus with a ram's face, and from the Egyptians the Ammonians do so too, who are colonists of both Egyptians and Ethiopians and speak a language between the two.

5And it is my opinion that the Ammonians took their name for this very reason; for the Egyptians call Zeus Amun. The Thebans do not sacrifice rams, and for this reason they hold them sacred.

6On one day of the year, at the festival of Zeus, they cut up a single ram and flay it and clothe the image of Zeus in the same way; and then they bring another image of Heracles and set it before that one. When they have done this, all those who serve at the temple beat themselves over the ram, and then bury it in a sacred coffin.

Chapter 43

1Of Heracles I heard this account: that he is one of the twelve gods; but of the other Heracles, whom the Greeks know, I could learn nothing anywhere in Egypt.

2And that the Egyptians did not take the name of Heracles from the Greeks, but rather the Greeks from the Egyptians—and it was the Greeks who gave the name Heracles to the son of Amphitryon—this too I have many proofs to show; among them this: that the parents of this Heracles, Amphitryon and Alcmene both, were of Egyptian descent, and that the Egyptians say they know neither the name of Poseidon nor that of the Dioscuri, and that these gods are not numbered among their other gods.

3And if they had taken the name of any divinity from the Greeks, it was these gods above all, and not least, that they would have been likely to remember—if even then they went to sea and some of the Greeks were seafarers, as I suppose and as my judgment concludes; so that the Egyptians would know the names of these gods rather than that of Heracles.

4No, Heracles is an ancient god among the Egyptians; and by their own reckoning it is seventeen thousand years from the reign of Amasis back to the time when the twelve gods came into being out of the eight, of whom they count Heracles to be one.

Chapter 44

1Being eager to know something sure about these matters from every source I could, I sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia, where I learned there is a holy sanctuary of Heracles.

2I saw it richly furnished with many other offerings besides, and in it were two pillars, one of refined gold, the other of emerald, a stone that shines greatly in the night. Entering into talk with the priests of the god, I asked how long a time it was since their sanctuary was founded.

3I found that not even these agreed with the Greeks; for they said that the sanctuary of the god was founded at the same time that Tyre was settled, and that it is two thousand three hundred years since the Tyrians have dwelt in Tyre. I saw in Tyre also another sanctuary of Heracles, the one called Thasian.

4I came also to Thasos, where I found a sanctuary of Heracles founded by Phoenicians who sailed out in search of Europa and settled Thasos; and this too is five generations of men earlier than the birth of Amphitryon's Heracles in Greece.

5What I have learned shows clearly that Heracles is an ancient god; and those of the Greeks seem to me to do most rightly who maintain two Heraclea, and who sacrifice to the one as to an immortal, with the title Olympian, but to the other offer funeral rites as to a hero.

Chapter 45

1The Greeks say many things thoughtlessly, and this tale of theirs about Heracles is foolish: that when he came to Egypt the Egyptians crowned him and led him out in procession to sacrifice him to Zeus; that at first he kept quiet, but when they began the rite at the altar, he turned to force and killed every one of them.

2To me the Greeks who say this seem to be utterly ignorant of the nature and customs of the Egyptians; for it is not lawful for them to sacrifice any beasts except swine, and male cattle and calves, so far as they are clean, and geese—how then could such men sacrifice human beings?

3And further, if Heracles was one man and still a mortal, as they say, how could it be in his nature to kill tens of thousands? On these matters, then, having said so much, may I have the good will of gods and heroes alike.

Chapter 46

1The Egyptians I have named do not sacrifice goats and he-goats for the following reasons: the Mendesians count Pan to be one of the eight gods, and these eight gods they say came into being before the twelve.

2Both the painters and the image-makers paint and carve the image of Pan with a goat's face and goat's legs, just as the Greeks do, not thinking that he is really so, but likening him to the other gods; but why they portray him so, it is not my pleasure to say.

3All goats are reverenced by the Mendesians, and the males more than the females; and of the goats the goatherds have the greater honor. But of them all they honor one above the rest; and when it dies, great mourning is held throughout the whole Mendesian district.

4Both the he-goat and Pan are called Mendes in Egyptian. And in my own time this portent happened in that district: a he-goat lay with a woman in plain sight. This came to be set before the eyes of men.

Chapter 47

1The Egyptians hold the swine to be an unclean beast; if a man touches one as he passes by, he goes at once to the river and dips himself with all his clothes on. And swineherds, though Egyptians by birth, are the only men in Egypt who cannot enter any temple, nor will anyone give his daughter in marriage to one of them or take a wife from among them; but the swineherds marry and give in marriage among themselves.

2To the other gods the Egyptians do not think it right to sacrifice swine; but to the Moon and to Dionysus, at the same time and on the same full moon, they sacrifice swine and eat the meat. There is an account given by the Egyptians of why they have come to loathe swine at the other festivals but sacrifice them at this one; but for me, though I know it, it is not seemly to tell.

3This is the manner of the sacrifice of swine to the Moon: when a man has sacrificed, he takes the tip of the tail, the spleen, and the caul, and putting them together he covers them with all the fat that is found around the belly of the beast, and then burns them on the fire; but the rest of the meat they eat on the full moon on which they have sacrificed the victims, and on no other day would they touch it. The poorer among them, for want of means, fashion pigs of dough and, baking these, sacrifice them.

Chapter 48

1At the evening meal of the festival of Dionysus every man slaughters a pig before his own door and gives it back to the very swineherd who sold it to him.

2In all else the Egyptians hold the festival of Dionysus in nearly the same fashion as the Greeks, except for the choruses; but in place of phalli they have devised other things—images a cubit high, worked by strings, which women carry about the villages, with the member nodding, not much smaller than the rest of the body; and a flute goes in front, and the women follow singing of Dionysus.

3Why the image has so large a member, and why that is the only part of the body that moves, there is a sacred account told.

Chapter 49

1Now I think that Melampus, son of Amytheon, was not ignorant of this sacrifice but was well acquainted with it. For Melampus is the man who introduced to the Greeks the name of Dionysus and the sacrifice and the procession of the phallus; he did not set forth the whole account with perfect accuracy, but those who came after him as sages made it clearer and fuller. The phallus carried in honor of Dionysus was taught them by Melampus, and learning it from him the Greeks do as they do.

2For my part I say that Melampus was a man of wisdom, who acquired the art of divination for himself and, having learned it from Egypt, taught the Greeks many other things besides and the rites of Dionysus among them, altering a few of them. For I will not say that the rites performed for the god in Egypt and those performed among the Greeks fell out by chance; for then they would be of the same fashion among the Greeks and not of recent introduction.

3Nor again will I say that the Egyptians took this or any other custom from the Greeks. But it seems to me that Melampus learned the rites of Dionysus chiefly from Cadmus of Tyre and the Phoenicians who came with him into the land now called Boeotia.

Chapter 50

1Nearly all the names of the gods have come from Egypt into Greece. That they come from foreign parts I find to be so on inquiry, and I think they came for the most part from Egypt.

2For except for Poseidon and the Dioscuri, as I have said before, and Hera and Hestia and Themis and the Graces and the Nereids, the names of all the other gods have always been in Egypt. And I speak as the Egyptians themselves say. But those gods whose names they say they do not know—these I think were named by the Pelasgians, except for Poseidon; him they learned from the Libyans.

3For no people possessed the name of Poseidon from the beginning except the Libyans, and they have always honored this god. The Egyptians believe in no heroes at all.

Chapter 51

1These things, then, and others besides, which I shall declare, the Greeks have taken from the Egyptians; but the making of the images of Hermes with erect members they did not learn from the Egyptians—it was from the Pelasgians that the Athenians first of all the Greeks received it, and from the Athenians the rest.

2For by that time the Pelasgians had come to be counted as Greeks, having become fellow-dwellers with the Athenians in their country—Athens being the very place from which the name of Greeks began to be applied. Whoever has been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabiri, which the Samothracians celebrate after receiving them from the Pelasgians, that man knows what I mean.

3For these Pelasgians, the same who became fellow-dwellers with the Athenians, dwelt in Samothrace before that, and from them the Samothracians received the mysteries.

4So it was the Athenians who, learning it from the Pelasgians, were the first of the Greeks to make the images of Hermes with erect members; and the Pelasgians told a sacred story about it, which is set forth in the mysteries at Samothrace.

Chapter 52

1The Pelasgians of old sacrificed to all the gods with prayers, as I know from what I heard at Dodona, but they gave neither a title nor a name to any of them, for they had not yet heard any. They called them gods from this reasoning: that they had set all things in order and assigned to each its courses.

2Then, after a long time had passed, they learned the names of the other gods, which had come from Egypt; but the name of Dionysus they learned much later. And in time they consulted the oracle at Dodona about the names; for this oracle is held to be the most ancient of the oracles in Greece, and it was the only one in those days.

3When the Pelasgians consulted at Dodona whether they should adopt the names that had come from foreign parts, the oracle answered that they should. From that time onward they sacrificed using the names of the gods; and later the Greeks received them from the Pelasgians.

Chapter 53

1Where each of the gods came into being, or whether they all existed always, and what forms they have, men did not know until the other day, so to speak—yesterday.

2For Hesiod and Homer, I believe, were four hundred years before my time and no more; and these are the men who made a theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their titles, assigned to them their honors and their functions, and declared their forms.

3The poets who are said to have lived before these men came, in fact, after them, in my opinion. Of these matters the earlier ones the priestesses of Dodona relate; but the latter ones, concerning Hesiod and Homer, I myself relate.

Chapter 54

1Concerning the oracles, both the one in Greece and the one in Libya, the Egyptians tell this story. The priests of the Theban Zeus said that two women, priestesses, were carried off from Thebes by Phoenicians, and that one of them was sold into Libya and the other to the Greeks; and that these were the women who first established the oracles in the two nations I have named.

2When I asked them how they could know this so exactly, they said that a great search was made by them for these women, and that though they could not find them, they learned later these facts about them which they now relate.

Chapter 55

1This I heard from the priests at Thebes; and the following is what the prophetesses of Dodona say: two black doves flew from Thebes in Egypt, and one of them came to Libya and the other to their land.

2Alighting on an oak, it spoke with a human voice, saying that an oracle of Zeus must be established there; and they understood that the message brought them was of divine origin, and so they did as they were told.

3The dove that went away to Libya, they say, commanded the Libyans to make an oracle of Ammon; and this too is an oracle of Zeus. These things were told me by the priestesses of Dodona, the eldest of whom was named Promeneia, the next Timarete, and the youngest Nicandre; and the other Dodonaeans who serve at the temple agreed with them.

Chapter 56

1This is my own judgment of the matter: if the Phoenicians really did carry off the sacred women and sell one of them into Libya and the other into Greece, then, in my opinion, this woman was sold to the Thesprotians in the land that is now called Greece but was in earlier days called Pelasgia.

2Then, being a slave there, she set up a sanctuary of Zeus beneath a growing oak; for it was natural that one who had served in a sanctuary of Zeus at Thebes should keep the memory of the god in the land where she had arrived.

3From this she came to be the foundress of an oracle, once she had learned the Greek tongue; and she said that a sister of hers had been sold in Libya by the same Phoenicians by whom she herself had been sold.

Chapter 57

1I think the women were called doves by the Dodonaeans because they were foreigners and seemed to them to twitter like birds.

2But after a time, they say, the dove spoke with a human voice, when the woman began to speak so that they could understand; for as long as she spoke a foreign tongue, she seemed to them to sound like a bird—for how could a dove speak with a human voice? And by saying that the dove was black they indicate that the woman was Egyptian.

3The oracle at Thebes in Egypt and that at Dodona are very like one another. And the art of divination by victims also has come to Greece from Egypt.

Chapter 58

1Festivals and processions and solemn rites of approach were first established by the Egyptians, and from them the Greeks have learned them. My proof of this is as follows: the Egyptian festivals are plainly held from a very long time back, while the Greek ones were established only recently.

Chapter 59

1The Egyptians do not gather for a festival once a year but many times; most of all and most eagerly at Bubastis for Artemis, and second at Busiris for Isis.

2For in this city is the greatest temple of Isis, and the city lies in the middle of the Delta of Egypt; and Isis is Demeter in the Greek tongue.

3Third, they hold their festival at the city of Sais for Athena; fourth, at the city of Heliopolis for the Sun; fifth, at the city of Buto for Leto; sixth, at the city of Papremis for Ares.

Chapter 60

1When they travel to the city of Bubastis, they do as follows. Men sail with women, and a great multitude of both in every barge; some of the women shake castanets and some play the flute, and all the way along the voyage the rest of the women and the men sing and clap their hands.

2When on the voyage they come near any other town, they bring the barge alongside the shore and do as follows: some of the women do as I have said, others shout mockery at the women of that town, others dance, and others stand up and lift their skirts. This they do at every riverside town.

3When they reach Bubastis, they hold the festival and offer great sacrifices, and more wine of the vine is drunk at this festival than in all the rest of the year together. Men and women gather there, apart from children, to the number of seventy myriads, as the people of the country say.

Chapter 61

1These things, then, are done in this way; and how they hold the festival of Isis at the city of Busiris I have already related. For after the sacrifice all the men and all the women beat themselves, very many myriads of them; but whom they beat, it is not lawful for me to say.

2As many Carians as dwell in Egypt do even more than this, for they cut their foreheads with knives; and by this they are plain to see that they are foreigners and not Egyptians.

Chapter 62

1When they gather at the city of Sais, during the sacrifice at night they all light many lamps in the open air around the houses; and the lamps are shallow bowls filled with salt and oil, with the wick floating on the surface, and this burns all night; and the festival is named the Lighting of the Lamps.

2Those Egyptians who do not come to this festival keep the night of the sacrifice and light lamps themselves as well; and so they are lit not only at Sais but throughout all Egypt. And why this night has come to have light and honor, there is a sacred account told.

Chapter 63

1To Heliopolis and to Buto they go only to offer sacrifices. But at Papremis they offer sacrifices and gifts as elsewhere; and when the sun begins to go down, a few of the priests are busy about the image, while most of them stand in the entrance of the temple holding wooden clubs; and others stand opposite in a body, more than a thousand men who are fulfilling their vows, and these too carry sticks.

2The image, which is kept in a small gilded wooden shrine, they bring out the day before into another sacred building. The few priests left with the image draw a four-wheeled wagon carrying the shrine and the image that is in it, while those who stand in the gateway do not let them enter; and the men who are fulfilling their vows come to the god's defense and strike them, and they fight back.

3There a hard fight with clubs takes place, and they break each other's heads; and I think many also die of their wounds; the Egyptians, however, said that no one dies.

4The people of the country say that this festival was established for the following reason: the mother of Ares dwelt in this temple, and Ares, reared elsewhere, came when he was grown, wishing to join with his mother; and the mother's attendants, since they had never seen him before, would not let him pass but kept him off; so he brought men from another town, roughly handled the attendants, and went in to his mother. From this, they say, this blow was ordained for Ares at the festival.

Chapter 64

1These were the first to observe the rule that men must not lie with women in the temples nor enter a temple unwashed after being with women. For nearly all other men, except the Egyptians and the Greeks, have intercourse in temples and enter a temple unwashed after rising from women, holding that men are no different from the other beasts.

2For they see other beasts and kinds of birds coupling in the temples of the gods and in the sacred precincts; and if this were not pleasing to the god, the beasts would not do it. These men, then, adduce such arguments in doing what is not to my liking.

Chapter 65

1The Egyptians show an exceeding reverence in all that concerns the temples, and in this too.

2Egypt, though it borders on Libya, is not much troubled with wild beasts; but all the beasts that are in it are held to be sacred, some of them living with the men and some apart. If I were to tell why the beasts are dedicated as sacred, I would be carried down into matters of divinity, which I am most reluctant to relate; and of such matters as I have touched on already, I spoke under the compulsion of necessity.

3The law regarding the beasts is this: keepers are appointed to feed each kind separately, both men and women, Egyptians by birth, and the office passes from father to son.

4Those who live in the cities fulfill their vows in this way: praying to the god to whom the beast belongs, they shave their children's heads—either the whole head, or half of it, or a third—and weigh the hair against silver; and whatever it weighs, they give to the keeper of the beasts, and she in return cuts up fish and provides food for the beasts.

5Such, then, is the provision made for their food; and if a man kills one of these beasts, if he does it deliberately the penalty is death, but if unwillingly he pays such penalty as the priests appoint. But whoever kills an ibis or a hawk, whether deliberately or unwillingly, must die.

Chapter 66

1Though many beasts live with mankind, they would be far more numerous still, if such things did not befall the cats: when the females have borne, they no longer go to the males, and the males, desiring to mate, cannot.

2Against this they contrive as follows: they snatch the kittens from the females and steal them away and kill them; but though they kill them, they do not eat them. The females, deprived of their young and desiring others, then come to the males; for the creature is fond of its young.

3When a fire breaks out, a divine frenzy seizes the cats; the Egyptians stand apart in ranks, taking no care to put out the blaze, while the cats slip through and leap over the men and spring into the fire.

4When this happens, great mourning befalls the Egyptians. In whatever house a cat dies a natural death, all who live there shave their eyebrows only; but wherever a dog dies, the whole body and the head.

Chapter 67

1The dead cats are carried away to sacred buildings, where they are embalmed and buried, in the city of Bubastis; dogs are buried by the people of each city in their own city, in sacred coffins. And ichneumons are buried in the same way as the dogs. Mice and hawks they carry to the city of Buto, and the ibises to the city of Hermes.

2Bears, which are scarce, and wolves, which are not much bigger than foxes, they bury on the spot where they are found lying.

Chapter 68

1The nature of the crocodile is this: it eats nothing during the four winter months, being a four-footed creature of both land and water. For it lays its eggs on land and hatches them there, and it spends most of the day on dry ground and the whole night in the river; for the water is warmer than the clear sky and the dew.

2Of all mortal creatures that we know, this grows to the greatest size from the smallest beginning; for its eggs are not much bigger than a goose's, and the young is in proportion to the egg, but as it grows it comes to be as much as seventeen cubits long, and even more.

3It has the eyes of a pig, and large tusks in proportion to its body. It is the only beast that has no tongue, and it does not move its lower jaw, but alone of beasts brings its upper jaw down to the lower.

4It has strong claws and a scaly hide that cannot be broken on its back. It is blind in the water, but in the open air it sees most keenly. Since it lives in the water, its mouth inside is entirely full of leeches. All other birds and beasts flee from it, but the trochilos lives at peace with it, since the crocodile is helped by it.

5For when the crocodile comes out of the water onto land and then opens its mouth—for it generally does this facing the west wind—the trochilos slips inside its mouth and swallows the leeches; and the crocodile, being helped, is pleased and does the trochilos no harm.

Chapter 69

1To some of the Egyptians crocodiles are sacred, but to others not, and these treat them as enemies. Those who dwell around Thebes and around Lake Moeris hold them to be very sacred indeed.

2Each of these peoples keeps one crocodile, taught to be tame, putting earrings of cast stone and of gold into its ears and bracelets on its forefeet, and giving it set portions of food and victims, and tending it with all care while it lives; and when it dies they embalm it and bury it in sacred coffins.

3But those who dwell around the city of Elephantine eat them, not holding them sacred. They are called not crocodiles but champsae; and the Ionians named them crocodiles, likening their appearance to the crocodiles that live in the stone walls in their own land.

Chapter 70

1Many and various are the ways of hunting them; but the one that seems to me most worth the telling I shall describe. When a man has baited a hook with a pig's back, he casts it into the middle of the river, while he himself stands on the bank of the river with a live pig, which he beats.

2Hearing the sound, the crocodile makes for it, and coming upon the back swallows it; and the men pull. When it has been dragged onto land, the first thing the hunter does is to plaster its eyes with mud; and having done this he easily masters what is left, but if he does not do it, only with difficulty.

Chapter 71

1The river horses are sacred in the district of Papremis, but to the other Egyptians they are not sacred. Their form is this: it is four-footed, cloven-hoofed, with the hoofs of an ox, snub-nosed, with a horse's mane, showing tusks, with a horse's tail and voice, and as big as the largest ox; and its hide is so thick that when it is dried, javelins are made from it.

Chapter 72

1Otters, too, are found in the river, and these they hold to be sacred. Of fish they hold the one called lepidotus and the eel to be sacred; these they say are sacred to the Nile; and of birds the fox-goose.

Chapter 73

1There is another sacred bird too, whose name is phoenix. I have not seen it myself except in a painting, for it visits them only rarely—every five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say;

2and they say it comes then, whenever its father dies. If it is like the painting, it is of such a size and such a sort: some of its feathers are gold and others red as red can be; in outline it is most like an eagle, and in size as well.

3They say this bird contrives the following, though I do not believe their story: setting out from Arabia, it carries its father, plastered up in myrrh, to the temple of the Sun, and buries him in the temple of the Sun,

4carrying him thus: first it molds an egg of myrrh as large as it can carry, then it tries its strength at bearing it; and when it has made the trial, it hollows out the egg and puts its father inside, and with other myrrh it plasters over the place of the egg where it hollowed it out to lay his father in; with the father inside, the weight is the same as before. Plastering it all up, it carries him off to Egypt, to the temple of the Sun. This is what they say this bird does.

Chapter 74

1Around Thebes there are sacred snakes that do men no harm at all; small as they are in size, they carry two horns that grow from the top of the head. These, when they die, they bury in the temple of Zeus, for they say they belong to this god.

Chapter 75

1There is a place in Arabia, lying almost exactly opposite the city of Buto, and to this place I came to inquire about the winged snakes. When I arrived I saw snake bones and spines in numbers impossible to describe: there were piles of spines, some great, some smaller, and some smaller still than these, and they were many.

2The place where the spines lie heaped up is like this: it is a pass leading out of narrow mountains into a great plain, and this plain joins on to the Egyptian plain.

3The story is that every spring winged snakes fly from Arabia toward Egypt, and the ibis birds meet them at the pass into this country and do not let them through but kill them.

4And the Arabs say that for this deed the ibis is held in great honor by the Egyptians; and the Egyptians too agree that for these reasons they honor these birds.

Chapter 76

1This is the shape of the ibis: it is entirely black, dreadfully so; it has the legs of a crane, a face that is very hooked, and is as big as a corncrake. Such is the look of the black ones that fight against the snakes; of those that rather keep about men's feet—for there are two kinds of ibis—

2it is bare of head and of the whole neck, white in its plumage except for the head, the neck, the tips of the wings and the tip of the tail (all these parts I have named are dreadfully black), while in legs and face it resembles the other kind. The snake is shaped just like the water snakes,

3but what it bears are not true feathers—they are most like the wings of a bat. Let this much be said of the sacred animals.

Chapter 77

1Of the Egyptians themselves, those who live in the sown land of Egypt, cultivating memory above all other men, are by far the most learned of all those whose acquaintance I have made;

2and this is the way of life they follow: they purge themselves for three days in succession in every month, seeking health by means of vomits and enemas, on the belief that all diseases in men come from the food they eat.

3For in fact the Egyptians are, next to the Libyans, the healthiest of all people, in my opinion because of the seasons, since the seasons do not change; for it is in change above all that men fall ill, in all other things and most of all in the seasons.

4They eat bread made from spelt, which they call kyllistis. They drink wine made from barley, for they have no vines in their land. Of fish they eat some raw, dried in the sun, and some salted in brine.

5Quails and ducks and the small birds they eat raw, after first salting them. Any other birds or fish they have, except those that are held to be sacred, the rest they eat roasted and boiled.

Chapter 78

1At the parties of their well-to-do, when they have finished dinner, a man carries round a corpse in a wooden coffin, made to look as like the real thing as possible both in painting and in workmanship, as big as one or two cubits; showing it to each of the guests he says, looking at it: "Drink and enjoy yourself, for when you are dead you will be like this." This is what they do at their drinking parties.

Chapter 79

1They keep the customs of their fathers and adopt no others; among their many other worthy customs there is one song, the Linus, which is sung in Phoenicia and in Cyprus and elsewhere, though among the different peoples it bears a different name;

2now it turns out to be the same song the Greeks sing, calling it Linus—so that of the many things in Egypt that fill me with wonder, one is where they got the name Linus. Yet they plainly have sung this song always. In Egyptian the Linus is called Maneros.

3The Egyptians said that he was the only son of the first king of Egypt, and that dying before his time he was honored by the Egyptians with these laments, and that this was their first and only song.

Chapter 80

1In this too the Egyptians agree with the Lacedaemonians alone among the Greeks: their younger men, meeting their elders in the road, give way and step aside, and rise from their seats when they come up.

2This, however, they share with no other Greeks: instead of greeting one another in the roads, they make obeisance, lowering the hand to the knee.

Chapter 81

1They wear linen tunics with tassels around the legs, called kalasiris, and over these they throw white woolen garments. Woolen garments, however, are not carried into the temples, nor buried with them; for that is not holy.

2In this they agree with the rites called Orphic and Bacchic, which are really Egyptian and Pythagorean; for it is not holy for one who has part in these rites to be buried in woolen garments. And there is a sacred story told about them.

Chapter 82

1These too are among the discoveries of the Egyptians: to which god each month and each day belongs, and, for each person, what he will meet with on the day of his birth, how he will end his life and what sort of person he will be. And the Greeks who took to poetry made use of these.

2More portents too have been found by them than by all other people; when a portent occurs they watch it and write down what comes of it, and if ever one like it happens later, they believe the outcome will be the same.

Chapter 83

1Divination among them is arranged thus: it belongs to no man, but to some of the gods; for there are there oracles of Heracles and of Apollo and of Athena and of Artemis and of Ares and of Zeus, and the one they hold in the highest honor of all their oracles is that of Leto in the city of Buto. Their modes of divination, though, are not all alike, but differ one from another.

Chapter 84

1Medicine is divided among them as follows: each physician is skilled in one disease and no more, and the land is full of physicians; some are set over the eyes, some over the head, some over the teeth, some over the parts of the belly, and some over the diseases that lie hidden.

Chapter 85

1Their mourning and their burials are as follows: when someone dies in a household of any account, all the women of that household smear their heads and faces with mud, and then, leaving the corpse in the house, they go about through the city beating themselves, with their clothes girded up and their breasts bared, and with them all their kinswomen as well;

2and apart from them the men beat themselves likewise, also girded up. When they have done this, only then do they carry the corpse away to be embalmed.

Chapter 86

1There are men whose whole business lies here, and this is their craft.

2When a corpse is brought to them, they show the bearers wooden models of corpses, painted to imitate the real thing; the costliest of these, they say, is that of the one whose name I do not think it right to mention in connection with such a matter; the second they show, inferior to this one and cheaper, and the third the cheapest. Having explained, they ask the bearers in which of the ways they want the corpse prepared.

3The parties then agree on a price and go away out of sight; those who stay behind embalm the costliest kind in the workshops as follows. First, with a crooked iron they draw the brain out through the nostrils, part of it drawn out this way and part washed out with drugs;

4then with a sharp Ethiopian stone they slit the flank and take out the whole contents of the belly; cleansing it and rinsing it with palm wine, they rinse it again with pounded perfumes;

5then they fill the belly with pure pounded myrrh and cassia and every other perfume except frankincense, and sew it up again. When they have done this, they cure the corpse in natron, hiding it away for seventy days; longer than that it is not permitted to cure it.

6When the seventy days have passed, they wash the corpse and wrap its whole body in strips of linen cloth of byssus, smearing it with gum, which the Egyptians use instead of glue for most purposes.

7Then the kinsmen take it back and have a wooden figure made in human shape; when it is made they enclose the corpse inside it, and closing it up they lay it up in a burial chamber, standing it upright against the wall.

Chapter 87

1This is how they prepare the costliest corpses; those who want the middle way and shrink from the great expense they prepare like this:

2when they have filled the clysters with oil made of cedar, they inject it into the belly of the corpse, without cutting the body open or removing the entrails, injecting it by way of the anus and blocking the clyster's way back out; then they cure it for the appointed days, and on the last day they let out of the belly the cedar oil they had poured in before.

3It has such power that it carries off with it the entrails and the belly all dissolved; the natron meanwhile dissolves the flesh, and what is left of the corpse is only the skin and the bones. When they have done this, they give the corpse back just as it is, having done nothing further to it.

Chapter 88

1The third way of embalming is this, which serves those who are poorer in means: after flushing the belly with a purge, they cure it for seventy days and then hand it back to be carried away.

Chapter 89

1The wives of men of rank, when they die, are not given over at once for embalming; nor are any women who are very beautiful and of great account; but only when three or four days have passed do they hand them over to the embalmers.

2They do this for the following reason, so that the embalmers may not have intercourse with the women; for they say one was caught lying with a woman newly dead, and a man of the same trade informed on him.

Chapter 90

1Whenever an Egyptian or a foreigner alike is seen to have been carried off by a crocodile or to have died by the river itself, in whichever city the body is washed up, it is altogether required that they embalm it and, dressing it as beautifully as possible, bury it in the sacred tombs;

2and no other person may touch it, neither kinsman nor friend, but the priests of the Nile themselves bury it, handling it as something rather more than the corpse of a man.

Chapter 91

1They avoid using Greek customs, and to speak generally, the customs of any other people at all. All the other Egyptians observe this strictly; but Chemmis is a great city in the Theban nome, near Neapolis,

2and in this city there is a square temple of Perseus son of Danae, with palms growing all around it. The gateway of the temple is of stone and very large; and on it stand two great stone statues. Inside the enclosure there is a shrine, and in it stands an image of Perseus.

3These people of Chemmis say that Perseus appears to them often, both in the land and inside the temple, and that one of his sandals is found worn, of two cubits in length, and whenever it appears, all Egypt prospers.

4This is what they say, and for Perseus they do the following Greek things: they hold athletic games with every kind of contest, offering prizes of livestock and cloaks and hides.

5When I asked why Perseus appeared to them alone, and why they had set themselves apart from the other Egyptians by holding athletic games, they said that Perseus had come from their own city; for Danaus and Lynceus, who were men of Chemmis, had sailed away to Greece, and from these they traced the line of descent down to Perseus.

6They said that he came to Egypt for the reason the Greeks also give, carrying the Gorgon's head out of Libya, and that he came to them as well and recognized all his kin; and that he had learned the name of Chemmis on his arrival in Egypt, having heard it from his mother. And it was at his command that they celebrate the athletic games.

Chapter 92

1All these are the customs of the Egyptians who live above the marshes; those who dwell in the marshes follow the same customs as the rest of the Egyptians, and in particular each of them has a single wife, just as the Greeks do, but in the frugality of their food they have hit upon the following.

2When the river rises and the plains are flooded, many lilies grow in the water, which the Egyptians call lotos; these they pluck and dry in the sun, and then they pound the part in the middle of the lotos, which is like a poppy, and make from it bread that they bake in the fire.

3The root of this lotos is also edible and quite sweet; it is round, and about the size of an apple.

4There are other lilies too, resembling roses, which likewise grow in the river; the fruit of these grows in another pod that springs from the root, very like a wasp's comb; inside it grow many edible seeds, each the size of an olive pit, and these are eaten both fresh and dried.

5The papyrus reed, which grows every year: when they pull it up from the marshes, they cut off the top and turn it to other uses, but the part left below, about a cubit long, they eat and sell. Those who want the papyrus at its best stew it in a covered oven and eat it that way. Some of them live on fish alone, and when they catch them and take out the belly, they dry them in the sun and eat them dried.

Chapter 93

1The shoaling fish are not much bred in the rivers; those bred in the lakes do as follows: when the desire to spawn comes upon them, they swim out in shoals to the sea. The males lead the way, shedding the milt, and the females follow and gulp it down and are impregnated by it.

2When they have become full of spawn in the sea, they sail back up again to their own haunts each of them; but the leaders are no longer the same, for now the females have the lead; leading the shoals they do just as the males did before; for they shed their eggs a few at a time, the millet grains, and the males swallow them as they follow. Now these millet grains are fish.

3From the millet grains that survive and are not swallowed the fish grow. Those of them that are caught on their way out to the sea are found rubbed on the left side of their heads, and those caught on their way back up are rubbed on the right side.

4They suffer this for the following reason: keeping close to the land they sail down to the sea with the land on their left, and on the way back up they hold to the same shore, drawing as close to it and touching it as much as they can, so that they do not miss the way because of the current.

5When the Nile begins to rise, the hollows of the land and the marshes along the river are the first to fill, as the water filters in from the river; and at once these become full, and straightway they all teem with small fish.

6As for where these fish are likely to come from, I think I understand it: in the previous year, when the Nile subsides, the fish lay their eggs in the mud and depart with the last of the water; and when the time has come round and the water returns again, these fish at once come into being from those eggs.

Chapter 94

1So it is with the fish. For oil, the Egyptians who live about the marshes use that made from the fruit of the sillicypria, which the Egyptians call kiki, and they make it thus: along the banks of the rivers and the lakes they sow the sillicypria—

2these, which in Greece grows wild by itself; sown in Egypt it bears much fruit, though it smells foul; when they gather it, some crush and press it, and some roast it and boil it down, collecting what runs off from it. It is rich, and for the lamp no less pleasant than olive oil, but it gives off a heavy smell.

Chapter 95

1Against the gnats, which abound here, the Egyptians have contrived the following. Those who live above the marshes are helped by towers, which they climb up into to sleep; for the gnats cannot fly high, being beaten down by the winds.

2For those who live around the marshes other devices take the place of towers: every man of them owns a casting net, with which he catches fish by day, and by night he uses it thus: around the bed where he lies he sets up the net, and then getting in under it he sleeps.

3The gnats, if a man sleeps wrapped in a cloak or in linen, bite through these; but through the net they do not even try at all.

Chapter 96

1Their cargo boats are made of the acacia tree, whose shape is very like the lotos of Cyrene and whose sap is gum. From this acacia they cut timbers of about two cubits and lay them together like bricks, building the boats in the following way:

2around pegs set close together and long they bind the two-cubit timbers; and when they have built the hull this way, they stretch crossbeams over the top. They use no ribs, and on the inside they caulk the joints with papyrus.

3They make a single rudder, and this is passed through the keel. They use an acacia mast and sails of papyrus. These boats cannot sail up the river unless a strong wind holds; they are towed from the land, and downstream they are carried as follows:

4There is a door made of tamarisk, stitched over with a mat of reeds, and a pierced stone of about two talents in weight; the door they tie to a cable and let float out ahead of the boat, and the stone on another cable behind.

5The door, driven on by the current, runs swiftly and draws the baris (for that is the name of these boats), while the stone, dragging behind in deep water, keeps the course straight. These boats are very many, and some of them carry many thousands of talents.

Chapter 97

1When the Nile comes over the land, the cities alone stand out, looking very much like the islands in the Aegean sea; for the rest of Egypt becomes open water, and the cities alone rise above it. When this happens, they travel by boat not along the river's channel but across the middle of the plain.

2To sail up from Naucratis to Memphis the course passes right by the pyramids; but that is not the real course, which lies by the point of the Delta and by the city of Cercasorus; while to Naucratis from the sea and Canopus, sailing across the plain, you will come past the city of Anthylla and the one called Archander's city.

Chapter 98

1Of these, Anthylla, being a city of account, is set aside and given to the wife of whoever is king of Egypt, to supply her footwear; and this has been so from the time Egypt came under the Persians.

2The other city, I think, takes its name from Archander, the son-in-law of Danaus, son of Phthius, son of Achaeus; for it is called Archander's city. It might be some other Archander; at any rate the name is not Egyptian.

Chapter 99

1Up to this point my account rests on my own sight and judgment and inquiry; but from here on I shall tell the tales of the Egyptians as I heard them, with something added from what I have seen myself.

2The priests told me that Menes, the first king of Egypt, first of all shut off the river at Memphis; for the whole river used to flow past the sandy mountain toward Libya, and Menes, about a hundred stades above Memphis, dammed the bend that turns to the south, drying up the ancient channel and digging a course for the river to flow midway between the mountains.

3Even now under the Persians this bend of the Nile, since it is shut off, is kept under close guard and fortified every year; for if the river were to break through and overflow at this point, there would be danger of all Memphis being flooded.

4When the land thus shut off became dry ground for Menes, this first king, he founded in it the city that is now called Memphis—for Memphis too lies in the narrow part of Egypt—and outside it he dug a lake fed from the river toward the north and the west (for the Nile itself shuts it off on the east), and in the city he founded the temple of Hephaestus, which is great and most worthy of mention.

Chapter 100

1After him the priests read off from a papyrus the names of three hundred and thirty other kings. In so many generations of men, eighteen were Ethiopians and one a native woman; all the rest were Egyptian men.

2The name of the woman who reigned was the same as that of the Babylonian queen, Nitocris. They said that she took vengeance for her brother, whom the Egyptians had killed while he was their king; after killing him they had handed the kingdom over to her, and avenging him she destroyed many Egyptians by a trick.

3She built a very long underground chamber, giving out one story as a pretext but contriving something else; then she invited those of the Egyptians she knew were most to blame for the murder, and feasted many of them, and while they were feasting she let the river in upon them through a great hidden channel.

4This is all they told of her, except that when she had done the deed she threw herself into a chamber full of ashes, so that she might not be brought to account.

Chapter 101

1Of the other kings they could show no accomplishment of works, and nothing of any brilliance, save only one, the last of them, Moeris;

2this one left as a memorial the gateway of the temple of Hephaestus turned toward the north wind, and dug a lake, whose circuit in stades I shall set forth later, and built pyramids in it, whose size I shall mention together with the lake itself. This king accomplished so much, but of the others not one anything at all.

Chapter 102

1Passing over these kings, I shall make mention of the one who came after them, whose name was Sesostris;

2the priests said that he first set out with long ships from the Arabian gulf and subdued the peoples living along the Red Sea, until as he sailed on he came to a sea that was no longer navigable because of the shallows.

3From there, when he had returned to Egypt, he took a large part of the army and, by the priests' account, marched through the mainland, subduing every nation that stood in his way.

4Whenever he met with peoples that were valiant and desperately eager to keep their freedom, he set up pillars in their lands, inscribed with letters telling his own name and his fatherland, and how by his own power he had subdued them;

5but those whose cities he took without a fight and easily, of these he inscribed on the pillars the same as of the nations that proved valiant, and he added besides a woman's genitals, wishing to make it clear that they were unmanly.

Chapter 103

1Doing this he traversed the mainland, until he crossed from Asia into Europe and subdued both the Scythians and the Thracians. To these, I think, the Egyptian army came furthest; for in their country the pillars he set up are visible, but beyond them there are no more.

2From there he turned back, and when he came to the river Phasis, I cannot say for certain what happened next—whether king Sesostris himself detached a part of his army and left them there to settle in the country, or whether some of the soldiers, wearied by their wandering, stayed behind around the river Phasis.

Chapter 104

1For the Colchians plainly are Egyptians; and this I say from my own thinking, before I heard it from others. When it came into my mind, I inquired of both peoples, and the Colchians remembered the Egyptians better than the Egyptians remembered the Colchians;

2the Egyptians, however, said that they believed the Colchians were part of the army of Sesostris. This I guessed myself, and from this too, that they are dark-skinned and woolly-haired. And that alone would prove nothing—for there are other peoples such as these—but more telling is this, that the Colchians and the Egyptians and the Ethiopians alone of all peoples have practiced circumcision from the very beginning.

3The Phoenicians and the Syrians in Palestine themselves agree that they learned it from the Egyptians, while the Syrians around the rivers Thermodon and Parthenius, and the Macrones, their neighbors, say they learned it only recently from the Colchians. For these are the only peoples that practice circumcision, and they do it in the same way as the Egyptians, as anyone may see.

4Of the Egyptians and the Ethiopians I cannot say which of them learned it from the other; for plainly it is an ancient thing. But that the Phoenicians learned it through their dealings with Egypt, this too is a strong proof to me: those Phoenicians who have dealings with the Greeks no longer imitate the Egyptians in the matter of the genitals, for they do not circumcise their children.

Chapter 105

1Come now, let me tell another thing in which the Colchians are like the Egyptians: these alone, along with the Egyptians, work flax, and in the same way; and their whole way of life and their language resemble one another. Colchian linen is called by the Greeks Sardonic, while the linen that comes from Egypt is called Egyptian.

Chapter 106

1The pillars that Sesostris king of Egypt set up in the various lands, most of them no longer survive; but in Palestine Syria I saw them myself, with the words I have mentioned still inscribed on them, and a woman's genitals.

2There are also in Ionia two figures of this man carved in the rock, one where the road runs from Ephesus to Phocaea, and one where it runs from Sardis to Smyrna.

3In each place a man is carved, five spans in height, holding a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and the rest of his equipment likewise; for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian;

4and from one shoulder to the other across the breast run Egyptian sacred characters carved in the rock, saying this: "I won this land with my own shoulders." Who he is and where he comes from, here he does not show; elsewhere he has shown it.

5Some of those who have seen these figures guess them to be an image of Memnon, but they are far wide of the truth.

Chapter 107

1This Egyptian Sesostris, as he returned home bringing with him many men from the nations whose lands he had subdued, the priests said that when he reached Daphnae of Pelusium on his way back, his brother, to whom Sesostris had entrusted Egypt, invited him and his sons to a feast, heaped fuel around the house on the outside, and set it on fire.

2When Sesostris learned of this, he at once took counsel with his wife—for he had his wife with him—and she advised him, since he had six children, to stretch two of them across the pyre and so bridge the burning, while he himself, stepping on them, made his escape. Sesostris did this, and two of his children were burned in this way, while the rest escaped with their father.

Chapter 108

1Sesostris, when he had come back to Egypt and punished his brother, put the multitude he had brought with him—the men of the lands he had subdued—to the following use:

2the stones that were brought to the temple of Hephaestus in the reign of this king, being of enormous size, it was these men who dragged them; and all the canals that are now in Egypt these men were compelled to dig, and unwillingly they made Egypt—which before had been passable everywhere by horse and wagon—destitute of both.

3From that time on Egypt, though it is all a plain, has become impassable for horses and wagons; the cause of this is the canals, which are many and of every kind.

4The king cut the country into canals for this reason: those Egyptians whose cities did not lie along the river but inland, whenever the river receded, being short of water had to drink brackish water, drawing it from wells.

Chapter 109

1For these reasons Egypt was cut up by canals. This king, they said, also divided the land among all the Egyptians, giving each an equal square plot, and made the revenues out of this by laying on them a tax to be paid every year.

2If the river carried off any part of a man's plot, he would come to the king and report what had happened, and the king would send men to inspect and measure how much smaller the plot had become, so that he might pay the appointed tax in proportion for the rest of the time.

3It seems to me that geometry was discovered here and came back to Greece; for the sundial and the gnomon and the division of the day into twelve parts the Greeks learned from the Babylonians.

Chapter 110

1This king alone of the Egyptians also ruled over Ethiopia, and he left as a memorial before the temple of Hephaestus stone statues, two of thirty cubits, himself and his wife, and his four sons of twenty cubits each;

2and long afterward the priest of Hephaestus did not permit Darius the Persian to set up a statue in front of them, saying that Darius had not done deeds to match those of Sesostris the Egyptian; for Sesostris had subdued nations no fewer than he had, and the Scythians besides, whereas Darius had not been able to conquer the Scythians.

3It was not right, then, to set up a statue in front of that man's offerings without surpassing him in deeds. And Darius, they say, took this in good part.

Chapter 111

1When Sesostris died, they said, his son Pheron succeeded to the kingdom; he accomplished no military expedition, and it was his lot to become blind, for the following reason. The river had come down to its greatest height then, eighteen cubits, and when it overflowed the fields, a wind fell upon it and the river grew rough;

2and they say that this king, in a fit of folly, took a spear and hurled it into the eddies of the river, and at once his eyes began to fail and he was struck blind. He was blind for ten years, and in the eleventh year an oracle came to him from the city of Buto that his time of punishment was at an end, and he would see again if he washed his eyes with the urine of a woman who had lain with no man but her own husband and had no experience of other men.

3He tried first his own wife, and then, when he did not see again, he tried all the women in turn; and when he regained his sight he gathered all the women he had tried, except the one whose urine he had used to wash his eyes and see again, into one city, which is now called the Red Earth; and having gathered them there he burned them all together with the city itself.

4The one whose urine he had used to wash his eyes and regain his sight, her he took as his wife. Having escaped the affliction of his eyes, he dedicated offerings in all the temples of renown, and the most worth mentioning he dedicated to the temple of the Sun: two obelisks of stone, each made of a single stone, each a hundred cubits long and eight cubits wide.

Chapter 112

1The next to succeed to the kingdom, they said, was a man of Memphis, whose name in the Greek language is Proteus; there is now a precinct of his in Memphis, very beautiful and well appointed, lying south of the temple of Hephaestus.

2Around this precinct dwell Phoenicians of Tyre, and the whole of this quarter is called the Camp of the Tyrians. And in the precinct of Proteus there is a temple called the temple of Foreign Aphrodite; and I gather that this temple belongs to Helen, the daughter of Tyndareus, both because I have heard the story of how Helen stayed with Proteus, and because it is named Foreign Aphrodite; for of all the other temples of Aphrodite, not one is called Foreign.

Chapter 113

1The priests told me, when I inquired into the story of Helen, that things happened as follows. Alexandros carried Helen off from Sparta and was sailing home; and when he was in the Aegean, easterly winds drove him off course into the Egyptian sea, and from there, since the winds would not let up, he came to Egypt, to the mouth of the Nile now called the Canopic mouth, and to Taricheiae.

2On the shore there was the temple of Heracles that is still there, where if a slave of any man takes refuge and has sacred marks stamped upon him, giving himself to the god, no one is permitted to lay hands on him.

3This custom has remained unchanged from the beginning down to my own time. Alexandros' servants deserted him when they learned of the custom observed at the temple, and sitting as suppliants of the god they accused Alexandros, wishing to do him harm, and told the whole story of how matters stood with Helen and of the wrong done to Menelaus; and they made their accusation both to the priests and to the warden of that mouth, whose name was Thonis.

Chapter 114

1When Thonis heard this, he sent the swiftest message to Memphis to Proteus, saying as follows.

2"A stranger has come, a Teucrian by race, who has committed an unholy deed in Greece; for he seduced the wife of his own host, and he comes bringing her and very many treasures, driven by winds to this land. Shall we then let him sail away unharmed, or shall we take from him what he brought with him?"

3Proteus sent back word to this effect: "Seize this man, whoever he is, who has committed an unholy deed against his own host, and bring him to me, so that I may learn what he will have to say for himself."

Chapter 115

1When Thonis heard this, he seized Alexander and held the young women of his ship in custody, and then brought the man himself up to Memphis with Helen and the money, and the suppliants besides.

2Once everything had been brought back, Proteus questioned Alexander: who he was, and where he had sailed from. And Alexander told him both his lineage and the name of his native land, and gave an account of the voyage he had made.

3Then Proteus asked him next where he had gotten Helen. But Alexander wandered in his story and would not tell the truth, and the men who had become suppliants convicted him, laying out the whole story of the wrong.

4At last Proteus revealed to them this speech, saying: "If I did not hold it of great worth to kill no stranger, of all those whom the winds have driven from their course to my land, I would have taken vengeance on you for the Greek's sake—you, the basest of men—who, after receiving a guest's welcome, did the most unholy deed: you went after the wife of your own host. And even that did not suffice you, but you roused her heart to wing and went off carrying her, stolen."

5"And not even that alone sufficed you: you came too after cutting the head from your host's house."

6"Now then, since I count it worth the world not to kill my guests, this woman and the money I will not let you carry off; I myself will keep them for the Greek guest, until he comes here and chooses to take them back. But you and your shipmates I hereby proclaim must ferry yourselves out of my land into some other country within three days; if you will not, I shall treat you as enemies."

Chapter 116

1This is the going-away of Helen to Proteus that the priests said happened. It seems to me that Homer too had heard this story; but because it did not suit his epic poetry as well as the other account he used, he let it go of his own will, having made clear that he knew this story too:

2it is evident, [for] he composed it throughout the Iliad (and nowhere else does he set himself right) — the wandering of Alexander: how, carrying Helen away, he was blown out of his course, wandering in other lands besides, and how he came to Sidon in Phoenicia.

3He also mentions it in the aristeia of Diomede; and the verses go like this: "There lay the robes, embroidered in every pattern, work of Sidonian women, whom godlike Alexander himself had brought from Sidon, sailing across the broad sea, on the voyage on which he brought home Helen, the daughter of a noble sire."

4And he mentions it in the Odyssey, in these verses: "Such were the drugs the daughter of Zeus carried, subtle drugs, good ones, which Polydamna gave her, the bedfellow of Thonis, an Egyptian woman, in whose country the grain-giving earth bears the most drugs of all, many good ones mixed in, many deadly."

5And Menelaus speaks these other verses to Telemachus: "In Egypt the gods still held me, though I longed to sail for home, because I had not offered them hecatombs brought to fulfillment."

6In these verses he shows that he knew Alexander's wandering to Egypt; for Syria borders on Egypt, and the Phoenicians, of whom Sidon is one, dwell in Syria.

Chapter 117

1Judged by these verses, this passage shows—no small proof but the greatest—that the Cypria is not Homer's poem but another man's. For in the Cypria it is said that on the third day Alexander came from Sparta to Ilium, carrying Helen, having had a favoring wind and a smooth sea; but in the Iliad it says that he wandered, carrying her.

Chapter 118

1Homer then, and the Cypria with him—farewell. But when I asked the priests whether the Greeks tell an empty tale about what happened at Ilium or not, they answered this, claiming to know it by inquiry from Menelaus himself:

2that after the abduction of Helen a great host of Greeks came to the land of the Teucrians to aid Menelaus; and when the army had gone ashore and pitched camp, it sent messengers to Ilium, and Menelaus himself went with them;

3that when they had entered inside the wall, they demanded Helen and the money Alexander had carried off in his theft, and demanded penalties for the wrongs; and that the Teucrians answered the same thing then and ever after, on oath and off it: that they had neither Helen nor the money being demanded, but that all of it was in Egypt, and that it would not be just for them to pay penalties for what Proteus, the Egyptian king, held.

4But the Greeks, thinking they were being laughed at by them, laid siege to the city until they took it; and when the wall was taken, and Helen did not appear, but they heard the same story as before, then at last the Greeks, believing the first account, sent Menelaus himself to Proteus.

Chapter 119

1When Menelaus came to Egypt and sailed up to Memphis, and told the truth of his affairs, he met with great hospitality and got Helen back untouched by any harm; and with her, all his own money besides.

2For all he had gained, however, Menelaus became an unjust man toward the Egyptians. Headwinds held him back as he was setting out to sail away; and when this lasted a long time, he contrived a deed that was not holy:

3for he took two children of men of the country and cut their throats as sacrifices. Afterward, when the deed was done and he was hated and pursued, he went off in flight with his ships toward Libya; but from there, where he turned to next, the Egyptians could not say. Of these things, they said, they knew some by inquiry; but what had happened in their own country they could tell with certainty.

Chapter 120

1That is what the Egyptian priests said. I too add my own word to the speech made about Helen, saying this: if Helen had been in Ilium, she would have been given back to the Greeks, whether Alexander consented or not.

2For Priam was not so deranged, nor were the others who were kin to him, that they were willing to hazard their own bodies, their children, and their city, just so that Alexander might live with Helen.

3And if even in the earliest days they knew this—for many of the other Trojans perished whenever they closed with the Greeks, and of Priam himself there was never a battle in which two or three or even more of his sons did not die (if one must speak as the writers of epic do)—with such things befalling them, I for my part expect that even if Priam himself was living with Helen, he would have given her back to the Achaeans, so as to be rid of the evils at hand.

4Nor did the royal power pass around to Alexander, so that, Priam being an old man, the business would rest in his hands; Hector, older than he and more of a man, was to receive it when Priam died, and he would never have allowed his brother, the wrongdoer, to go on—and that too while great evils were befalling because of him, both on himself and on all the other Trojans.

5But the Trojans had no power to give Helen back, and though they told the truth, the Greeks did not believe them—so it seems to me—because the divine was contriving it so that, perishing in utter ruin, they might make this plain to humankind: that great wrongs also have great punishments from the gods. And that is what I have to say about this.

Chapter 121

1After Proteus, they said, Rhampsinitus received the kingship. He left as a memorial the gateway of the temple of Hephaestus that faces toward the west, and opposite the gateway he set up two statues twenty-five cubits in height; the Egyptians call the one standing toward the north Summer, and the one toward the south Winter. The one they call Summer they honor and treat well; the one called Winter they treat in the opposite way.

Chapter 121A

1This king, they said, came into great wealth in silver, such that none of the kings who arose after him could surpass it or even come near. Wanting to store his money in safety, he had a stone chamber built, one of whose walls faced toward the outside of the house. The builder schemed against him and contrived this: he made one of the stones so that it could be drawn out of the wall easily, by two men or even by one.

2When the chamber was finished, the king stored his money in it. But as time went by, the builder, nearing the end of his life, called his sons to him (he had two) and told them that he, with an eye to their future, so that they might have abundant means of living, had devised a trick in building the king's treasury; and having explained everything plainly to them about the drawing out of the stone, he gave them its measurements, saying that if they kept them carefully they would be stewards of the king's money.

3The father ended his life; and the sons were not long about their task. Coming to the palace by night, and finding the stone in the wall, they handled it easily and carried out much of the money.

Chapter 121B

1When the king happened to open the chamber, he marveled to see the money sunk low in its vessels, but had no one to blame: the seals were intact and the chamber fastened shut. And when, on opening it a second time and a third, he saw the money always less (for the thieves were not ceasing their emptying), he did this: he ordered traps made and set them around the vessels in which the money lay.

2The thieves came as they had before, and one of them went inside; when he came to the vessel, he was caught at once in the trap. As soon as he understood what evil he was in, he called his brother without delay, showed him what was happening, and told him to come in as quickly as he could and cut off his head, so that, if he were seen and recognized for who he was, he might not also destroy his brother with him. The other thought he spoke well, and, persuaded, did it; and fitting the stone back in its place, he went home carrying his brother's head.

Chapter 121C

1When day came, the king went into the chamber and was struck with wonder at the sight of the thief's body in the trap without its head, while the chamber stood untouched, having no way in and no way out of any kind. At a loss, he did this: he hung the thief's corpse against the wall and set guards over it, commanding them that anyone they saw weeping over it or mourning for it they should seize and bring to him.

2When the corpse was hung up, the mother took it grievously, and pressing her speeches on the son who remained, she ordered him to contrive, by whatever means he could, how he might take down his brother's body and bring it home; and if he neglected this, she threatened that she would go to the king and betray him as the one who had the money.

Chapter 121D

1The mother kept taking it hard against the surviving son, and though he said much to her he did not persuade her; so he devised this: he got donkeys ready and filled skins with wine, loaded them on the donkeys, and drove them; and when he was beside the guards watching the hanging corpse, he untied the bottoms of two or three of the skins, letting them hang loose.

2As the wine streamed out, he struck his head, crying out loudly, as if he did not know toward which of the donkeys he should turn first. The guards, when they saw the wine running in great quantity, ran out into the road with their vessels and gathered up the spilled wine, reckoning it their gain;

3he fell to quarreling with them all, feigning anger; but as the guards consoled him, after a time he let himself seem to calm down and to set aside his anger, and at last drove his donkeys out of the road and put them right again.

4As more talk arose between them, and he joked with one of them and brought them to laughter, he offered them one of the skins; and the guards, lying down where they were, took to drinking, and he was taken in too and urged to stay and drink with them; and he let himself be persuaded and remained.

5As they made much of him warmly over their cups, he offered them another of the skins besides; and the guards, drinking deep, became thoroughly drunk, and overcome by sleep fell asleep where they had been drinking.

6But he, when the night was far spent, took down his brother's body, and shaved off the right cheeks of all the guards, in mockery of them; and putting the corpse on the donkeys, he drove it home, having accomplished for his mother what had been commanded.

Chapter 121E

1When the king was told that the thief's corpse had been carried off, he was beside himself; but because he wanted at all costs to find out who the man contriving these things could ever be, he did the following—things that are not credible to me:

2he seated his own daughter in a chamber, instructing her to receive every man alike, and, before lying with him, to compel him to tell her what was the cleverest and the most unholy deed he had done in his life; and whoever told her the story of what had happened with the thief, she was to seize and not let go out.

3When the girl did what her father had commanded, the thief, learning for what purpose this was being done, resolved to get the better of the king by his resourcefulness, and did this:

4he cut the arm from the shoulder of a freshly dead corpse and went in carrying it hidden under his cloak. When he entered to the king's daughter and was asked the same questions as all the others, he told her that the most unholy thing he had ever done was to cut off his brother's head when his brother had been caught in the trap in the king's treasury; and the cleverest, to make the guards drunk and take down his brother's hanging corpse.

5When she heard this, she reached out to seize him. In the dark the thief held out to her the dead man's arm; and she grasped it and held it fast, thinking she had that arm of his in her grip; but the thief left it in her hands and made off through the doors in flight.

Chapter 121F

1When even this was carried back to the king, he was astounded at the man's cunning and daring; and at last he had a proclamation sent round to all the cities, offering him freedom from fear and great rewards if he would come into his presence.

2The thief, trusting in this, came to him; and Rhampsinitus marveled greatly, and gave him this daughter to wife as the man who understood the most of all humankind. The Egyptians, he said, had been preferred over all other men, and this man over all the Egyptians.

Chapter 122

1After these things they said that this king went down alive below into the place the Greeks believe to be Hades, and there played at dice with Demeter, sometimes beating her and sometimes being beaten by her, and that he came back again bearing a gift from her, a napkin of gold.

2From the descent of Rhampsinitus, when he had come back again, they said the Egyptians establish a festival; and I know this festival still, observed even in my own day, but whether it is for these reasons that they keep it, I cannot say.

3On that same day the priests weave a linen cloth and bind the eyes of one of their number with a headband; and leading him along, wearing the linen, onto the road that leads to the temple of Demeter, they themselves turn back and go. This priest, with his eyes bound, they say, is led by two wolves to the temple of Demeter, which lies twenty stades from the city, and the wolves lead him back again from the temple to that same place.

Chapter 123

1Whoever finds such things credible may make what use he likes of what the Egyptians say; but my rule, lying beneath the whole account, is this: I write what each people says as I hear it. The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus are the founders of the world below.

2The Egyptians are also the first who said this word: that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that when the body perishes it enters into another living creature that is always coming to be; and when it has made the round of all the land creatures and the sea creatures and the birds, it enters again into the body of a human being as it comes to be; and that this circuit for the soul takes place in three thousand years.

3Some of the Greeks have made use of this doctrine, some earlier and some later, as though it were their own; I know their names, but I do not write them.

Chapter 124

1Up to the time of King Rhampsinitus, the Egyptians said, there was good government everywhere in Egypt and the land prospered greatly; but after him Cheops, who became king over them, drove it to every kind of misery. For he first shut all the temples and forbade the Egyptians to sacrifice at them, and then he ordered all the Egyptians to work for him.

2Some were assigned to haul the stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountain down to the Nile; and when the stones had been carried across the river in boats, he ordered others to take delivery of them and haul them to the mountain called the Libyan mountain.

3They worked in relays of a hundred thousand men at a time, three months in every turn. Ten years were worn away by the people in toiling over the road along which they hauled the stones, a work that in my judgment was not much less than the pyramid itself.

4For its length is five stades, its width ten fathoms, and its height, where it rises highest, eight fathoms; and it is built of polished stone with figures carved on it. Ten years, then, went to this road and to the underground chambers on the hill on which the pyramids stand, the tombs he made for himself on an island after leading in a channel of the Nile.

5The pyramid itself took twenty years to build. Each of its sides measures eight plethra in every direction, the pyramid being square and equal in height, of polished stone fitted together with the greatest precision, and no stone in it is less than thirty feet.

Chapter 125

1This pyramid was built in the following fashion, in steps like a staircase, which some call battlements and others little altars,

2when they had first built it in this form, they raised the remaining stones by machines made of short timbers, lifting them from the ground up onto the first tier of the steps;

3and when the stone had been raised onto it, the stone was set on a second machine standing on the first tier, and from there it was hauled up to the second tier on another machine.

4For there were as many machines as there were tiers of the steps—or else they kept shifting the same single machine, being easy to carry, onto each tier as they took off the stone; for let the account be given both ways, just as it is told.

5The topmost parts of it, at any rate, were finished first, and then they completed the courses next to these, and last of all they finished the parts at ground level and the lowest courses.

6It is recorded in Egyptian writing on the pyramid how much was spent on radishes and onions and garlic for the workmen; and if I remember rightly, what the interpreter who read the writing to me said was that sixteen hundred talents of silver had been spent.

7If this is so, how much must have gone besides on the iron with which they worked, and on food and clothing for the workmen, when they built the works for the length of time I have said, and also, as I think, for no short time in cutting and hauling the stones and in making the excavation underground.

Chapter 126

1To such depths of misery did Cheops descend that, being in need of money, he seated his own daughter in a brothel and ordered her to charge a certain sum of money—how much, they did not tell me. She exacted what her father had commanded, but she also conceived the desire to leave a memorial of her own, and she asked each man who came in to her to present her with one stone for the works.

2From these stones, they said, the pyramid was built that stands in the middle of the three, in front of the great pyramid, each of whose sides is a plethrum and a half.

Chapter 127

1This Cheops, the Egyptians said, reigned fifty years, and at his death his brother Chephren succeeded to the throne; and he followed the same course as the other, in everything else as well as in building a pyramid, though it did not match the dimensions of his;

2for these we measured ourselves (for there are no chambers beneath it, nor does a channel from the Nile flow into it as into the other; instead the water runs through a built conduit around an island, in which they say Cheops himself lies);

3laying the first course of variegated Ethiopian stone forty feet below the level of the other, though equal to it in size, he built it close to the great one. Both stand on the same hill, about a hundred feet in height. Chephren, they said, reigned fifty-six years.

Chapter 128

1These, they reckon, are a hundred and six years, in which the Egyptians were in every misery, and the temples, being kept shut for so long a time, were never opened. So hateful are these kings that the Egyptians are very unwilling to name them, and they call the pyramids after the shepherd Philition, who at that time fed his flocks in these parts.

Chapter 129

1After him, they said, Mycerinus, the son of Cheops, became king of Egypt; the works of his father were not to his liking, and he opened the temples and let the people, worn out to the very last degree of misery, go back to their labor and their sacrifices, and he judged their cases more justly than any other king.

2In this matter of judgment the Egyptians praise him beyond all the kings who have ever ruled. For he judged well in other things too, and above all, when a man went away from his trial aggrieved, the king would give him something from his own purse to satisfy his anger.

3While Mycerinus was thus gentle toward his citizens and practiced such conduct, the first of his misfortunes began with the death of his daughter, the only child he had in his household. Grieving bitterly over what had befallen him and wishing to bury his daughter more richly than was the custom, he had a wooden cow made, hollow, and gilded it, and then buried his dead daughter inside it.

Chapter 130

1This cow, then, was not buried underground; it was still to be seen in my time in the city of Sais, lying in a decorated chamber in the palace. All kinds of incense are burned beside it every day, and a lamp is kept burning all night long every night.

2Near this cow, in another chamber, stand the images of the concubines of Mycerinus, as the priests in the city of Sais told me; for they stand there as wooden colossi, about twenty in number, made naked; but who they are I cannot say except for what is reported.

Chapter 131

1Some tell the following story about this cow and the colossi: that Mycerinus fell in love with his own daughter and lay with her against her will;

2and then, they say, the girl hanged herself out of grief, and he buried her in this cow; and her mother cut off the hands of the serving women who had betrayed the daughter to her father, and now the images of them have suffered the same as the living women did.

3This is idle nonsense, in my judgment, and most of all what they say about the hands of the colossi; for we ourselves saw that their hands had fallen off with time, and they were still to be seen lying at their feet even in my day.

Chapter 132

1The cow is covered in all else with a crimson robe, but its neck and head show through, gilded with very thick gold; and between the horns there is set a golden disk, an image of the circle of the sun.

2The cow does not stand upright but lies on its knees, and is as large as a big living cow. It is carried out of the chamber every year, when the Egyptians beat themselves in honor of the god whom I will not name on such an occasion;

3at that time, then, they also bring the cow out into the light; for they say that she asked her father Mycerinus, as she was dying, that she might see the sun once in every year.

Chapter 133

1After the fate of his daughter, the following happened next to this king: an oracle came to him from the city of Buto that he was fated to live only six years and to die in the seventh.

2Taking this hard, he sent a message of reproach to the god's oracle, complaining in return that his own father and his uncle, who had shut the temples and remembered no god but destroyed men as well, had lived long, while he himself, being devout, was fated to die so soon.

3A second answer came to him from the oracle, saying that for these very reasons he was hastening his life to its end; for he had not done what it was fated that he do; Egypt must be afflicted for a hundred and fifty years, and the two kings who came before him had learned this, but he had not.

4When Mycerinus heard this, believing that his doom was already pronounced, he had a great many lamps made, and as soon as night came on he lit them and drank and took his pleasure, never letting up by day or by night, roaming through the marshes and the groves wherever he learned there were places most fit for reveling.

5This he contrived wishing to show that the oracle was false, so that six years might become twelve for him, by turning his nights into days.

Chapter 134

1This king left behind him a pyramid far smaller than his father's, each of its sides falling twenty feet short of three plethra, square, and clad to half its height in Ethiopian stone; which some of the Greeks say is the tomb of the courtesan Rhodopis, but they are not right.

2They do not even seem to me to know who this Rhodopis was; for they could never have credited her with building such a pyramid, on which uncounted thousands of talents, so to speak, were spent; besides, Rhodopis flourished in the reign of Amasis, not of this king.

3For it was many years after these kings who left these pyramids that Rhodopis lived; she was by birth from Thrace, and she was a slave of Iadmon son of Hephaestopolis, a Samian, and a fellow slave of Aesop the storyteller. For Aesop too belonged to Iadmon, and this was proved most clearly in the following way:

4when the Delphians had made proclamation, on the god's command, that whoever wished to claim the penalty for the life of Aesop should come forward, no one else appeared except another Iadmon, the grandson of Iadmon, who claimed it. So Aesop too belonged to Iadmon.

Chapter 135

1Rhodopis came to Egypt, brought over by Xanthes the Samian; she had come there to work, and she was ransomed for a great sum of money by a man of Mytilene, Charaxus son of Scamandronymus, the brother of Sappho the poet.

2So Rhodopis was set free, and she stayed in Egypt, and becoming very charming she acquired great wealth—for one such as Rhodopis—but not so much as to reach the building of such a pyramid.

3For a tenth part of her wealth can still be seen today by anyone who wishes, and there is no need to credit her with great riches. For Rhodopis desired to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, and she devised a work that no one else had happened to think of and dedicate in a temple, and she dedicated it at Delphi as a memorial of herself.

4With a tenth part of her wealth she made a great number of iron ox-spits, as many as her tenth part would pay for, and sent them to Delphi; and they are still heaped up together there, behind the altar that the Chians dedicated and opposite the temple itself.

5For some reason the courtesans at Naucratis are apt to be charming. In the first place, this woman, about whom this story is told, became so famous that all the Greeks learned the name of Rhodopis; and second, later than her, one named Archidice became a byword throughout Greece, though she was less talked of than the other.

6Charaxus, when he had ransomed Rhodopis and returned home to Mytilene, was mocked roundly by Sappho in a song.

Chapter 136

1Of Rhodopis, then, I have said enough. After Mycerinus, the priests said, Asychis became king of Egypt; he built for Hephaestus the gateway on the side toward the rising sun, which is by far the fairest and by far the greatest of them; for all the gateways have carved figures and a wealth of other ornament in their building, but this one far more than the rest.

2In his reign, they said, there being a great scarcity of money, a law was made for the Egyptians: a man might borrow money by pledging the corpse of his father as security. And this further provision was added to the law: that the man who lent the money should have control of the whole tomb of the borrower; and upon the man who gave this security there lay this penalty if he did not repay the debt: that when he died he might obtain no burial, neither in that ancestral tomb nor in any other, nor might he bury any other of his household who died.

3Wishing to surpass the kings who had ruled Egypt before him, this king left behind him a memorial, a pyramid built of bricks, on which there is an inscription carved in stone that says this:

4"Do not hold me in contempt beside the stone pyramids; for I surpass them as much as Zeus surpasses the other gods. For with poles they thrust down into a lake, and whatever mud clung to the poles, that they gathered and made into bricks, and in such fashion they finished me."

Chapter 137

1This king, then, accomplished so much. After him, they said, a blind man from the city of Anysis became king, whose name was Anysis. In his reign the Ethiopians and Sabacos their king invaded Egypt with a great host.

2The blind man fled away to the marshes, and the Ethiopian ruled Egypt for fifty years, in which time he did the following:

3whenever any of the Egyptians committed an offense, he was willing to kill none of them, but he sentenced each according to the size of the wrong, commanding them to heap up mounds beside their own city, the city from which each of the offenders came. And so the cities became even higher;

4for at first they had been raised by the men who dug the canals in the reign of King Sesostris, and secondly in the time of the Ethiopian they became very high indeed.

5Though many other cities in Egypt were raised as well, in my judgment the city of Bubastis was heaped up the most, where there is a temple of Bubastis most worth describing; for there are other temples that are larger and more costly, but none that is a greater pleasure to look upon. Bubastis, in the Greek tongue, is Artemis.

Chapter 138

1Her temple is like this: apart from the entrance, the rest is an island; for channels from the Nile run in, not meeting one another, but each reaches as far as the entrance of the temple, one flowing around it on this side and the other on that, each a hundred feet wide and shaded with trees.

2The gateway is ten fathoms high, and is adorned with figures of six cubits, worth seeing. The temple lies in the middle of the city and can be seen from every side as one walks around; for since the city has been heaped up high, while the temple has not been moved but is as it was built from the beginning, it lies open to view.

3A wall carved with figures runs around it, and inside there is a grove of very tall trees planted about a great temple, in which the image is; and the temple is a stade in width and in length in every direction.

4By the entrance there is a paved road of stone, about three stades long, leading through the marketplace toward the east, and about four plethra wide; on either side of the road trees grow that reach to heaven; and it leads to a temple of Hermes. This temple, then, is as I have described it.

Chapter 139

1The manner of the Ethiopian's departure, they said, was as follows: he saw this vision in his sleep, and thereupon fled away; it seemed to him that a man stood over him and advised him to gather together all the priests in Egypt and cut them through the middle.

2When he had seen this vision, he said that he thought the gods were showing him this as a pretext, so that by committing impiety against the temples he might bring some evil upon himself from gods or men; he would not do it, but the time had run out for which he was fated to rule Egypt, and he would depart.

3For when he was still in Ethiopia, the oracles that the Ethiopians consult had declared that he was fated to rule Egypt for fifty years. When this time had run its course and the vision of the dream kept troubling him, Sabacos of his own will left Egypt.

Chapter 140

1When the Ethiopian had gone away from Egypt, the blind man came back from the marshes and ruled again, returning from the place where he had lived for fifty years on an island that he had built up of ashes and earth. For the Egyptians used to come to him bringing grain, each as had been assigned to them, unbeknownst to the Ethiopian, and he ordered them to bring ashes as well, as a gift.

2This island no one before Amurtaius was able to discover; for more than seven hundred years the kings who came before Amurtaius were not able to find it. The name of the island is Elbo, and it is ten stades across in every direction.

Chapter 141

1After him the priest of Hephaestus became king, a man named Sethon; he held the fighting men of Egypt in no regard, as though he would never have need of them, and among other indignities he took away their fields, the twelve arourae that under the earlier kings had been granted free of tax to each of them.

2After this Sanacharib, king of the Arabians and the Assyrians, led a great army against Egypt; and the fighting men of the Egyptians would not come to his aid.

3The priest, driven into a corner and at his wit's end, went into the sanctuary to the image and bewailed the fate that threatened him. As he lamented, sleep came over him, and in his dream it seemed that the god stood over him and gave him heart, telling him that he would suffer no harm in facing the army of the Arabians; for he himself would send him defenders.

4Trusting in this dream, he took with him those of the Egyptians who were willing to follow him and encamped at Pelusium—for there are the passes into Egypt. None of the fighting men followed him, but shopkeepers and craftsmen and men of the marketplace.

5When the enemy arrived and fell upon them in the night, field mice swarmed over them and gnawed through their quivers and their bows and the handles of their shields, so that on the next day many of them fell as they fled, with nothing to defend themselves.

6This king now stands in the temple of Hephaestus, made of stone, holding a mouse in his hand, and saying in writing these words: "Whoever looks upon me, let him be devout."

Chapter 142

1Thus far the Egyptians and their priests carried their story, showing that from the first king down to this priest of Hephaestus, the last to reign, there had been three hundred and one generations of men, and in that time as many high priests and as many kings.

2Now three hundred generations of men make ten thousand years; for three generations of men are a hundred years. And the one and forty generations that remained over and above the three hundred make one thousand three hundred and forty years.

3So in eleven thousand three hundred and forty years, they said, no god in human form had appeared; nor did they report anything of the kind either before or after, among the remaining kings of Egypt.

4In this time, they said, the sun rose out of its course four times: twice it rose where it now sets, and twice it set where it now rises. Yet nothing in Egypt changed because of this, neither what the earth and the river produce for them, nor what concerns sickness, nor what concerns death.

Chapter 143

1Before this, when Hecataeus the historian was at Thebes and traced his own descent, connecting his family line with a god in the sixteenth generation, the priests of Zeus did to him what they also did to me, though I had traced no descent of my own:

2leading me into the great hall inside, which is vast, they counted out the wooden colossi, showing as many as they had said; for every high priest sets up there an image of himself in his own lifetime;

3counting them out and showing them, the priests pointed out to me that each was the son of his own father, passing through all the images in turn from that of the man who had died most recently, until they had displayed every one of them.

4But to Hecataeus, who had traced his descent and linked it with a god in the sixteenth generation, they answered with a genealogy of their own as they counted, refusing to accept that a man could be born from a god; and their answer was this, that each of the colossi had been a piromis son of a piromis, until they had shown three hundred and forty-five colossi [called piromis], and they linked them to no god or hero. Piromis, in the Greek tongue, means a good and noble man.

Chapter 144

1All those whose images stood there, then, they showed to have been men of just that sort, far removed from gods.

2Before these men, they said, those who ruled in Egypt were gods who did not live at the same time as men, and of these always one held the power; the last of them to rule was Horus son of Osiris, whom the Greeks name Apollo; it was he who made an end of Typhon, and he was the last king of Egypt. Osiris is Dionysus in the Greek tongue.

Chapter 145

1Among the Greeks, then, Heracles and Dionysus and Pan are held to be the youngest of the gods; but among the Egyptians, Pan is the most ancient and is counted among the eight gods who are called the first; Heracles is among the second twelve, as they are called; and Dionysus among the third, who were born of the twelve gods.

2How many years the Egyptians themselves say there were from Heracles to King Amasis, I have shown before. Pan is said to be older still than these, and Dionysus the youngest of them—and even for him they reckon fifteen thousand years to the time of King Amasis.

3All this the Egyptians say they know for certain, since they count the years and record them continually.

4Dionysus, who is said to have been born of Semele the daughter of Cadmus, was born about sixteen hundred years before my time; Heracles son of Alcmena about nine hundred; and Pan, who is said to be born of Penelope—for the Greeks say that Pan was born of Penelope and Hermes—is younger than the Trojan War by about eight hundred years up to my day.

Chapter 146

1Of these two accounts, then, every man may use whichever he is readier to believe; for myself, my opinion of them has been set forth. If these too had appeared and grown old in Greece, like Heracles the son of Amphitryon, and likewise Dionysus son of Semele and Pan son of Penelope, one might say that these also were men who bore the names of the gods who had been before them.

2But as it is, the Greeks say that Dionysus was sewn into the thigh of Zeus as soon as he was born and carried to Nysa, which lies above Egypt in Ethiopia; and as for Pan, they cannot say what became of him after he was born. It is clear to me that the Greeks learned the names of these gods later than the names of the other gods; and from the time when they learned them, from that time they reckon their birth.

Chapter 147

1All this, then, the Egyptians themselves say. But what other men say, in agreement with the Egyptians, about what has come to pass in this land, that I shall now set forth; and something of what I have seen myself will be added to it.

2When the Egyptians were freed after the reign of the priest of Hephaestus—for they were not able to live without a king—they established twelve kings, dividing all Egypt into twelve portions.

3These made marriages with one another and ruled under these laws: that they would not overthrow one another, and that none would seek to have more than another, and that they should be the firmest of friends.

4They made these laws and strictly observed them for this reason: at the very beginning, as soon as they entered upon their rule, an oracle had been given to them that whoever of them should pour a libation with a bronze bowl in the temple of Hephaestus, he should be king of all Egypt; for they used to gather together in all the temples.

Chapter 148

1They resolved, moreover, to leave a memorial of themselves in common, and having so resolved they built the labyrinth, a little above the lake of Moeris, near the place called the City of Crocodiles; and I have seen it, and it is beyond all telling.

2For if a man were to add up all the buildings and the works of the Greeks, they would be found to have cost less labor and less money than this labyrinth. And yet the temple at Ephesus is a notable one, and so is the one at Samos.

3The pyramids too are beyond description, and each of them is worth many great Greek works; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids.

4Of this [for] there are twelve courts with roofs, with gates facing one another, six turned toward the north and six toward the south, standing in a row, and one wall encloses them on the outside. Within are double chambers, some underground and some above ground, three thousand in number, fifteen hundred of each kind.

5The upper chambers we saw ourselves as we passed through them, and it is from what we saw that we speak; but the underground chambers we learned of only by report. For the Egyptians in charge were wholly unwilling to show them, saying that the tombs of the kings who first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles were there.

6So what concerns the lower chambers we report as we heard it, but the upper ones we saw ourselves, and they are works greater than human. For the passages through the covered chambers and the winding ways through the courts, of the greatest intricacy, afforded endless wonder, leading from a court into the chambers, from the chambers into colonnades, from the colonnades into other covered rooms, and from the chambers into other courts.

7The roof of all these is of stone, like the walls, and the walls are full of carved figures, and each court is surrounded by colonnades of white stone fitted together with the greatest precision. Where the labyrinth ends, at its angle, there stands a pyramid of forty fathoms, with great animals carved on it; and a way into it has been made under the ground.

Chapter 149

1Such as this labyrinth is, the lake called the lake of Moeris, beside which it is built, offers a wonder still greater: the measure of its circuit is three thousand six hundred stades, being sixty schoeni, which is equal to the seaboard of Egypt itself. The lake lies stretched out toward the north and the south, and it is fifty fathoms deep where it is deepest.

2That it is made by hand and dug out, the lake itself makes clear; for in the middle of the lake stand two pyramids, each rising fifty fathoms above the water, and with as much again built beneath the water; and on each of them sits a colossus of stone on a throne.

3Thus the pyramids are a hundred fathoms in all; and a hundred fathoms exactly are a stade of six plethra, the fathom being measured as six feet or four cubits, the foot being four palms and the cubit six palms.

4The water in the lake is not natural—for the land here is exceedingly dry—but has been brought in from the Nile through a channel; and for six months it flows into the lake, and for six months out again into the Nile.

5And when it flows outward, then for those six months it pays into the royal treasury a talent of silver a day from the fish; but when the water flows into it, twenty minae.

Chapter 150

1The people of the country told me also that this lake flows underground into the Syrtis in Libya, turning westward into the interior along the mountain that lies above Memphis.

2Since I saw the earth from this excavation nowhere—for I made a point of it—I asked those who lived nearest the lake where the earth that had been dug out was. They told me where it had been carried away, and easily persuaded me; for I knew by report of another thing of the kind done in Ninus, the city of the Assyrians.

3For thieves plotted to carry off the great wealth of Sardanapallus, king of Ninus, which was kept in underground treasuries. So, starting from their own houses, the thieves dug by measurement toward the palace, and the earth they brought out of the digging they would carry away and throw into the river Tigris, which flows past Ninus, whenever night came, until they had done what they wanted.

4I heard that something of the kind had been done in the digging of the lake in Egypt too, except that it was done by day and not by night; for as the Egyptians dug, they carried the earth to the Nile, which was sure to take it up and scatter it. This lake, then, is said to have been dug in this way.

Chapter 151

1While the twelve kings were governing justly, in the course of time, when they had sacrificed in the temple of Hephaestus on the last day of the festival and were about to pour the libation, the high priest brought out the golden bowls in which they were accustomed to pour the libation, and he missed the count, bringing eleven for twelve.

2Then Psammetichus, who stood last of them and had no bowl, took off his helmet, which was of bronze, held it under, and poured the libation. All the other kings too were wearing helmets and happened to have them on at that time.

3Psammetichus held out the helmet with no thought of treachery; but the others took to heart both what Psammetichus had done and the oracle—for it had been declared to them that whoever of them poured the libation with a bronze bowl should be sole king of Egypt—and remembering the oracle, they did not think it right to kill Psammetichus, since on inquiry they found he had acted with no design, but they resolved to strip him of most of his power and drive him to the marshes, and that he should not come from the marshes into the rest of Egypt.

Chapter 152

1This Psammetichus had before been in exile from the Ethiopian Sabacos, who killed his father Necos; and he had fled at that time to Syria. When the Ethiopian had departed because of the vision of his dream, he was brought back by those Egyptians who belong to the district of Sais.

2But afterward, when he was king a second time, he was caught by the eleven kings and forced to flee to the marshes because of the helmet.

3Knowing how grievously he had been dishonored by them, he planned to take vengeance on the men who had driven him out. When he sent to the city of Buto to the oracle of Leto—for the Egyptians have here the truest oracle—an oracle came to him that vengeance would come from the sea when men of bronze appeared.

4He, for his part, had little belief that men of bronze would come to his aid. But not long afterward necessity forced Ionians and Carians, who had put to sea on a raid, to be carried to Egypt; and when they had landed and armed themselves in bronze, one of the Egyptians came to Psammetichus in the marshes and reported, since he had never seen men armed in bronze before, that men of bronze had come from the sea and were laying waste the plain.

5When he learned that the oracle was coming true, he made friends with the Ionians and Carians and, with great promises, persuaded them to join his side. When he had persuaded them, together with the Egyptians who favored his cause and with these allies, he overthrew the kings.

Chapter 153

1Having won power over all Egypt, Psammetichus built for Hephaestus the gateway at Memphis that faces toward the south wind, and he built a court for the Apis, in which the animal is kept when it appears, opposite the gateway, entirely surrounded by columns and full of figures; and in place of columns, colossi of twelve cubits hold up the court. The Apis is Epaphus in the Greek tongue.

Chapter 154

1To the Ionians and Carians who had helped him win his power, Psammetichus gave lands to live in, facing one another with the Nile between them, which were called the Camps; these lands he gave them, and he paid all the rest that he had promised.

2And he also put Egyptian children in their hands to be taught the Greek tongue; and from these, when they had learned the language, have come the interpreters who are now in Egypt.

3The Ionians and Carians lived in these lands for a long time; and they lie by the sea, a little below the city of Bubastis, at the mouth of the Nile called the Pelusian. These settlers, long afterward, King Amasis uprooted from there and settled at Memphis, making them a guard for himself against the Egyptians.

4When these had come to live in Egypt, we Greeks, by our dealings with them, know exactly all that has come to pass in Egypt from the time of King Psammetichus onward, and all that happened after; for they were the first people of foreign speech to settle in Egypt.

5The places from which they were uprooted still showed, up to my time, the moorings of their ships and the ruins of their houses.

Chapter 155

1Psammetichus, then, won Egypt in this way. I have already mentioned the oracle in Egypt many times, and now I shall give an account of it, since it is worthy of one. This oracle in Egypt is a temple of Leto, set in a great city on the mouth of the Nile called the Sebennytic, as one sails up from the sea.

2The name of the city where this oracle is, is Buto, as I have named it before. In this Buto there is a temple of Apollo and of Artemis, and the temple of Leto, in which the oracle is, is itself very large, and its gateway rises to the height of ten fathoms.

3But the greatest of the visible marvels here I shall describe: in this precinct there is a temple of Leto made of a single stone, both in height and in length, and each wall equal to these; each of its dimensions is forty cubits, and another stone lies upon it for the roof, with a cornice of four cubits.

Chapter 156

1This temple, then, is the most remarkable of the visible things about this shrine; the second is the island called Chemmis.

2It lies in a deep and broad lake beside the shrine at Buto, and the Egyptians say that this island floats. I myself never saw it moving or sailing, but I am astonished to hear that an island truly floats.

3On it stands a great temple of Apollo, and three altars are set up; and many palms grow on it, and other trees as well, both fruit-bearing and fruitless, in plenty.

4The Egyptians adduce the following story and say that the island floats: that in this island, which was not floating before, Leto, one of the eight gods who were the first, who dwelt in the city of Buto where this oracle of hers is, received Apollo from Isis as a trust and kept him safe, hiding him in the island that is now called floating, when Typhon came searching everywhere, wishing to find the son of Osiris.

5Apollo and Artemis, they say, are children of Dionysus and Isis, and Leto was their nurse and their savior. In Egyptian, Apollo is Horus, Demeter is Isis, and Artemis is Bubastis.

6From this story and from no other Aeschylus son of Euphorion took what I shall say, being the only one of the poets before him to do so: he made Artemis the daughter of Demeter. And the island became floating because of this. Such, then, is their story.

Chapter 157

1Psammetichus reigned over Egypt fifty-four years, and for twenty-nine of them he lay before Azotus, a great city in Syria, and besieged it until he took it. This Azotus held out under siege for a longer time than any city we know of.

Chapter 158

1Necos son of Psammetichus became king of Egypt; he was the first to attempt the channel that leads to the Red Sea, which Darius the Persian later dug; the length of the voyage along it is four days, and it was cut wide enough for two triremes to sail side by side.

2Water has been led into it from the Nile; it is led a little above the city of Bubastis, past the Arabian city of Patumus, and it empties into the Red Sea. It was dug first through the part of the Egyptian plain that faces Arabia; and above the plain lies the mountain that stretches toward Memphis, in which the quarries are.

3Along the foothills of this mountain the channel has been cut, running from the west a long way toward the east, and then it stretches on into defiles, leading from the mountain toward midday and the south wind into the Arabian gulf.

4The shortest and quickest way to cross from the northern sea to the southern—that is, this same sea which is called the Red Sea—is from Mount Casius, which borders Egypt and Syria; from there it is exactly a thousand stades to the Arabian gulf.

5That is the shortest way; the channel is far longer, in proportion as it is more crooked. In digging it in the time of King Necos a hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians perished. Necos gave up the digging halfway, when an oracle stood in his way: that he was toiling for a foreigner. The Egyptians call all those who do not speak their language foreigners.

Chapter 159

1When he gave up the channel, Necos turned to campaigns; and triremes were built, some for the northern sea and some in the Arabian gulf on the Red Sea, whose mooring places are still visible.

2These he used as the need arose, and he also met the Syrians on land at Magdolus and won the battle; and after the battle he took Cadytis, a great city in Syria.

3The clothes in which he accomplished these deeds he dedicated to Apollo, sending them to the Branchidae of the Milesians. Then, after reigning sixteen years in all, he died, handing over the rule to his son Psammis.

Chapter 160

1While this Psammis was king of Egypt, envoys from Elis arrived, boasting that they staged the Olympic contest more justly and more beautifully than any men in the world, and thinking that not even the wisest of men, the Egyptians, could devise anything better than what they did.

2When the Eleans arrived in Egypt and declared the reason for which they had come, the king summoned those of the Egyptians who were said to be the wisest. When they came together, the Egyptians asked the Eleans to tell them everything that it was their part to do in staging the contest; and when they had related it all, they said they had come to learn in addition whether the Egyptians had anything more just to suggest.

3The Egyptians took counsel and then asked the Eleans whether their own fellow citizens competed. The Eleans said that it was open to any man who wished, both to themselves and to the other Greeks alike, to compete.

4The Egyptians said that in setting it up this way they had failed of every kind of justice. For there was no way they would not side with their own townsman who competed, wronging the stranger. But if they wished to stage the contest justly, and had come to Egypt for this reason, they should have the contest run by foreigners, and no Elean should be allowed to compete. This is the advice the Egyptians gave to the Eleans.

Chapter 161

1After Psammis had reigned over Egypt only six years, and had marched on Ethiopia, and had died soon afterward, Apries son of Psammis succeeded him.

2He, after Psammetichus his ancestor, was the most fortunate of the kings before him; he reigned twenty-five years, in which time he led an army against Sidon and fought a sea battle with the Tyrian.

3But when it was fated that he should come to grief, it came about for a reason that I shall relate at greater length in my account of Libya, but here only briefly.

4Apries had sent an army against the Cyrenaeans and suffered a great defeat; the Egyptians resented this and revolted from him, thinking that Apries had sent them into visible ruin on purpose, so that their destruction might come about and he might rule the rest of the Egyptians more securely. Taking this as an outrage, both those who had returned and the friends of those who had perished revolted outright.

Chapter 162

1Learning of this, Apries sent Amasis to put a stop to them with words. When he came and tried to restrain the Egyptians from their course, one of the Egyptians stood behind him as he spoke and put a helmet on his head, and as he set it on he said that he set it on him for king.

2And what was done was not at all unwelcome to him, as he showed. For when the rebels had proclaimed him king of the Egyptians, he prepared to march against Apries.

3Learning of this, Apries sent to Amasis a man of note among the Egyptians of his following, whose name was Patarbemis, instructing him to bring Amasis to him alive. When Patarbemis came and summoned Amasis, Amasis—who happened to be sitting on horseback—lifted himself and broke wind, and told him to carry that back to Apries.

4Still Patarbemis insisted that, since the king had sent for him, he should come to him; and Amasis answered that he had long been preparing to do just this, and that Apries would have no complaint of him; for he would come himself and bring others with him.

5Patarbemis saw his intention well enough from what was said, and watching him make his preparations in haste, he went off, wishing to tell the king as quickly as possible what was being done. When he came to Apries without bringing Amasis, Apries gave him no hearing, but in a fury ordered his ears and his nose cut off.

6When the rest of the Egyptians, who were still of Apries' mind, saw the most honored among them so shamefully outraged and mutilated, they waited no longer, but went over to the other side and gave themselves up to Amasis.

Chapter 163

1Learning of this as well, Apries armed his mercenaries and marched against the Egyptians; and he had with him thirty thousand mercenary men, Carians and Ionians; and his palace was in the city of Sais, a great one and worth seeing.

2Apries and his men advanced against the Egyptians, and Amasis and his against the foreigners; and both came to the city of Momemphis and were about to put one another to the test.

Chapter 164

1There are seven classes of the Egyptians: of these some are called priests, some fighting men, some herdsmen, some swineherds, some shopkeepers, some interpreters, and some boatmen. So many are the classes of the Egyptians, and their names are given them from their trades.

2The fighting men among them are called Calasiries and Hermotybies, and they come from these districts; for all Egypt is divided into districts.

Chapter 165

1These are the districts of the Hermotybies: Busirites, Saites, Chemmites, Papremis, the island called Prosopitis, and half of Natho. From these districts come the Hermotybies, who, when they were at their most numerous, amounted to sixteen myriads. Of these no man has learned any trade, but they are free of all else and devoted to war.

Chapter 166

1These are the other districts of the Calasiries: Theban, Bubastites, Aphthites, Tanites, Mendesius, Sebennytes, Athribites, Pharbaithites, Thmuites, Onuphites, Anytius, and Myecphorites; this last district dwells on an island opposite the city of Bubastis.

2These are the districts of the Calasiries, who, when they were at their most numerous, amounted to twenty-five myriads of men. Nor may these practice any trade, but they practice only what belongs to war, each son taking it up from his father.

Chapter 167

1Whether the Greeks learned this too from the Egyptians, I cannot say for certain, seeing that the Thracians and Scythians and Persians and Lydians, and almost all foreigners, hold those who learn trades and the children of these to be of less account than the rest of their citizens, while those who are free of handicrafts are held to be noble, especially those who are devoted to war.

2All the Greeks have learned this, and the Lacedaemonians most of all. But the Corinthians hold craftsmen in least esteem.

Chapter 168

1These privileges were set apart for these alone among the Egyptians, apart from the priests: twelve exempt arourae for each man, free of tax. The aroura is a hundred cubits square by Egyptian measure, and the Egyptian cubit is the same as the Samian.

2These privileges were set apart for all of them; the following they enjoyed in turn and never the same men. A thousand Calasiries and a thousand Hermotybies acted as bodyguards for the king, each group for a year; and to these, besides the arourae, the following were given every day: to each man five minae of baked bread by weight, two minae of beef, and four ladlefuls of wine. This was given to those who were on bodyguard duty at the time.

Chapter 169

1When they came together—Apries leading the mercenaries and Amasis all the Egyptians—at the city of Momemphis, they joined battle; and the foreigners fought well, but being far inferior in numbers they were defeated on this account.

2Apries is said to have held this belief: that not even a god could deprive him of his kingdom, so secure did he think his power was. And so he joined battle and was defeated, and being taken alive he was led away to the city of Sais, to what had before been his own palace but was by now the palace of Amasis.

3There for a time he was kept in the palace, and Amasis treated him well; but at last the Egyptians complained that he was not doing right in keeping alive the man who was most hateful both to them and to himself, and so he handed Apries over to the Egyptians. They strangled him and then buried him in the ancestral tombs;

4and these are in the temple of Athena, very close to the shrine, on the left hand as you enter. The people of Sais buried all the kings who came from this district inside the temple.

5For the tomb of Amasis too is in the same place, though it is farther from the shrine than that of Apries and of his forefathers; it too stands in the court of the temple, a great colonnade of stone, adorned with columns carved to look like palm trees and with all other costliness; and inside the colonnade stand double doors, and within the doors is the burial chamber.

Chapter 170

1There are also the tombs of the god whose name it is not lawful for me to speak on such a matter, in the city of Sais, in the temple of Athena, behind the shrine, adjoining the whole wall of the temple of Athena.

2And in the precinct stand great obelisks of stone; and there is a lake beside it, bordered with a stone embankment and finely wrought all round, and in size, as it seemed to me, as large as the one at Delos called the Round Lake.

Chapter 171

1On this lake they stage by night the representations of his sufferings, which the Egyptians call mysteries. Of these, though I know in some detail how each of them is done, let my lips be sealed.

2Of the rite of Demeter too, which the Greeks call the Thesmophoria, of this too let my lips be sealed, save for so much of it as it is lawful to tell;

3the daughters of Danaus were those who brought this rite out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; and afterward, when the whole population of the Peloponnese was driven out by the Dorians, the rite was lost, and the Arcadians, who were left behind of the Peloponnesians and did not leave their homes, preserved it alone.

Chapter 172

1When Apries had been overthrown in this way, Amasis became king; he was of the Saitic district, and the city he came from is called Siouph.

2At first the Egyptians held Amasis in contempt and did not regard him highly at all, since he had been a common man before and of no distinguished family; but afterward Amasis won them over by cleverness, not by force.

3Among his countless treasures he had a golden foot-basin, in which Amasis himself and all his dinner guests used to wash their feet every time; this he broke up and made of it an image of a god, and set it up in the part of the city where it was most convenient; and the Egyptians came to the image and worshipped it greatly.

4When Amasis learned what the townsfolk were doing, he called the Egyptians together and made it known, saying that the image had been made from the foot-basin, in which the Egyptians had before been accustomed to vomit and urinate and wash their feet, but which they now greatly revered.

5Now, he said, he had fared in the same way as the foot-basin: for if he had been a common man before, yet now he was their king; and so he bade them honor him and hold him in regard.

Chapter 173

1By such a device he won the Egyptians over so that they agreed to be his subjects; and he kept to this order of his days: from early morning until the marketplace was full, he zealously handled the business brought before him; and after that he drank and made sport of his companions and was frivolous and fond of jests.

2His friends, distressed at this, admonished him with words like these: "O king, you do not govern yourself rightly, bringing yourself down to utter frivolity. For you should sit in solemn state upon a solemn throne and do the business of the day through the whole day; then the Egyptians would understand that they are ruled by a man of greatness, and you would be better spoken of; but as it is, you behave in no way like a king."

3He answered them with this: "Those who own bows stretch them when they need to use them; for if they were kept stretched all the time, they would break, and so when the need came they would have no use for them."

4"So it is with a man's condition: if he should choose to be all seriousness always and never give himself any part in play, he would go mad without knowing it or be struck down. Knowing this, I give each its share." So he answered his friends.

Chapter 174

1Amasis is said to have been, even when he was a private man, fond of drinking and fond of jesting and in no way a serious man; and whenever his supplies failed him as he drank and made merry, he would go about and steal; and those who claimed that he had their goods would bring him, when he denied it, before the oracle that each of them used. Many times he was convicted by the oracles, and many times he was acquitted.

2When he became king, he did as follows: as for those gods who had acquitted him of being a thief, he took no care of their temples and gave nothing for their repair, nor did he come to sacrifice at them, holding them to be worthless and their oracles false; but as for those gods who had convicted him of being a thief, these he took the greatest care of, as being true gods and giving oracles that do not lie.

Chapter 175

1At Sais he built for the goddess Athena gateway buildings that are a marvel, surpassing all others far and away in height and size, both in the great size of the stones and in the quality of them; and he set up great colossi and towering man-sphinxes, and brought other stones of extraordinary size for the repair work.

2Some of these he brought from the quarries near Memphis, and the very largest from the city of Elephantine, which lies a voyage of twenty days from Sais.

3But the thing about them that I marvel at most—though it is not the least of them—is this: he brought a chamber of a single stone from the city of Elephantine, and it was three years on the way, and two thousand men were assigned to it as the towing crew, and every one of them was a steersman. The measurements of this roofed chamber are, on the outside, twenty-one cubits in length, fourteen in breadth, and eight in height.

4These are the outside measurements of the chamber of one stone; but inside, the length is eighteen cubits and a span, and the height five cubits. It lies beside the entrance to the temple;

5for they say it was not hauled inside the temple for this reason: as the chamber was being dragged along, its architect groaned aloud, worn out by the long time the work had taken and heavy at heart over it, and Amasis took it as an ill omen and would not let it be hauled any farther. Some, however, say that a man was crushed to death by it—one of those who were prying it along with levers—and that for this reason it was not dragged in.

Chapter 176

1Amasis also dedicated in all the other notable temples works worth seeing for their size; among them, at Memphis, the colossus lying face up in front of the temple of Hephaestus, which is seventy-five feet in length. On the same base stand two colossi of the same stone, each twenty feet in height, one on this side and one on that of the great one.

2There is another stone colossus of the same size at Sais, lying in the same fashion as the one at Memphis. The temple of Isis at Memphis, again, was built by Amasis; it is both great and the most worth seeing of all.

Chapter 177

1In the reign of king Amasis, it is said, Egypt reached its greatest prosperity—both in what the river brought forth for the land and in what the land brought forth for its people—and the inhabited cities in it at that time are said to have numbered twenty thousand in all.

2This law for the Egyptians Amasis established: every Egyptian must declare to his nomarch each year from what source he earns his living; and whoever does neither this nor shows a lawful means of livelihood is put to death. Solon of Athens took this law from Egypt and established it for the Athenians, and they use it to this day, since it is a law beyond reproach.

Chapter 178

1Becoming a friend of the Greeks, Amasis showed favors to some of them, and in particular he granted those who came to Egypt the city of Naucratis to live in; to those of them who did not wish to settle but traded there by ship he gave places where they might set up altars and precincts for their gods.

2Now the greatest of their precincts, and the most famous and the most serviceable, which is called the Hellenion, was founded jointly by these cities: of the Ionians, Chios, Teos, Phocaea, and Clazomenae; of the Dorians, Rhodes, Cnidos, Halicarnassus, and Phaselis; and of the Aeolians, Mytilene alone.

3This precinct belongs to these cities, and it is they who provide the overseers of the trading-post; any other cities that claim a share claim one in which they have no part. Apart from these, the Aeginetans founded a precinct of Zeus on their own account, the Samians one of Hera, and the Milesians one of Apollo.

Chapter 179

1In ancient times Naucratis was the only trading-post in Egypt, and there was no other. If anyone came to any of the other mouths of the Nile, he had to swear that he had not come there on purpose; and having sworn, he had to sail in the same ship to the Canopic mouth; or if he was unable to sail against contrary winds, he had to carry his cargo around the Delta in barges, until he reached Naucratis. Such was the honor in which Naucratis was held.

Chapter 180

1When the Amphictyons contracted to have the temple that now stands at Delphi built for three hundred talents—for the one that stood there before had burned down of its own accord—it fell to the Delphians to furnish a fourth part of the contracted price.

2The Delphians went from city to city asking for gifts, and in doing so they raised no small sum from Egypt: Amasis gave them a thousand talents of alum, and the Greeks living in Egypt twenty minas.

Chapter 181

1Amasis made a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Cyrenaeans, and he also decided to take a wife from among them, whether because he desired a Greek woman or out of friendship for the Cyrenaeans;

2he married, then—so some say—the daughter of Battus, so others of Arcesilaus, so others again the daughter of Critobulus, a man of standing among the citizens, whose name was Ladice. Whenever Amasis lay with her, he was unable to have intercourse with her, though he had intercourse with his other women.

3When this went on for a long time, Amasis said to this woman called Ladice: "Woman, you have drugged me, and there is no way you will not die the most wretched death of any woman."

4Ladice, since her denials made Amasis no gentler, prayed in her heart to Aphrodite that, if Amasis had intercourse with her during that night—for this would be a cure for her trouble—she would send a statue of the goddess to Cyrene. And immediately after her prayer Amasis had intercourse with her; and from that time on, whenever Amasis came to her, he lay with her, and after this he grew very fond of her.

5Ladice paid her vow to the goddess: she had a statue made and sent it to Cyrene, where it still stood in my day, turned to face outward from the city of the Cyrenaeans. When Cambyses conquered Egypt and learned who this Ladice was, he sent her back to Cyrene unharmed.

Chapter 182

1Amasis also dedicated offerings in Greece: at Cyrene, a gilded statue of Athena and a painted likeness of himself; at Lindos, to Athena, two stone statues and a linen breastplate worth seeing; and at Samos, to Hera, two wooden images of himself, which stood in the great temple even down to my time, behind the doors.

2He dedicated these at Samos because of the guest-friendship between himself and Polycrates son of Aeaces; those at Lindos not for the sake of any guest-friendship, but because the temple of Athena at Lindos is said to have been founded by the daughters of Danaus when they put in there, as they fled from the sons of Aegyptus. These, then, are the offerings Amasis made; and he was the first of all men to conquer Cyprus and reduce it to the payment of tribute.

Chapter 1

1When Cyrus died, Cambyses took over the kingship. He was the son of Cyrus and of Cassandane, the daughter of Pharnaspes. When Cassandane died before him, Cyrus made great mourning for her himself, and he ordered all the people he ruled to mourn as well.

2Cambyses was the son of this woman and of Cyrus. He counted the Ionians and the Aeolians as slaves who had come down to him from his father. He made an expedition against Egypt, taking with him other peoples he ruled, and among them some Greeks whom he ruled.

Chapter 2

1The Egyptians, before Psammetichus was king over them, believed that they were the first of all people. But when Psammetichus became king and wanted to know which people had really been first, from that time on they believe that the Phrygians came before them, and that they themselves came before all others.

2Psammetichus, when he could find out nothing by asking, hit on this plan. He gave two newborn babies, taken from people who happened to be at hand, to a shepherd to raise among his flocks, with food of this kind. He ordered that no one speak a single word in front of the children, that the children lie by themselves in an empty hut, that goats be brought to them at the proper hour, and that the shepherd fill them with milk and then go about his other business.

3Psammetichus did this and gave these orders because he wanted to hear, once the children were past their meaningless baby sounds, what word they would first break out with. And that is what happened. When two years had passed while the shepherd was doing this, he opened the door and came in, and both children fell before him, crying out "bekos" and stretching out their hands.

4The shepherd kept quiet when he first heard it. But since, coming often and caring for the children, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master and brought the children into his presence, when he was ordered to. Psammetichus himself also heard it, and asked what people called things "bekos"; and by asking he found that the Phrygians call bread by this word.

5So the Egyptians gave in, and weighing the matter this way, they judged the Phrygians to be older than themselves. That is what I heard from the priests of Hephaestus in Memphis. The Greeks tell other foolish things besides, saying that Psammetichus had the tongues of certain women cut out, and had the children raised by these women.

Chapter 3

1So much they told me about the raising of the children. I heard other things too in Memphis, when I came and talked with the priests of Hephaestus. And I went to Thebes and to Heliopolis for this very reason: I wanted to know whether they would agree with the accounts given in Memphis. The people of Heliopolis are said to be the most learned of the Egyptians.

2I am not eager, however, to tell the divine matters of what I heard, except the names alone, because I hold that all people know these things equally. Whatever I do mention of them, I will mention only because the account forces me to.

Chapter 4

1About human matters they said this, agreeing with one another: the Egyptians were the first of all people to find out the year, dividing the year's seasons into twelve parts, and they said they discovered this from the stars. They reckon, in my judgment, more wisely than the Greeks, by this much: the Greeks insert an intercalary month every third year to keep the seasons right, while the Egyptians make their twelve months thirty days each and add five days every year beyond that number, and so the circle of their seasons comes around to the same place.

2They said the Egyptians first gave the twelve gods their names, and that the Greeks took the names from them; and that the Egyptians first assigned altars, images, and temples to the gods, and first carved figures of animals in stone; and of these things they proved the most by actual works. They said the first man who was king of Egypt was Min.

3In his time, they said, all Egypt except the Theban district was a marsh, and nothing of the land showed above water as far down as where the lake of Moeris now lies, which is seven days' voyage up the river from the sea.

Chapter 5

1They seemed to me to speak well about the land, for it is clear even to one who has not heard it beforehand but has seen it, if he has any sense, that Egypt, to which the Greeks sail, is for the Egyptians land gained and the gift of the river. The land still higher up than this lake, for three days' voyage more, of which the priests said nothing, is another stretch of the same kind.

2The nature of the land of Egypt is as follows. First, when you are still sailing toward it and a day's run from land, if you let down a sounding lead you will bring up mud, and you will find yourself in eleven fathoms. This shows that the land is a deposit laid down by the river.

Chapter 6

1The length of Egypt itself along the sea is sixty schoinoi, dividing Egypt as we divide it, from the Gulf of Plinthine to the lake of Serbonis, along which runs Mount Casion. Those sixty schoinoi are counted from there.

2People who are short of land measure their country in fathoms; people less short of land, in stades; people who have much land, in parasangs; and people who have land in great plenty, in schoinoi.

3A parasang is thirty stades, and a schoinos, an Egyptian measure, is sixty stades.

Chapter 7

1So Egypt along the sea would be three thousand six hundred stades. From the coast inland to the city of Heliopolis, Egypt is broad, being all flat, waterlogged, and muddy. The road from the sea up to Heliopolis is about as long as the road that runs from Athens to Pisa and to the temple of Olympian Zeus, starting from the altar of the Twelve Gods.

2If a person worked it out, he would find only a small difference between the two roads, so that they are not exactly equal, and the difference is no more than fifteen stades. The road from Athens to Pisa falls short of one thousand five hundred stades by about fifteen, while the road to Heliopolis from the sea comes out to just that number.

Chapter 8

1From Heliopolis on, going upstream, Egypt is narrow. On the one side the mountain of Arabia stretches, running from the north toward the south, and it always rises toward the sea called the Red. In this mountain are the stone quarries that were cut for the pyramids at Memphis. The mountain bends back where it ends, as I have said; and at its longest it runs, as I learned, a journey of two months from east to west, and its far ends toward the east are the regions that bear frankincense.

2Such is this mountain. On the Libya side of Egypt stretches another mountain, rocky and covered with sand; the pyramids stand in it; it runs toward the south in the same way as the Arabian one.

3So the country from Heliopolis is Egypt for no great distance, but for about fourteen days' voyage upstream. There Egypt is narrow, lying between the mountains I have named, a level plain; and it seemed to me that at its narrowest it is no more than two hundred stades across, from the Arabian mountain to the one called the Libyan. Beyond that, Egypt becomes broad again. Such is the nature of this land.

Chapter 9

1From Heliopolis to Thebes is a voyage of nine days upstream, and the road is four thousand eight hundred and sixty stades, which is eighty-one schoinoi.

2These stades added up for Egypt: along the sea I have already shown that it is three thousand six hundred stades. As for the distance from the sea inland to Thebes, I will state it: it is six thousand one hundred and twenty stades. And from Thebes to the city called Elephantine is one thousand eight hundred stades.

Chapter 10

1Of this land I have described, the greater part, as the priests said, seemed to me also to be land the Egyptians came to have. For it looked to me that the space between the mountains that lie above the city of Memphis had once been a gulf of the sea, like the country around Ilium and Teuthrania and Ephesus and the plain of the Maeander, small as those places are when set against this one.

2For of the rivers that built up those lands by what they carried down, not one is of a size worth comparing with a single one of the Nile's five mouths.

3There are other rivers too, not as large as the Nile, that have produced great works. I could name others, and not least the Achelous, which flows through Acarnania and, emptying into the sea, has already made half of the Echinades islands into mainland.

Chapter 11

1There is, in Arabia and not far from Egypt, a gulf of the sea running in from the sea called the Red. It is so long and so narrow that I go on to describe it:

2in length, a voyage of forty days, for a rowed boat, from its innermost point out to the open sea; and in breadth, at its widest, half a day's voyage. In it there is a strong ebb and flood every day.

3I think Egypt too once had another gulf of the same kind: one running in from the northern sea toward Ethiopia, and the Arabian one, which I am about to describe, running from the south toward Syria. Their inner ends almost touch each other, with only a small piece of land between them.

4If the Nile were willing to turn its stream into this Arabian gulf, what would keep it from being filled in by that river within twenty thousand years at the most? For my part, I expect it would be filled in within ten thousand. Why then might not a gulf even much larger than this one have been filled in during the time before I was born, by a river so great and so hard-working?

Chapter 12

1I am persuaded of these things about Egypt both by those who say them and by my own strong opinion, for I have seen Egypt reaching out beyond the adjoining land, and seashells showing on the mountains, and salt crust coming up on the surface, so that even the pyramids are eaten by it, and this mountain above Memphis is the only one in Egypt that has sand on it.

2And besides the land itself: Egypt is not like the neighboring country of Arabia, nor like Libya, nor even like Syria, for Syrians dwell on the parts of Arabia along the sea; but Egypt is black and crumbles easily, since it is mud and deposit carried down from Ethiopia by the river.

3We know that Libya has redder soil and more sand, while Arabia and Syria are more clayey and rocky.

Chapter 13

1The priests told me this too, as a great proof about this land: in the time of King Moeris, when the river rose at least eight cubits, it watered Egypt below Memphis; and Moeris had not yet been dead nine hundred years when I heard this from the priests. But now, unless the river rises at least sixteen or fifteen cubits, it does not overflow onto the land.

2It seems to me too that the Egyptians who live below the lake of Moeris, in the other districts and in what is called the Delta, will, if this land keeps rising in height in the same proportion and keeps growing in the same way, suffer for all the time to come, if the Nile no longer floods it, just what the Egyptians themselves once said the Greeks would suffer.

3For, hearing that the whole land of the Greeks is watered by rain and not, like their own land, by rivers, they said the Greeks would one day be cheated of a great hope and would meet with hunger. This saying means that if the god is not willing to send them rain but dries them out instead, the Greeks will be taken by famine, for they have no other source of water at all except rain from Zeus alone.

Chapter 14

1This said about the Greeks is right. Let me now tell how it stands for the Egyptians themselves: if the land below Memphis, which is the land that keeps growing, rises in proportion to the time gone by, as I said before, what else will the Egyptians living there suffer but famine, if the land gets no rain and the river is not able to overflow onto their fields?

2For now these people gather the fruit of the earth with less labor than all the other people in the world, and less than the rest of the Egyptians. They have no labor of breaking the ground with the plow to make furrows, no hoeing, and none of the other work other men do for a crop. When the river comes of itself and waters their fields, and having watered them leaves them again, each man sows his own plot and sends pigs into it; and when the pigs have trampled the seed in with their feet, he waits for the harvest; then, threshing the grain out with the pigs, he gathers it in.

Chapter 15

1If we chose to follow the Ionians' opinions about Egypt, those who say that Egypt is only the Delta, that its seacoast runs from the watchtower called Perseus' to the Taricheae of Pelusium, which is forty schoinoi, and that it stretches inland from the sea to the city of Cercasorus, at which the Nile splits, flowing toward Pelusium and toward Canopus, and that the rest of Egypt belongs partly to Libya and partly to Arabia, then we would prove, using that account, that the Egyptians had no country at all before.

2For the Delta, as the Egyptians themselves say and as I think, is river-deposited land, and has appeared lately, so to speak. If then the Egyptians had had no land at all, why would they have gone to the trouble of thinking they were the first of people? And they would not have needed to run the test with the babies, to find out what word they would first say.

3But I do not think the Egyptians came into being together with the Delta the Ionians speak of. I think they have always existed, ever since the race of people began; and as the land pushed farther out, some of them were left behind and others came down with it. In old times Thebes was called Egypt, and its circuit is six thousand one hundred and twenty stades.

Chapter 16

1If we judge rightly about this, then the Ionians do not think rightly about Egypt. But if the Ionians' opinion is right, then I show that the Greeks, and the Ionians themselves, do not know how to reckon, since they say that the whole earth has three parts, Europe and Asia and Libya.

2For they would have to count the Delta of Egypt as a fourth part, if it belongs neither to Asia nor to Libya. On that account it is not the Nile that marks the boundary between Asia and Libya; the Nile splits apart at the point of the Delta, so that the land in between would have to be part of Asia and part of Libya.

Chapter 17

1We leave behind the Ionians' opinion. We ourselves say this about these matters: all Egypt is this land inhabited by the Egyptians, just as Cilicia is the land of the Cilicians and Assyria the land of the Assyrians; and we know of no true boundary between Asia and Libya except the borders of the Egyptians.

2But if we use the rule laid down by the Greeks, we must count all of Egypt, starting from the Cataracts and the city of Elephantine, and divide it into two, taking both names: one part of it is Libya, and the other Asia.

3For the Nile, starting from the Cataracts, flows through the middle of Egypt, splitting it, down to the sea. Up to the city of Cercasorus the Nile flows as one river; from that city it splits into three ways.

4One branch, turning toward the east, is called the Pelusian mouth; another of the ways goes toward the west, and this is called the Canobic mouth. The straight course of the Nile is this: flowing down from above, it comes to the point of the Delta, and from there it splits the Delta in the middle and pours into the sea. This branch gives neither the smallest share of the water nor is it the least famous. It is called the Sebennytic mouth.

5There are also two other mouths that break away from the Sebennytic and run to the sea. Their names are these: one is called the Saitic mouth, and the other the Mendesian.

6The Bolbitine mouth and the Bucolic mouth are not natural mouths; they are dug channels.

Chapter 18

1The oracle of Ammon bears me witness in this opinion, that Egypt is of just such an extent as I show by my account. I asked about Egypt at the oracle of Ammon after I had already formed my own opinion.

2The men of Marea and Apis, who live in the parts of Egypt bordering Libya, believe themselves to be Libyans and not Egyptians, and they are troubled by the religious rule about sacred things, because they want to be free to eat cows. So they sent to Ammon, saying that they had nothing in common with the Egyptians: they lived outside the Delta and agreed with them in nothing, and they wanted it to be allowed them to eat everything.

3But the god did not allow them to do this. He said that Egypt was that land which the Nile waters in its course, and that the Egyptians were those who live below the city of Elephantine and drink of this river. That is the answer he gave them.

Chapter 19

1When the Nile rises in flood, it covers not only the Delta but also the district called Libyan and the district called Arabian. In one place the flood reaches two days' journey out on each side, and in places it goes farther than that, and in places less. About the nature of the river's rise I could learn nothing from any of the priests or from anyone else.

2I was eager to learn from them why the Nile rises in flood, starting at the summer solstice and going on for a hundred days, and then, once it has reached that number of days, falls back and drops, so that the river stays low through the whole winter until the summer solstice comes again.

3So I could get no answer at all from the Egyptians about any of these things, when I asked them what power the Nile has that makes it grow the opposite way from all other rivers. I wanted to know the things I have spoken of, and also why the Nile alone of all rivers gives off no breezes.

Chapter 20

1But some Greeks, wanting to win fame for wisdom, gave three different accounts of this water. Two of the three I do not think are worth mentioning at all, except so far as to point them out.

2The first says that the etesian winds are the cause of the river's rise, because they hold the Nile back so that it cannot flow out to sea. But the etesian winds have many times failed to blow, and the Nile still does the same thing.

3Besides, if the etesian winds were the cause, then the other rivers that flow against those winds ought to be affected the same way as the Nile, and even more so, since they are smaller and their currents are weaker. There are many rivers in Syria and many in Libya, and none of them does anything like what the Nile does.

Chapter 21

1The second account is less knowledgeable than the one just described, but more astonishing to hear: it says that the river does this because it flows from Ocean, and that Ocean flows around the whole earth.

Chapter 22

1The third of the accounts, though it sounds by far the most reasonable, is the most false of all. It too says nothing, for it claims that the Nile flows from melting snow. But the river flows from Libya, right through the middle of Ethiopia, and comes out into Egypt.

2How then could it flow from snow, when it flows from the hottest lands out into lands that are for the most part colder? For a man who can reason about such things, the first and greatest proof that it cannot flow from snow is the winds, which blow hot from these lands.

3Second, the land there stays rainless and without frost, and when snow does fall, it must melt within five days. So if it snowed there, these regions would have rain. Third, the people of the land are dark from the heat.

4And kites and swallows stay there all through the year and never leave, while cranes, fleeing the winter that comes in the land of Scythia, keep coming to winter in those same regions. If snow fell in the land the Nile flows through and the land it starts from, none of this would happen, as plain necessity proves.

Chapter 23

1As for the man who spoke about Ocean and pushed his story into the realm of the unseen, his account cannot be disproved, for I for my part know of no river called Ocean. I think Homer, or one of the poets born before him, invented the name and brought it into poetry.

Chapter 24

1But if I must fault the accounts given above and state my own opinion about what is hidden, I will tell why I think the Nile rises in summer. In the winter season the sun, driven out of its old path by the storms, travels through the upper part of Libya.

2To say it in the fewest words, this is the whole story: whatever land this god comes nearest to, and whatever land he crosses, it is natural for that land to thirst most for water, and for the rivers native to it to dry up.

Chapter 25

1To explain it more fully, here is how it is. As the sun crosses the upper part of Libya, it does this: since the air over those regions is clear all year long, the land is parched, and there are no cold winds, the sun there does what it always does in summer when it goes through the middle of the sky.

2It draws the water up to itself, and having drawn it up, pushes it out toward the inland regions. The winds catch it, scatter it, and dissolve it. And it is natural that the winds that blow from this land, the south wind and the southwest wind, are by far the most rainy of all winds.

3It also seems to me that the sun does not send off the whole of the Nile's yearly water each time, but keeps some of it behind around itself. When winter eases, the sun goes back to its middle path in the sky, and from then on it draws from all the rivers alike.

4Up to that time the other rivers flow big, because a great deal of rainwater mixes into them, since the land is rained on and cut into channels; but in summer, when the rains leave them and the sun draws on them, they are weak.

5But the Nile, which gets no rain, and which the sun alone of rivers draws on during that season, naturally runs much lower than in summer: in summer it is drawn on together with all the waters alike, but in winter it alone is squeezed.

Chapter 26

1This is how I judge the sun to be the cause of these things. In my opinion this same sun is also the cause of the dry air of that region, because it burns up the path it crosses. And so it is always summer in the upper part of Libya.

2But if the position of the seasons were changed — if the part of the sky where the north wind and winter now stand had the south wind and midsummer, and the part where the south wind now stands had the north wind — then the sun, driven out of the middle of the sky by winter and the north wind, would go to the upper part of Europe, just as it now goes through the upper part of Libya. And I expect that, crossing all of Europe, it would make the Ister do what the Nile does now.

Chapter 27

1About the breezes, why the Nile does not breathe them out, I hold this opinion: it is not natural at all for anything to breathe out from lands that are very hot, while a breeze likes to blow from something cold.

Chapter 28

1So much for this; let it be as it is and as it was from the beginning. About the sources of the Nile, none of the Egyptians, Libyans, or Greeks whom I talked with claimed to know anything, except the registrar of the sacred money of Athena in the Egyptian city of Sais.

2He seemed to me to be joking when he claimed to know for certain. This is what he said: there are two mountains with peaks cut to a point, lying between the city of Syene, which is in the Thebaid, and Elephantine; the names of the two mountains are Crophi and Mophi.

3The sources of the Nile, he said, are bottomless springs flowing from between these two mountains, and half the water flows toward Egypt and the north wind, while the other half flows toward Ethiopia and the south wind.

4That the springs are bottomless, he said, King Psammetichus of Egypt put to the test: he wove a rope many thousands of fathoms long and let it down there, but it did not reach the bottom.

5So much from the registrar — if what he told of really happened. As I understand it, there are strong whirlpools there and a current that runs back on itself, so that, the water dashing against the mountains, a weighted sounding line let down cannot reach the bottom.

Chapter 29

1From everyone else I could learn nothing. But this much more I found out, going as far as could be gone: as far as the city of Elephantine I went and saw it myself; beyond that point I learned things by asking.

2Going up from the city of Elephantine the river has a rough stretch of bed. There you must tie the boat fast on both sides and go on ahead, the way you lead an ox; if the boat breaks loose, it is lost, carried off by the strength of the current.

3This stretch takes four days to sail through, and the Nile bends back and forth here just as the Maeander does. There are twelve schoinoi that must be sailed through in this way. After that you come to a smooth plain, in which the Nile flows around an island; the name of the island is Tachompso.

4Above Elephantine Ethiopians live, and they hold half of the island too, while Egyptians hold the other half. Beside the island lies a great lake, around which nomad Ethiopians graze their herds. Sail across the lake and you come to the channel of the Nile that flows into this lake.

5After that you must leave the river and walk for forty days, for sharp rocks rise in the Nile there, and many ridges, and it is not possible to sail through them.

6After you have passed through that stretch in the forty days, you board another boat and sail twelve days more, and then you come to a great city whose name is Meroe; this city is said to be the capital of the other Ethiopians.

7The people of that city worship only two gods, Zeus and Dionysus, and they honor them greatly. They have an oracle of Zeus. They go on campaign whenever this god commands them through his oracles, and they go wherever he commands.

Chapter 30

1Sailing on from that city, in the same length of time it took you to go from Elephantine to the capital of the Ethiopians, you come to the deserters. These deserters are called Asmach, which means in the Greek language "those who stand at the king's left hand."

2Twenty-four myriads of Egyptian warriors deserted to these Ethiopians for the following reason. Under King Psammetichus, garrisons were set up: one in the city of Elephantine against the Ethiopians, another in the Pelusian Daphnae against the Arabs and Assyrians, and another in Marea against Libya.

3Even in my time the Persians keep the garrisons just as they were in the days of Psammetichus: Persians keep guard at Elephantine and at Daphnae. No one relieved the Egyptians of their guard duty for three years. So they took counsel and agreed with one another, all deserted Psammetichus, and went off to Ethiopia.

4Psammetichus heard of it and went after them. When he caught up with them, he begged them with many words not to abandon their ancestral gods and their children and wives. Then one of them, they say, pointed to his private parts and said that wherever that was, there they would have children and wives too.

5When these men came to Ethiopia, they gave themselves over to the king of the Ethiopians, and he repaid them with this gift: there were certain Ethiopians with whom he was at odds, and he told them to drive those people out and live in their land. With these men settled among them, the Ethiopians became more civilized, having learned Egyptian ways.

Chapter 31

1Besides its course in Egypt, the Nile is known for a voyage and march of four months: that is how many months a man traveling from Elephantine to these deserters finds himself on the way. The river flows from the west and the setting sun. Beyond that no one can say anything clearly, for this land is desert because of the heat.

Chapter 32

1But this I heard from Cyrenaean men, who said they had gone to the oracle of Ammon and had talked with Etearchus, king of the Ammonians. Among other talk the conversation came around to the Nile — how no one knows its sources — and Etearchus said that Nasamonians had once come to visit him.

2This people is Libyan, and it lives in the Syrtis and the land east of the Syrtis, but not far beyond it.

3When the Nasamonians had come and were asked whether they had anything more to tell about the deserts of Libya, they said this: sons of powerful men among them had grown up violent and overreaching. When they became men, they devised other extravagant things, and among them this: they drew lots from among themselves for five men to go see the deserts of Libya and to try to see more than anyone who had seen the farthest.

4Along the northern sea, starting from Egypt and going as far as Cape Soloeis, where Libya ends, Libyans and many peoples of Libyans extend along the whole coast, except for the part the Greeks and Phoenicians hold. Above the sea and above the people who live along the coast, inland Libya is a country of wild beasts. Above the wild-beast country there is sand, terribly without water, and utterly desert.

5So the young men, sent out by their companions and well equipped with water and food, first went through the settled country, then crossed it and came into the wild-beast country, and out of that country they crossed the desert, steering their course toward the west wind.

6After they had crossed a great sandy stretch, over many days, they saw at last trees growing in a plain. They came up to them and began to take the fruit that grew on the trees. While they were taking it, small men came upon them, shorter than ordinary men, seized them, and led them away; the Nasamonians understood not a word of their speech, and their guides understood none of the Nasamonians' speech.

7The guides led them through great marshes, and after crossing these the Nasamonians came to a city where all the people were as tall as the guides and black in color. A great river flowed past the city, running from the west toward the rising sun, and crocodiles were seen in it.

Chapter 33

1So much for the story of Etearchus the Ammonian — except that he added, as the Cyrenaeans said, that the Nasamonians got safely home, and that all the people they had come to were sorcerers.

2Etearchus also reasoned that this river flowing past the city is the Nile, and so indeed the argument goes. The Nile flows out of Libya and cuts Libya in half. And as I reason from what can be seen about what cannot be known, it rises at the same distance as the Ister.

3The Ister rises among the Celts, by the city of Pyrene, and flows through the middle of Europe, splitting it. The Celts live outside the Pillars of Heracles, next to the Cynesii, who are the westernmost of the peoples settled in Europe.

4The Ister ends its course through all of Europe in the sea of the Euxine, where the Milesians have their colony of Istria.

Chapter 34

1The Ister is known to many people, since it flows through inhabited country, but no one can say anything about the sources of the Nile, for Libya, which it flows through, is uninhabited and desert. About the river's course I have said as much as I could reach by asking, as far as it was possible to go: it flows out into Egypt. And Egypt lies nearly opposite the mountainous part of Cilicia.

2From there, for a man traveling light, it is a straight road of five days to Sinope on the Euxine; and Sinope lies opposite the place where the Ister runs into the sea. This is how I think the Nile, crossing the whole of Libya, runs level with the Ister.

Chapter 35

1So much about the Nile. I turn now to lengthen my account with Egypt, because it has more wonders in it than any other country, and offers works greater than words can tell beside any other country; for that reason I will say more about it.

2The Egyptians, whose sky is different from other peoples' and whose river is different in nature from all other rivers, have turned most of their customs and laws the opposite way from all other people. Among them the women buy and sell in the market, while the men stay at home and weave. Other peoples push the weft upward as they weave; the Egyptians push it downward.

3Men carry loads on their heads, women on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up, men sitting down. They relieve themselves indoors and eat outside in the streets, giving this reason: things that are shameful but necessary should be done out of sight, while things that are not shameful should be done in the open.

4No woman serves as priest, either for a male god or for a female one; men serve as priests for gods of both kinds. Sons are under no necessity to support their parents if they do not wish to, but daughters must support them even if they do not wish to.

Chapter 36

1Priests of the gods elsewhere let their hair grow; in Egypt they are shorn. Among other people the custom is to shave their heads when grief strikes hardest; the Egyptians, when a death occurs, let the hair of the head and of the beard grow, after having been shaven before.

2Other people live apart from animals; the Egyptians live together with them. Others get their living from wheat and barley; for an Egyptian to make his living from those is the greatest disgrace, and they make their food instead from olyra, which some others call zea.

3They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands, and they gather up dung with their hands too. Other people leave their genitals as they were born, except those who have learned it from the Egyptians; the Egyptians circumcise themselves. Each man has two garments, each woman one.

4Others fasten the rings and ropes of their sails on the outside; the Egyptians fasten them on the inside. When the Greeks write letters or count with pebbles they move the hand from left to right; the Egyptians move it from right to left. And doing this they say that they themselves do it toward the right and the Greeks toward the left. They use two kinds of writing: one is called sacred and the other common.

Chapter 37

1Being excessively devout, more than all other people, they use religious rules like these. They drink from bronze cups, rinsing them out every day — not just some of them, but all of them.

2They wear linen garments always freshly washed, and they practice this above all. They circumcise themselves for the sake of cleanliness, preferring to be clean rather than better looking. The priests shave their whole bodies every other day, so that no lice or any other foul thing may grow on them while they serve the gods.

3The priests wear linen clothing only, and sandals made of papyrus. They may not take any other clothing or any other sandals. They bathe in cold water twice every day and twice every night, and they perform, so to speak, countless other religious observances.

4They also enjoy no small benefits: they do no labor on their houses, and they spend nothing of their own, but sacred baked food is served to them. A great amount of beef and goose meat is allotted to each of them every day, and they are given wine from the grape as well. But they may not touch fish.

5Egyptians do not sow beans much in their land, if at all, and those that grow they neither eat raw nor boil and eat; the priests cannot even bear to look at them, for they hold the bean to be an unclean legume. Each god does not have one priest but many, and one of them is the chief priest. When a priest dies, his son takes his place.

Chapter 38

1They believe the male bulls belong to Epaphus, and for that reason they test them this way: if the examiner sees even one black hair on the animal, he counts it unclean.

2The examination is made by one of the priests appointed for the task. He looks at the animal standing up and then lying on its back, and after pulling out its tongue he checks whether it is clean of the signs I will speak of in another part of my account. He also looks at the hairs of the tail to see whether they grow as nature gives them.

3If the animal is clean in all these points, the priest marks it by winding a strip of papyrus around its horns, then smearing sealing clay over it and pressing his signet ring into it, and so they lead it away. Anyone who sacrifices an unmarked animal is punished with death. That is how the animal is tested; this is the sacrifice as it is established among them.

Chapter 39

1They lead the marked animal to the altar where they will sacrifice it, and light a fire. Then they pour wine over the victim, call on the god, and cut its throat, and after cutting the throat they cut off the head.

2They flay the body of the animal. As for the head, after heaping many curses on it, they carry it off: if there is a market in the place and Greek traders are there, they carry it into the market and sell it; if there are no Greeks there, they throw it into the river.

3The curse they pronounce over the heads goes like this: if any evil is going to come either on those who sacrifice or on Egypt as a whole, may it turn upon this head.

4In the matter of the heads of the sacrificed animals and the pouring of wine over the victim, all the Egyptians use the same rules for every sacred rite. And because of this rule, no Egyptian ever tastes the head of any living creature.

Chapter 40

1The removal of the sacred parts and the burning are ordered differently for each different sacred animal. I now come to speak of the divinity whom they hold to be the greatest, and of the greatest festival they keep for her.

2When they have flayed the bull, they pray first, and then they take out the whole of the stomach, but they leave the entrails in the body and the fat too. They cut off the legs, the tip of the loin, the shoulders, and the neck.

3Having done this, they fill the rest of the bull's body with pure bread, honey, raisins, figs, frankincense, myrrh, and other incenses. When they have filled it with these, they set it on fire, pouring a great quantity of oil over it.

4They fast before they sacrifice. While the sacred animal burns, they all beat themselves, and when they have finished beating themselves they set out a meal of what is left of the animal.

Chapter 41

1All the Egyptians sacrifice the clean males, the bulls and the calves, but they may not sacrifice the females: the females are sacred to Isis.

2The image of Isis is a woman with the horns of a cow, just as the Greeks picture Io. And in the same way all Egyptians honor female cows far above all other livestock.

3For that reason no Egyptian man or woman would kiss a Greek on the mouth, or use a Greek's knife, or his spits, or his pot, or taste the meat of a clean bull cut with a Greek knife.

4They bury the cattle when they die in this way: the females they throw into the river; each town buries its males in the outskirts, leaving one horn, or both, standing up as a mark. When the carcass has rotted and the set time has come, a boat comes from the island called Prosopitis to each city.

5This island lies in the Delta, and its circumference is nine schoinoi. There are many other cities on the island of Prosopitis, and from one of them, named Atarbechis, the boats come to gather up the bones of the cattle; in that city a holy sanctuary of Aphrodite is founded.

6From this city others travel out to many other cities, and after digging up the bones they carry them off, and all of them bury them together in one place. Other livestock they bury in the same way when they die, for this rule too has been laid down for them: they do not kill these animals either.

Chapter 42

1All who have a sanctuary of the Theban Zeus, or who belong to the Theban nome, abstain from sheep and sacrifice goats.

2The Egyptians do not all worship the same gods in the same way, except for Isis and Osiris, whom they say is Dionysus; these all worship alike. Those who have a sanctuary of Mendes, or belong to the Mendesian nome, abstain from goats and sacrifice sheep.

3The Thebans, and those who abstain from sheep because of them, say this rule was laid on them for the following reason. Heracles wanted by all means to see Zeus, but Zeus did not want to be seen by him. At last, when Heracles kept pleading, Zeus hit on this device:

4he flayed a ram, cut off its head and held it in front of himself, and pulled the fleece over himself, and so showed himself to Heracles. From that time the Egyptians make the image of Zeus with a ram's face. And from the Egyptians come the Ammonians, who are colonists of both Egyptians and Ethiopians and speak a language between the two.

5It seems to me that the Ammonians also took their name from this: the Egyptians call Zeus "Amun." So the Thebans do not sacrifice rams; they hold them sacred for this reason.

6On one day in the year, at the festival of Zeus, they cut up a single ram, flay it, and put its fleece on the image of Zeus in the same way, and then they bring up another image, of Heracles, to it. When they have done this, all who are at the sanctuary beat themselves in mourning for the ram, and then they bury it in a sacred tomb.

Chapter 43

1About Heracles I heard this account: that he was one of the twelve gods. But about the other Heracles, the one the Greeks know, I could not hear anything anywhere in Egypt.

2And yet, that the Egyptians did not take the name of Heracles from the Greeks, but the Greeks took it from the Egyptians — those Greeks who gave the name Heracles to the son of Amphitryon — I have many other proofs, and among them this one: the two parents of that Heracles, Amphitryon and Alcmene, were by origin descended from Egypt; and besides this, the Egyptians say they do not know the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, and these two gods have not been received among their other gods.

3Besides, if the Egyptians had taken the name of any god from the Greeks, these gods would have been the likeliest, indeed the most certain, to be remembered, if the Egyptians did then make sea voyages and some Greeks were sailors, as I expect and as my judgment tells me. So they would have known the names of those gods even better than the name of Heracles.

4No: Heracles is for the Egyptians an ancient god. As they themselves say, seventeen thousand years passed down to the reign of Amasis, counting from the time when the twelve gods were born from the eight; and they count Heracles as one of the twelve.

Chapter 44

1And wanting to know something certain about these matters, from whatever sources I could, I also sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia, because I heard that a holy sanctuary of Heracles stood there.

2I saw it richly furnished with many other offerings, and in it were two pillars of great size, one of solid gold and one of emerald stone that shone in the night. Talking with the priests of the god, I asked how long a time it was since the sanctuary was founded.

3I found that not even they agree with the Greeks: they said the god's sanctuary was founded when Tyre was founded, and that Tyre had been inhabited for two thousand three hundred years. In Tyre I also saw another sanctuary of Heracles, bearing the name Heracles of Thasos.

4I went on to Thasos as well, and there I found a sanctuary of Heracles founded by Phoenicians, who sailed out in search of Europa and founded Thasos. That was five generations of men earlier than Heracles son of Amphitryon was born in Greece.

5What I inquired into makes it plain that Heracles is an ancient god. And those Greeks, it seems to me, act most rightly who have set up and keep two sanctuaries of Heracles: to one they sacrifice as to an immortal god, with the name Olympian; for the other they make offerings as to a dead hero.

Chapter 45

1The Greeks also tell many other stories without examining them. Among the thoughtless ones is this tale they tell about Heracles: that when he came to Egypt, the Egyptians crowned him and led him out in a procession to sacrifice him to Zeus, and that he kept quiet for a while, but when they began the rites at the altar he turned to violence and killed them all.

2To me it seems that Greeks who say this know nothing at all about the Egyptian character and customs. The Egyptians may not sacrifice even animals, except swine, and male bulls and calves if they are clean, and geese; how then would these people sacrifice human beings?

3Besides, they say Heracles was still one man and still a human being; how is it natural that he should kill many myriads? So much for that. And having said so much about these matters, may there be good will toward us from both the gods and the heroes.

Chapter 46

1The Egyptians I mentioned do not sacrifice she-goats and he-goats for the following reason: the Mendesians count Pan among the eight gods, and they say these eight gods came into being before the twelve.

2Their painters and sculptors make the image of Pan with a goat's face and goat's legs, just as the Greeks do, not because they believe he was like that, but because they believe he was like the other gods. Why they picture him so, it is not pleasing to me to say.

3The Mendesians hold all goats sacred, the males more than the females, and their goatherds get greater honors than others. One goat of all is honored most, and when it dies, great mourning is ordained for the whole Mendesian nome.

4In Egyptian both the he-goat and Pan are called Mendes. In my own time a portent happened in that nome: a goat had intercourse with a woman in the open. This came to be known to all people.

Chapter 47

1The Egyptians hold the pig to be an unclean animal. If a man touches one in passing, he goes down into the river and washes himself with the very clothes he is wearing. And the swineherds, though they are native Egyptians, are the only men of all who enter no temple in Egypt; no one will give a daughter in marriage to any of them or take a wife from among them, so the swineherds give and take wives only from one another.

2The Egyptians do not think it right to sacrifice pigs to any other gods, but only to the Moon and to Dionysus, at one and the same time, at the same full moon, and after sacrificing the pigs they eat their meat. Why they loathe pigs at all their other festivals and yet sacrifice them at these, the Egyptians have a story they tell about it; but though I know it, it does not seem to me proper to tell.

3The sacrifice of the pigs to the Moon is performed like this: after sacrificing, the sacrificer puts the tip of the tail and the spleen and the omentum together, covers them all with the fat that is found around the belly of the animal, and then sets them on fire. The rest of the meat they eat on the full moon on which they sacrificed; on any other day they would not touch it. The poor among them, because their means are weak, knead little pigs out of dough and bake them, and offer those instead.

Chapter 48

1At the festival of Dionysus, on the eve of the feast, each man slaughters a pig before his doors and gives it to be carried away by the same swineherd who sold it to him.

2The Egyptians hold the rest of the festival of Dionysus almost entirely in the same way as the Greeks, except that they have no dances. Instead of phalluses they have invented something else: images about a cubit long, worked by strings, which the women carry around through the villages, the private parts on them nodding, though these are not much smaller than the rest of the body. A flute player goes before them, and they follow, singing a song of Dionysus.

3Why the image has a larger private part, and why only that part of the body moves, there is a sacred story told about it.

Chapter 49

1It seems to me that Melampus son of Amythaon was not ignorant of this sacrifice but knew it well. For it is Melampus who taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus, his sacrifice, and the procession of the phallus. He did not lay hold of the whole account exactly, but the wise men who came after him explained it more fully. And it is Melampus who taught the sending of the phallus in honor of Dionysus, and the Greeks learned it from him and so do what they do.

2I say that Melampus was a wise man, that he worked out for himself the art of divination, and that, having learned many things in Egypt, he taught the Greeks many other things besides, and the rites of Dionysus too, changing only a few of them. For I will not say that what the Egyptians do for this god and what the Greeks do just happened to match: then the Greek rites would be Greek in character and not lately introduced.

3Nor will I say that the Egyptians took this or any other religious custom from the Greeks. It seems to me that Melampus learned the things about Dionysus chiefly from Cadmus the Tyrian and the people who came with him from Phoenicia into the land now called Boeotia.

Chapter 50

1Indeed the names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt. That they came from the foreigners I found by asking; and I believe they came mostly from Egypt.

2For except Poseidon and the Dioscuri, as I said before, and Hera and Hestia and Themis and the Graces and the Nereids, the Egyptians have had from the beginning the names of all the other gods in their land. I report what the Egyptians themselves say. As for the gods whose names they say they do not know, these, I think, were named by the Pelasgians, except Poseidon: him they learned of from the Libyans.

3For from the beginning no people have held the name of Poseidon except the Libyans, and they have always honored this god. The Egyptians also count the heroes as nothing at all.

Chapter 51

1These things, and others besides them that I will tell of, the Greeks have taken as custom from the Egyptians. But the making of the images of Hermes with erect private parts they did not learn from the Egyptians; it came from the Pelasgians — the Athenians first of all the Greeks took it up, and from the Athenians the rest.

2Athens was by then already counted as Greek when the Pelasgians came to live in the land together with them, and it was from that that Greeks began to be called by that name. Whoever has been initiated into the rites of the Cabeiri, which the Samothracians perform, having learned them from the Pelasgians, that man knows what I mean.

3For these same Pelasgians, who became fellow settlers with the Athenians, lived in Samothrace before, and it was from them that the Samothracians took the rites.

4So the Athenians, first of the Greeks, learned from the Pelasgians to make the images of Hermes with erect private parts, and they made them. The Pelasgians told a sacred story about this, and it is made plain in the mysteries at Samothrace.

Chapter 52

1Before that, as I know from what I heard at Dodona, the Pelasgians sacrificed to all the gods, calling on them in prayer, but they gave no title or name to any of them, for they had not yet heard any. They gave them the name "gods" (theoi) for a reason like this: because they had set (thentes) all things in order and held every allotment (nomas).

2After a long time had passed, they learned the names of the other gods, which came from Egypt, and Dionysus they learned much later. Then after a while they consulted the oracle at Dodona about the names, for this oracle is held to be the oldest of the oracles among the Greeks, and at that time it was the only one.

3So the Pelasgians consulted the oracle at Dodona, asking whether they should take up the names that had come from the foreigners, and the oracle told them to use them. From that time they sacrificed using the names of the gods, and the Greeks later took the names from the Pelasgians.

Chapter 53

1Where each of the gods came from, or whether they had all existed forever, or what their forms were like, was not known until — so to speak — yesterday and the day before.

2I believe Hesiod and Homer were four hundred years older than I am, and not more. These are the men who made a theogony for the Greeks, gave the gods their titles, divided out their honors and skills, and marked out their forms.

3The poets said to have been born before these men, it seems to me, were really born after them. The earlier parts of this I have from the priestesses of Dodona; the later parts, the ones touching Hesiod and Homer, I state myself.

Chapter 54

1About the oracles in Greece and in Libya the Egyptians tell this story. The priests of the Theban Zeus said that two priestesses were carried off from Thebes by Phoenicians, one of them sold into Libya and the other to the Greeks; these two women, they said, were the first to found the oracles in the lands I named.

2When I asked how they could speak so exactly, they said a great search had afterward been made for these women, and that the searchers could not find them, but later learned these things about them, which was what they were telling me.

Chapter 55

1This is what I heard from the priests at Thebes; what follows the prophetesses at Dodona say: two black doves flew away from Egyptian Thebes, and one of them came to Libya and the other to them.

2The second one, they say, settled on an oak and spoke with a human voice, saying that an oracle of Zeus had to be set up there; and they took what was announced to them to be divine, and because of it they made the oracle.

3The dove that flew off to Libya, they say, told the Libyans to found the oracle of Ammon, and that too is an oracle of Zeus. The priestesses of Dodona told me this — the oldest was named Promeneia, the next after her Timarete, and the youngest Nicandra — and the other Dodonaeans in charge of the sanctuary agreed with them.

Chapter 56

1This is my own opinion about them: if the Phoenicians really did carry off the sacred women and sold one to Libya and one to Greece, then this woman, in the land that is now Greece but was then called Pelasgia, was sold to the Thesprotians.

2Then, working there as a slave, she founded a sanctuary of Zeus under an oak that grew there, which was only natural, since she had served in the sanctuary of Zeus at Thebes; and in the place where she came, she kept the memory of him.

3From that she founded the oracle, once she had come to understand the Greek language. And she said her sister had been sold in Libya by the same Phoenicians who had sold her.

Chapter 57

1It seems to me that the women were called doves by the Dodonaeans for this reason: they were foreigners, and their speech sounded to the people like the cries of birds.

2After a time, they say, the dove spoke with a human voice, because the woman had by then learned to speak so they could understand her. While she spoke a foreign tongue, she seemed to them to make a bird's sound — for how could a dove ever speak with a human voice? And in saying the dove was black they mean the woman was Egyptian.

3The oracle in Egyptian Thebes and the oracle at Dodona turn out to be very much alike. The art of divination from the sacrificial victims also came from Egypt.

Chapter 58

1The Egyptians were the first of all people to hold festivals, processions, and solemn processions of approach, and the Greeks learned them from them. My proof is this: the Egyptian ones are clearly made from long ago, while the Greek ones were established only recently.

Chapter 59

1The Egyptians do not keep a festival only once in the year; they keep many. The most honored and most eagerly kept is at the city of Bubastis in honor of Artemis, and the second is at the city of Busiris in honor of Isis.

2For that city has the largest sanctuary of Isis, and the city stands in the middle of the Egyptian Delta. Isis is, in the Greek language, Demeter.

3The third festival is at the city of Sais in honor of Athena; the fourth at the city of Heliopolis in honor of Helios; the fifth at the city of Buto in honor of Leto; and the sixth at the city of Papremis in honor of Ares.

Chapter 60

1When they travel to the city of Bubastis, this is what they do. Men and women sail together, a great crowd of each in every boat. Some of the women carry castanets and rattle them, and some of the men play the flute all through the voyage; the rest of the women and men sing and clap their hands.

2Whenever they come sailing past some other town, they run the boat in against the shore and do this: some of the women do what I said before, some call out abuse at the women of that town, some dance, and some stand up and pull up their clothing. They do this at every town along the river.

3When they reach Bubastis, they keep the festival with great sacrifices, and more wine from the grape is drunk at that one festival than in all the rest of the year. People gather there, every man and every woman except the children, to the number of seventy myriads, as the people of the country say.

Chapter 61

1This is what they do at Bubastis. What they do at the city of Busiris, when they hold the festival of Isis, I have told earlier: after the sacrifice, all the men and all the women beat themselves, myriads upon myriads of people. But whom they beat themselves for, it is not lawful for me to say.

2The Carians living in Egypt go even further than this: they cut their foreheads with knives as well, and by this it is plain that they are foreigners and not Egyptians.

Chapter 62

1When they gather at the city of Sais, on the night of the sacrifice they burn lamps outdoors, many of them set in a circle around their houses. The lamps are shallow bowls full of salt and oil, with the wick floating on the surface, and they burn all night. The festival is called the Festival of Lamps.

2Even the Egyptians who do not come to this festival keep watch on the night of the sacrifice and burn lamps, all of them, so that the burning is not at Sais alone but through all Egypt. Why this night won its light and its honor, there is a sacred story told about it.

Chapter 63

1At the city of Heliopolis and at Buto they perform only sacrifices when they go there. At Papremis they perform sacrifices and rites just as at the other festivals; but when the sun goes down, a few of the priests stay busy around the image, while the many stand at the entrance of the sanctuary holding wooden clubs, and on the other side stand more than a thousand other men, fulfilling vows, each of them holding clubs too.

2The image stands in a small wooden temple covered with gold, and the day before they carry it out to another sacred building. The few priests left around the image then pull a four-wheeled wagon that carries the little temple and the image inside it; the men standing at the gates will not let it in, and the vowed men, taking revenge for the god, strike them as they try to hold the way.

3A hard fight with the clubs breaks out there, and heads are broken, and as I think many die of their wounds. But the Egyptians said that no one dies.

4The locals say this festival got its custom from the following. The mother of Ares lived in that sanctuary of Ares, and Ares, who had been raised away from her, came back a grown man, wanting to sleep with her. His mother's servants, who had never seen him before, would not let him pass but drove him off. So he brought men from another city, dealt roughly with the servants, and got in beside his mother. From that, they say, this beating at the festival was made a custom for Ares.

Chapter 64

1The Egyptians were also the first to make it a religious rule that men may not have intercourse with women in sanctuaries, nor enter a sanctuary from a woman unwashed. Almost all other people, except the Egyptians and the Greeks, do have intercourse in sanctuaries and enter them from a woman unwashed, holding that human beings are just like the other animals:

2for they see the other animals and the kinds of birds mating in the temples of the gods and in their sacred precincts; and if this were not pleasing to the god, the animals would not do it. Such things they say and do, but I do not find them pleasing.

Chapter 65

1The Egyptians are excessively strict in their religious practice in other matters of their sanctuaries, and in this too.

2Though Egypt borders on Libya, it is not very full of wild beasts; but all the animals they have are held sacred, some of them living together with the people and some not. If I were to say why each animal is sacred, I would be drawn by my account into matters of the gods, which I am most careful not to talk about; where I have touched on them, I said it caught by necessity.

3The rule about the animals is this: keepers, both men and women, are appointed from among the Egyptians to feed each kind separately, and a keeper's son receives the office from his father.

4In the cities, when the people fulfill their vows, this is what they do: praying to the god the animal belongs to, they shave the head of their children, the whole head or half of it or a third part, and set the hair up for sale by weight against silver. Whatever the hair brings they give to the keeper of the animals, and she, cutting fish in return, provides food for the animals.

5That is how their food is provided. Whoever kills one of these animals on purpose is punished with death; if he kills it by accident, he pays whatever fine the priests set. And whoever kills an ibis or a hawk, on purpose or by accident, must die.

Chapter 66

1There are many animals reared together with people, and there would be many more, if it were not for what happens to the cats: after the females give birth, they no longer come to the males, and the males, wanting to mate with them, cannot manage it.

2So the males have devised this: they snatch and steal the kittens from the females and kill them, though they do not eat them when killed. The females, robbed of their young and wanting more, then come back to the males, for the animal loves its offspring.

3When a fire breaks out, something divine takes hold of the cats: the Egyptians stand apart and keep watch over the cats, not troubling to put out the fire, while the cats slip and leap through the people and throw themselves into the fire.

4When this happens, great mourning seizes the Egyptians. In whichever house a cat dies a natural death, all who live there shave only their eyebrows; in whichever house a dog dies, they shave the whole body and the head.

Chapter 67

1Cats that die are carried out to sacred buildings, where they are embalmed and buried, in the city of Bubastis. Dogs are buried by each town in its own city, in sacred tombs, and the hounds that track are buried in the same way as the dogs. The shrew-mice and the hawks they carry to the city of Buto, and the ibises to the city of Hermes.

2Bears, which are rare, and wolves, which are not much bigger than foxes, they bury wherever they find them lying.

Chapter 68

1This is the nature of the crocodile: for the four most wintry months it eats nothing. It is a four-footed animal of land and lake, for it lays its eggs in the ground and hatches them, and it spends most of the day on dry land but the whole night in the river, for the water is warmer than the clear air and the dew.

2Of all the mortal creatures we know, this one grows from the smallest start to the greatest size: its eggs are not much bigger than a goose's eggs, and the young one comes out in proportion to the egg; but as it grows it becomes seventeen cubits long, and even more.

3It has eyes like a pig's, and big tusk-like teeth in proportion to its body. Alone of animals it has no tongue, and it does not move its lower jaw; it is also alone among animals in bringing the upper jaw down to the lower one.

4It has strong claws too, and on its back a scaly hide that cannot be broken. It is blind in the water but has the sharpest sight in the open air. Because it lives in the water, the inside of its mouth is always full of leeches. All other birds and beasts avoid it, but the trochilus is at peace with it, because the crocodile gets help from it:

5when the crocodile comes out of the water onto the land and then opens its mouth (it usually does this facing the west wind), the trochilus slips into its mouth and swallows down the leeches; and the crocodile, enjoying the help, does the trochilus no harm.

Chapter 69

1For some of the Egyptians the crocodiles are sacred, for others not; the others treat them as enemies. Those who live around Thebes and the lake of Moeris hold them most strongly to be sacred.

2Each of these peoples raises one crocodile out of all of them, trained to be tame; they put ornaments of cast stone and of gold in its ears and rings on its front feet, give it set portions of food and offerings, treat it as well as they can while it lives, and when it dies they embalm it and bury it in sacred tombs.

3The people living around the city of Elephantine even eat them, not holding them sacred. They do not call them crocodiles but champsae; the Ionians named them crocodiles, comparing their shapes with the crocodiles born among them in the vaulted passages.

Chapter 70

1There are many ways of hunting them, and of every kind; the one I think most worth telling I will write here. When the hunter has baited a hook with the back of a pig, he lets it go into the middle of the river, while he himself stands on the riverbank holding a live pig, which he beats.

2Hearing the squealing, the crocodile comes toward the sound, meets the pig's back, and swallows it; the hunters then pull on the line. When it has been dragged onto the land, the hunter's first act is to plaster its eyes with mud; having done this, he handles the rest very easily, but without doing it with great toil.

Chapter 71

1The hippopotamuses are sacred in the nome of Papremis, but not sacred to the rest of the Egyptians. They have this appearance: it is a four-footed animal with a cloven hoof and hoofs like a cow's, a snub nose, a horse's mane, visible tusks, and the tail and voice of a horse; it is as big as the biggest ox. Its hide is so thick that when it has dried, spear shafts are made from it.

Chapter 72

1There are also otters in the river, and they hold these to be sacred. They also count as sacred the fish called the lepidotos and the eel; these, they say, are sacred to the Nile. And among the birds, the fox-geese.

Chapter 73

1There is another sacred bird too, whose name is the phoenix. I myself have never seen it except in a picture; for it rarely comes to them, at intervals of, as the people of Heliopolis say, five hundred years.

2They say it comes at that time when its father has died. If it is like its picture, its size and its look are these: part of its feathers is gold-colored, and part is mostly red; and in shape and in size it is most like an eagle.

3About this bird they tell one thing, and it is a thing I do not believe: they say it brings its father from Arabia, packed in myrrh, to the temple of the Sun, and buries him there.

4It carries him like this: first it molds an egg of myrrh as big as it can possibly carry, and makes trial of carrying it. When it has made its trial, it hollows out the egg and puts its father inside; then it plugs the hole with other myrrh, filling up the space it had emptied to put the father in. With the father laid inside, the egg comes to the same weight as before. It then seals it and carries it to Egypt, to the temple of the Sun. This, they say, is what the bird does.

Chapter 74

1Near Thebes there are sacred snakes, in no way harmful to people. They are small in size, and they carry two horns growing from the very top of the head. When they die, the people bury them in the temple of Zeus; for they say these snakes are sacred to that god.

Chapter 75

1There is a place in Arabia lying very near the city of Buto, and I went to this place to make inquiry about the winged snakes. When I came there, I saw bones of snakes and backbones, too many to describe. There were heaps of backbones, some large, some smaller, and some smaller still, and there were many of them.

2The place where the backbones lie scattered is of this kind: a narrow opening from steep mountains into a great plain, and this plain joins the plain of Egypt.

3The story is that at the coming of spring, winged snakes fly from Arabia toward Egypt, and the ibises, the birds, meet them at the entrance to this land and do not let the snakes pass; they kill them.

4The Arabs say the ibis is greatly honored by the Egyptians because of this deed; and the Egyptians themselves agree that they honor these birds for this reason.

Chapter 76

1The ibis looks like this: it is very black all over; it has the legs of a crane; its face is most strongly hooked; and it is about the size of a crake. This is the look of the black ones that fight against the snakes. Of those that keep more about the feet of men (for there are two kinds of ibises)—

2one kind is bare over the whole head and neck; it is white in its feathers except for the head, the neck, the tips of the wings, and the end of the rump (and all these parts I have named are very black); in legs and in face it is like the other kind.

3The snake's shape is like that of the water-snakes; but its wings are not feathered; they are most like the wings of a bat. So much then for the sacred animals.

Chapter 77

1Of the Egyptians themselves, those who live in the tilled part of Egypt, keeping the memory of the past more than any other people I have come to know, are by far the most learned.

2Their way of life is as follows: for three days in a row every month they purge themselves, seeking health with vomits and with enemas. Their belief is that all sickness among men comes from the food they eat.

3Even apart from this, the Egyptians, along with the Libyans, seem to me the healthiest of all men because of the seasons: their seasons do not change. For in changes, sickness comes upon men more than from anything else, and above all from changes of the seasons.

4They eat bread made from emmer; they call the loaves cyllestis. They drink a wine made from barley, for there are no vines in their country. Of fish, they dry some in the sun and eat them raw, and others they eat after curing in brine.

5Of birds they eat quails and ducks and the smaller birds raw, after first curing them with salt. All the other food they have of birds or of fish, except the kinds declared sacred to them, they eat the rest roasted or boiled.

Chapter 78

1At the gatherings of their rich men, when the dinner is over, a man carries round a corpse in a wooden coffin, made as like a real body as possible, both in painting and in workmanship, a cubit or two cubits long. Showing it to each guest, he says: "Drink and enjoy yourself; for when you die you will be like this." This they do at their drinking parties.

Chapter 79

1They keep the laws of their fathers and take on no others. Among their other worthy customs there is one song, the Linus song, which is sung in Phoenicia and in Cyprus and in other places; each people gives it its own name.

2It agrees with the song the Greeks sing, calling it the Linus song. This is one of many things in Egypt that make me marvel—where they got the name Linus. It is clear that they have always sung this song. In the Egyptian tongue the Linus is called Maneros.

3The Egyptians said that he was the only son of the first king who ruled Egypt, and that when he died before his time, this lament was paid to him by the Egyptians; and that this song was the first and the only one they had.

Chapter 80

1The Egyptians agree in one more custom with the Lacedaemonians alone of the Greeks: when their younger men meet older men, they give way on the road and step aside, and rise from their seats when the elders come up.

2In this, though, they do not agree with any other Greeks: instead of greeting one another on the roads, they bow, letting the hand go down to the knee.

Chapter 81

1They wear linen tunics with fringes about the legs, which they call calasiris; over these they wear white woolen mantles, thrown about them. But wool is not carried into the temples, and it is not buried with them; for that is not holy.

2In this they agree with the rites called Orphic and Bacchic, which are in truth Egyptian and Pythagorean; for one initiated into those rites too may not be buried in woolen garments. There is a sacred story told about this.

Chapter 82

1The Egyptians have also worked out these things: for each month and for each day, which god has charge of it; and for a man born on any given day, what he will run into, how he will end, and what he will be like. Some of the Greeks who were makers of poems have used these things.

2They have found out more omens than all the rest of mankind. When an omen has happened, they watch and write down what comes of it; and if something like it happens again later, they believe the same result will follow.

Chapter 83

1Their divination is arranged in this way: the art attaches itself to no man, but to certain of the gods. In their country there are oracles of Heracles, of Apollo, of Athena, of Artemis, of Ares, and of Zeus; and of all the oracles, the one held in the highest honor is that of Leto in the city of Buto. But their oracles do not all stand in one manner; they differ.

Chapter 84

1Their medicine is divided as follows: each physician is for one sickness and no more. The whole country is full of physicians: some are physicians of the eyes, some of the head, some of the teeth, some of the belly, and some of hidden diseases.

Chapter 85

1Their mournings and their burials are these: whenever a man of any account dies a natural death out of one of their houses, all the women of that house smear their heads, or even their faces, with mud. Then, leaving the body in the house, they go about the city, beating themselves with their girdles fastened and their breasts showing, and all their female kin go with them.

2In another place the men also beat themselves, girt up as the women are. When they have done this, they carry the body away to be embalmed.

Chapter 86

1There are men whose settled business is this very thing, and who practice it as a craft.

2When a dead body is brought to them, they show the bearers wooden models of corpses, made lifelike by painting. Of these, they say, the finest is that of one whose name it is not holy for me to name in speaking of such a matter; the second they show is lower than that one and cheaper; and the third is the cheapest of all. When they have explained, they ask from which of them the bearers wish the body to be made ready.

3The bearers agree on a price and go away, and the men left in the workshop embalm in the finest way like this: first they draw the brain out through the nostrils with a bent iron tool; part of it they take out in this way, and part they clear away by pouring drugs in.

4Next, with a sharp Ethiopian stone they cut open the side along the belly and take out all the contents of the stomach; and after cleaning out the cavity and rinsing it with palm wine, they rinse it a second time with pounded spices.

5Then they fill the belly with pure pounded myrrh and with cassia and the other spices, except frankincense, and sew it up again. When this is done, they embalm the body, hiding it covered in natron for seventy days; for a longer time than seventy days they are not permitted to embalm.

6When the seventy days have passed, they wash the body and wrap its whole frame in bandages cut from the finest linen cloth, smearing it with gum, which the Egyptians use for the most part instead of glue.

7After this the dead man's kin take him back, and they have a wooden human-shaped case made; and having made it, they shut the corpse inside. Thus stored, they keep it in a burial chamber, standing it upright against a wall.

Chapter 87

1That is how they prepare the dead at the greatest cost. For those who want the middle way and shrink from the great expense, they prepare the body like this:

2They fill their syringes with cedar oil, the oil with which they had filled the dead man's belly; and without cutting him open and without taking out the bowels, they inject it through the anus, stop it from coming out, and keep the body in natron for the days named. On the last day they let the cedar oil out of the belly, the oil they had poured in first.

3The oil has such power that it brings out with it the stomach and the entrails, all melted down; and the natron melts the flesh, so that only the skin and the bones of the dead man are left. When they have done this, they give the body back and do nothing more.

Chapter 88

1The third manner of embalming, which prepares the dead whose means are small, is this: after rinsing out the belly with a purging drink, they embalm the body for the seventy days, and then give it back to be carried away.

Chapter 89

1The wives of men of standing, when they die, they do not hand over at once to be embalmed; and they do not hand over women who are very beautiful and of much note. Only when three or four days have passed since death do they give them to the embalmers.

2They do this for the following reason: so that the embalmers may not lie with the women. For they say one was caught lying with the fresh corpse of a woman, and that a fellow workman informed on him.

Chapter 90

1Whoever of the Egyptians themselves, or of strangers as well, is found dead, carried off by a crocodile or killed by the river itself—in whatever city he is carried ashore, the people there are bound by the strongest duty to embalm him, dress him as finely as they can, and bury him in a sacred coffin.

2No one else may touch him, not his kin and not his friends. The priests of the Nile alone bury him, handling him with their own hands as something more than a human corpse.

Chapter 91

1The Egyptians refuse to use Greek customs, and, to say the whole matter, the customs of no other people at all. This is the rule all the other Egyptians keep. Yet there is a great city, Chemmis, in the Theban district, near the city of Neon:

2in this city there is a square temple of Perseus, son of Danae, and palm trees grow around it. The gateway of the temple is of stone, and very large, and two great stone statues stand upon it. Within the enclosure there is a temple house, and in it a statue of Perseus has been set up.

3These people of Chemmis say that Perseus often appears to them, now throughout the land, and now inside the temple, and that his sandal, two cubits long, is found; and that whenever it appears, all Egypt prospers.

4That is what they say. This, however, they do for Perseus in the Greek manner: they hold athletic games, with events of every kind, and give as prizes cattle and cloaks and hides.

5When I asked them why Perseus appeared to them alone, and why they alone of all the other Egyptians held athletic games, they said that Perseus was sprung from their city. Danaus and Lynceus, they said, were men of Chemmis and sailed away to Greece; and tracing the line of descent from these two, they came down to Perseus.

6They said that when he came to Egypt, for the same cause the Greeks also tell of—bringing from Libya the head of the Gorgon—he came to them too and acknowledged all his kinsmen; and that he had come to Egypt already knowing the name of Chemmis, having been told it by his mother. At his command, they said, they hold the athletic games.

Chapter 92

1All this, then, is the practice of the Egyptians who live above the marshland. Those who dwell in the marshes use the same laws as the other Egyptians, and in other matters as well; and each of them lives with one wife, as the Greeks do. But to keep down the cost of their food they have devised these things besides:

2When the river is full and the plains turn to sea, lilies grow in the water in great numbers, which the Egyptians call lotus. When they gather these, they dry them in the sun; then they pound the middle of the lotus, which is like a poppy head, and from it they bake loaves in a fire.

3The root of this lotus is also good to eat, and rather sweet; it is round, and about the size of an apple.

4There are also other lilies, like roses, and these too grow in the river. From them the fruit grows in a separate pod springing from the root beside it, most like a wasp's comb; in it grow many kernels good to eat, each about the size of an olive stone; these are eaten both fresh and dried.

5The papyrus of the year's growth, when they pull it from the marshes, they cut off at the top and turn to other uses; and the lower stalk left behind, about a cubit of it, they eat and sell. Those who wish to use the papyrus at its best bake it in a red-hot oven and so eat it. Some of them live on fish alone: these they catch, take the belly from, dry in the sun, and then eat dried.

Chapter 93

1Fish that do not go in schools are not many in the rivers; but they breed in the lakes, and this is what they do: when the urge to breed comes upon them, they swim out to the sea in shoals. The males lead, shedding their seed; the females follow, swallowing it, and in this way they conceive.

2When they are full of young in the sea, they swim back, each to its old haunts. This time the lead is no longer with the males; the leadership belongs to the females. They lead in shoals just as the males did before: of their eggs they let fall a few grains at a time, and the males following swallow them. And these grains are little fish.

3From the grains left over and not swallowed come the fish that are bred later. Those of them that are caught on the way out to sea are found rubbed on the left side of the head; those caught swimming back have the right side rubbed.

4This happens for the following cause: going down to the sea they keep the land on their left, and swimming back they hold to the same land, pressing close against it and touching it as much as they can, so as not to miss their way in the current.

5When the Nile begins to rise, the hollows of the land and the marshes beside the river are the first to fill, as the water soaks through from the river; and at once these become full, and in a moment they all fill with little fish.

6Where these fish ought to come from, I think I understand it: when the Nile left in the year before, the fish laid their eggs in the mud and went off with the last of the water; and when, with the turning of time, the water comes again, these fish are born out of those eggs at once.

Chapter 94

1So it is with the fish. The Egyptians who live in the marshes use an oil made from the fruit of the sillicyprium, which the Egyptians call kiki; and they make it like this: along the banks of the rivers and the lakes they sow the sillicypria,

2which in Greece grow wild of themselves. In Egypt, when sown, these plants bear much fruit, but fruit of a very bad smell. When they have gathered it, some crush it and press out the liquid, and others roast it and then boil it; and what flows from it they gather. This oil is rich, and for burning in a lamp it is no worse than olive oil; but it gives off a heavy smell.

Chapter 95

1Against the gnats, which are beyond counting, they have devised the following. For the people who live above the marshes, the towers are a help: they climb up and sleep on them, for the gnats cannot fly high because of the winds.

2For those who live in the marshes, instead of towers other things have been devised. Every man of them owns a net: with it he catches fish by day, and at night he uses it like this—his bed stands inside it; around the bed he sets the net, and then, getting under it, he goes to sleep.

3If a man sleeps wrapped in a cloak or in a linen cloth, the gnats bite through it; but through the net they do not even try to bite at all.

Chapter 96

1The boats they use for carrying freight are made of acanthus wood, which in shape is most like the Cyrenaic lotus, and whose sap is gum. From this acanthus they cut planks of wood, each about two cubits long, and lay them up like courses of brick, building in this way:

2they fit the two-cubit planks around pegs that are close set and long. When they have built the boat in this way, they stretch crossbeams over the top of it. They use no ribs at all; and from inside they stop the seams with papyrus.

3They make one rudder, and this is pierced down through the keel. They use a mast of acanthus wood and sails of papyrus. These boats cannot sail up the river unless a strong wind is blowing; they are towed from the bank. Downstream they are carried like this:

4there is a door made of tamarisk wood, sewn around with reed matting, and a stone with a hole through it, weighing about two talents. The door they tie by a rope and let forward, to float ahead of the boat; the stone they tie by another rope and let out behind.

5The door, when the current strikes it, travels fast and pulls the baris after it (for baris is the name of these boats); and the stone, dragged behind and lying in the deep water, keeps the boat's course straight. They have these boats in great numbers, and some of them carry many thousands of talents.

Chapter 97

1When the Nile comes over the land, only the cities are seen standing out above the water, most like the islands of the Aegean Sea; for the rest of Egypt turns to sea, and only the cities show. So when this happens, boats are ferried no longer along the channels of the river but straight across the plain.

2Sailing up to Memphis from Naucratis, one's course goes right past the pyramids themselves. But this route is not the common one either; the common one is by the point of the Delta and by the city of Cercasorus. Sailing to Naucratis from the sea and from Canopus across the plain, you will come to the city of Anthylla and to the one called the city of Archander.

Chapter 98

1Of these two cities, Anthylla, being a city of note, is set apart to furnish shoes to the wife of whoever is king of Egypt at the time; and this has been so ever since Egypt came under the Persians.

2The other city, I judge, holds its name from Archander, son of Phthius the Achaean, the son-in-law of Danaus; for it is called the city of Archander. There might be some other Archander; but the name is not Egyptian.

Chapter 99

1Up to this point, what I have been saying rests on my own sight, my own judgment, and my own inquiry. From this point on, I begin to tell the stories of the Egyptians as I heard them; but something from my own sight will be added to them as well.

2The priests said that Min, the first king of Egypt, first dammed off the land about Memphis. For the river used to run the whole way along the sandy hill toward Libya; but Min, from upriver, about a hundred stades south of Memphis, filled in the southern bend of the river with earth. Then the old channel dried up, and the river was led to flow in the middle between the hills.

3Even now this bend of the Nile, so that it may not flow where it was cut off, is held under a strong watch by the Persians and strengthened every year; for if the river were to break through and overflow there, all Memphis would be in danger of being flooded.

4When the dammed-off ground had become dry land for Min, this first king, he first built on it the city that is now called Memphis; for Memphis too lies in the narrow part of Egypt. Outside the city he dug a lake from the river, toward the north and the west (for the river itself closes it off to the east); and he founded in the city the temple of Hephaestus, a great work and one well worth describing.

Chapter 100

1After him the priests read out from a book the names of three hundred and thirty other kings. In all those generations of men there were eighteen Ethiopians, one woman native to the country, and all the rest Egyptian men.

2The woman who ruled had the same name as the Babylonian queen, Nitocris. They said she avenged her brother: the Egyptians had killed him while he ruled over them, and after killing him they gave the kingdom to her. Avenging him, she destroyed many Egyptians by a trick.

3For they said she built a long underground room, saying in words that she was consecrating it, but in her mind planning something else. She invited to a great feast the Egyptians she knew to be most guilty of the murder; and as they feasted, she let the river in on them through a great hidden channel.

4This much they told of her—except that, when she had done this deed, she threw herself into a room filled with ashes, so that she might escape punishment.

Chapter 101

1Of the other kings they said that no one left any memorable deed or any display of splendor, except the last of them, Moeris.

2Moeris, they said, left memorials: the gateway of Hephaestus turned toward the north wind, and a lake that he dug—I will state its circuit in stades later—and pyramids built in the lake, whose size I will tell of along with the lake. He, they said, left all this; and of the others, not one left anything at all.

Chapter 102

1Passing over these kings, then, I will tell of the one who ruled next after them, whose name was Sesostris.

2The priests said that Sesostris first set out with long ships from the Arabian Gulf and subdued the peoples who lived along the Red Sea, until, sailing farther and farther, he came to a sea no longer navigable because of shallows.

3Then, when he had come back to Egypt, according to the report of the priests, he took a great army and marched over the mainland, subduing every people that stood in his way.

4Wherever he met brave peoples fighting hard for their freedom, he set up pillars in their lands, which said in writing his own name and his homeland, and how he had subdued them by his own power.

5But wherever he took cities without a battle and with ease, on the pillars of these peoples he had written the same as on the male figures of the conquered nations, and he even had the private parts of a woman added, wishing to make it plain that they had shown no courage.

Chapter 103

1Doing these things, he marched through the mainland, until he crossed over from Asia into Europe and subdued the Scythians and the Thracians. Against these, I judge, the Egyptian army came farthest; for the pillars are plainly seen set up in their country, but beyond them there are none.

2Then he turned and went back home. When he came to the river Phasis, I cannot say for certain what happened from there on: whether the king Sesostris himself set apart a part of his army and left them to live in the land, or whether some of the soldiers were carried astray in his wandering and stayed behind about the river Phasis.

Chapter 104

1For the Colchians plainly are Egyptians. I myself noticed it before I heard it from others. When the thought came to me, I questioned both peoples; and the Colchians remembered the Egyptians better than the Egyptians remembered the Colchians.

2The Egyptians said they believed the Colchians were of Sesostris' army. I myself guessed it on these grounds: because they are dark-skinned and woolly-haired—though that proves nothing, since others too are like that—but more than this, because the Colchians and the Egyptians and the Ethiopians alone of all mankind have cut around their private parts from the beginning.

3The Phoenicians and the Syrians in Palestine themselves admit that they learned this from the Egyptians. The Syrians who live by the rivers Thermodon and Parthenius, and the Macrones, their neighbors, say they learned it only lately from the Colchians. These are the only men who cut around their private parts, and they plainly do it exactly as the Egyptians do.

4Of the Egyptians and the Ethiopians themselves I cannot say which of them learned it from the other; for it plainly is a very old custom. But that these peoples learned it through mixing with Egypt is strong proof to me: the Phoenicians who mix with Greece no longer imitate the Egyptians in this matter of the private parts, and of the children born to them afterward they do not cut the private parts.

Chapter 105

1Let me now say one more thing about the Colchians, how they are like the Egyptians: they alone, together with the Egyptians, work linen, and they work it in the same way; and their whole manner of life and their language are like one another. The linen of Colchis the Greeks call Sardonic; the linen brought from Egypt is called Egyptian.

Chapter 106

1Of the pillars that Sesostris king of Egypt set up in the lands, most are no longer to be seen standing; but in Palestine Syria I myself saw them still standing, with the writing I have described on them, and with a woman's private parts as well.

2There are also two figures of this man cut in rock in Ionia: one on the road from Ephesus to Phocaea, and one on the road from Sardis to Smyrna.

3On each of the two a man is carved, of the size of five spans, holding a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and the rest of his gear is like this too; for he has both Egyptian and Ethiopian dress.

4From one shoulder to the other, across the breast, run sacred Egyptian letters cut in the rock, which say: "I won this land with my own shoulders." Who he is and where he comes from, he does not state here; but elsewhere he has stated it.

5Some of those who have seen the figures take him for an image of Memnon; but they are far from the truth.

Chapter 107

1The priests said that when this Egyptian Sesostris was making his way home, bringing back many people from the nations he had subdued, when he came to Daphnae of Pelusium, his brother—to whom Sesostris had entrusted Egypt—invited him to a feast, with his children beside him, and piled wood around the house on the outside; and when it was piled, he set it on fire.

2When Sesostris learned this, he took counsel with his wife at once; for she too had been brought along with him. She advised him, of his six children, to lay two on the fire and stretch them as a bridge over the burning wood, and to step over on them and so save himself. Sesostris did this: two of his children were burned to death in this way, but the rest were saved along with their father.

Chapter 108

1When Sesostris came back to Egypt and had taken vengeance on his brother, he used the host of people he had brought from the lands he had subdued in this way:

2they were the men who dragged the stones that were brought to the temple of Hephaestus in this king's time, stones of very great size; and it was they who, under compulsion, dug all the canals that now exist in Egypt; and so, against their will, they made Egypt—which before was open to horse-riding and carriage-driving throughout—unfit for both.

3From that time on, Egypt, though it is all plain, has been without horses and untraveled by carriage; and the cause of this is the canals, which are many and run in every direction.

4This is why the king cut up the land: those Egyptians who had built their cities not on the river but inland—whenever the river went away, they ran short of water and had to drink a poorer sort, drawing it from wells.

Chapter 109

1For this cause Egypt was cut up. The same king, they said, divided the land among all the Egyptians, giving each an equal square plot, and made his revenue from this, ordering them to pay a tax every year.

2If the river took anything away from anyone's plot, that man would come to the king and report what had happened; and the king would send men to look and measure how much smaller the land had become, so that from then on the man paid the appointed tax in proportion to what was left.

3It seems to me that geometry was discovered here, and that it passed from this into Greece. The pole and the gnomon and the twelve divisions of the day the Greeks learned from the Babylonians.

Chapter 110

1This king was the only Egyptian king who also ruled Ethiopia. He left memorials in front of the temple of Hephaestus: stone statues, two of thirty cubits—himself and his wife—and his four children, each of them twenty cubits tall.

2Of these, the priest of Hephaestus, long afterward, would not let Darius the Persian set up a statue in front of them. He said that Darius had done no deeds like those of Sesostris the Egyptian; for Sesostris had subdued no fewer nations than he, and the Scythians besides, while Darius had not even been able to conquer the Scythians.

3So it was not right, he said, for him to set up a monument in front of that king's offerings, when his deeds did not surpass them. Darius, they say, made allowance for these words.

Chapter 111

1When Sesostris died, they said, his son Pheron received the kingship. He made no campaign of war; and it befell him to become blind for the following cause. When the river came down at its highest, to eighteen cubits, and rose above the fields, a wind fell upon it and the river was beaten into waves.

2The king, they say, in his recklessness took a spear and hurled it into the middle of the river's whirlpools; and at once he fell sick and his eyes went blind. For ten years he was blind; and in the eleventh year an oracle reached him from the city of Buto, saying that the time of his punishment had run out and that he would see again if he washed his eyes with the urine of a woman who had gone only to her own husband and had never known another man.

3He tried his own wife first; and then, because he did not see again, he tried the rest one after another. When he did see again, he gathered all the women he had tried—except the one whose urine had given him back his sight—into one city, which is now called Erythra Bolos; and he shut them in and burned them all, together with the city.

4The woman whose urine had cured him he took as his wife. For his escape from the affliction of his eyes he dedicated offerings in all the temples of note; and what is most worth telling: at the temple of the Sun he dedicated works worth seeing, two obelisks of stone, each cut from a single stone, each of them a hundred cubits long and eight cubits wide.

Chapter 112

1After him, they said, a man of Memphis received the kingship, whose name in the Greek tongue is Proteus. His precinct stands in Memphis, very beautiful and richly furnished, south of the temple of Hephaestus.

2Phoenicians of Tyre live around this precinct, and the whole place is called the camp of the Tyrians. Within the precinct of Proteus there is a temple called the temple of Foreign Aphrodite. I guess this temple is a temple of Helen, daughter of Tyndareus: both because I have heard the story that Helen lodged with Proteus, and because it is named for Foreign Aphrodite; for none of the other temples of Aphrodite is anywhere called "foreign."

Chapter 113

1The priests told me, when I questioned them, that this is what happened about Helen. Alexander carried Helen off from Sparta and sailed away for home. In the Aegean, winds caught him and drove him out into the Egyptian sea; and from there—for the winds did not slacken—he came to Egypt, to the mouth of the Nile now called Canobic, and to Taricheia.

2On the shore stood the temple of Heracles that stands there even now. If a slave of any of the peoples takes refuge in it and has sacred marks put on his body, giving himself over to the god, no one may lay hands on him.

3This law has continued the same, unchanged from the beginning, down to my time. So Alexander's servants, distrusting him, learned of the law that governed the temple, and sat down as suppliants of the god; and from there they accused Alexander, wanting to hurt him, laying out the whole story of Helen and of the wrong done to Menelaus. They brought these charges before the priests and before the warden of that river mouth, whose name was Thonis.

Chapter 114

1When Thonis heard this, he sent the fastest message to Memphis, to Proteus, saying the following.

2"A stranger has come here, a Teucrian by birth, who has done an unholy deed in Greece: he deceived his own host, and he has come carrying off the host's wife and a very great sum of money, driven to this land by the winds. Are we then to let him sail away unharmed, or are we to take from him what he came with?"

3Proteus sent back this answer: "Seize this man, whoever he is, who has done a wrong to his own host, and bring him to me, so that I may learn what he will say."

Chapter 115

1When Thonis heard this, he seized Alexander and tied up his ships; then he brought up to Memphis him, and Helen, and the money, and the suppliants as well.

2When all had been brought up, Proteus asked Alexander who he was and from where he had sailed. Alexander told his family line and the name of his country, and told the story of his voyage, from where he had sailed.

3Then Proteus asked him from where he had gotten Helen. Alexander went astray in his answers and did not tell the truth; but the men who had become suppliants caught him out, telling the whole story of the wrong.

4At last Proteus made this speech plain to them: "If I did not count it a very great matter never to kill any stranger who has been driven to my land by winds, I would have taken vengeance on you for the sake of the Greek. You, worst of men, received hospitality and then did the most unholy deed: you went to your own host and took his wife. And even that did not satisfy you; you made off with her, stealing her away."

5"And not even that was enough for you: you plundered your host's house too before you came away."

6"Now then, since I set great store by never killing strangers, I will not let you take this woman or the money away; I will keep them here for the Greek stranger, until he himself comes and wants to carry them home. But you and your shipmates I give notice to leave my land within three days and shift your mooring to some other shore. If you do not, I will treat you as enemies."

Chapter 116

1The priests said that this was how Helen departed from Proteus. It seems to me that Homer also knew this story; but because it was not so well suited to epic poetry as the other account he used, he let it go, though he made it plain that he knew this story too.

2He made it clear in this way: in the Iliad—and nowhere else does he correct himself—he described the wandering of Alexander, how he was carried off course as he brought Helen, driven about now here and now there, and how he came to Sidon in Phoenicia.

3He mentions it in the great deeds of Diomedes; and the verses say this: "There lay the robes, all many-colored, the work of Sidonian women, / which godlike Alexander himself had carried from Sidon, / sailing over the broad sea, / on the road by which he had brought away Helen, the high-born daughter."

4He mentions it also in the Odyssey, in these verses: "Such healing drugs did the daughter of Zeus keep, drugs of cunning, good ones, / which Polydamna gave her, the wife of Thon, an Egyptian woman; / for the grain-giving earth of Egypt bears the most drugs, / many mixed for good, and many for harm."

5And Menelaus says this too, to Telemachus: "The gods held me in Egypt, eager as I was to come home, / because I had not offered them the full hecatombs."

6In these verses he makes it plain that he knew of Alexander's wandering to Egypt; for Syria borders on Egypt, and the Phoenicians, to whom Sidon belongs, live in Syria.

Chapter 117

1By these verses, and by this passage above all, it is clear that the verses called the Cypria are not the work of Homer but of some other man. For in the Cypria it is told that Alexander came from Sparta to Ilium on the third day, bringing Helen, having had a fair wind and a smooth sea; but in the Iliad he says that he wandered off course as he brought her.

Chapter 118

1Let Homer keep his Cypria verses. When I asked the priests whether the Greeks tell an idle tale about what happened at Ilium or not, they answered the following, saying that they knew it for certain through Menelaus himself.

2After Helen was carried off, they said, a great army of Greeks came to the Teucrian land to help Menelaus. When the army had landed on the shore and set up its camp, it sent messengers to Ilium, and Menelaus himself went with them.

3When these had come inside the wall, they demanded Helen and the money Alexander had stolen, and called for payment for the wrongs; but the Teucrians at that time and ever after kept saying the same thing, swearing themselves and offering the Greeks oaths in return: that they had neither Helen nor the money claimed, but that all of it was in Egypt, and that it would not be right for them to pay for what Proteus king of Egypt held.

4The Greeks, thinking they were being laughed at, laid siege to the city until they took it. When they had taken the wall, Helen did not appear; they heard only the same story as at the first. So the Greeks, now believing the first story, sent Menelaus himself to Proteus.

Chapter 119

1When Menelaus came to Egypt and sailed up to Memphis, and told the truth of the matter, he met with great hospitality, and he got Helen back without hurt, and all his own money besides.

2But with all this in hand, Menelaus acted unjustly toward the Egyptians. He made ready to sail, but the sailing was stopped—there was no way to sail; and when this had gone on so for a long time, he contrived an unholy deed:

3he took two little boys, children of native men, and cut their throats as a sacrifice. When it became known that he had done this, hated and pursued, he went off in flight with his ships toward Libya; where he turned after that, the Egyptians could not say. Of these things, the priests said, they knew some by inquiry, while of what had happened among themselves they could speak with sure knowledge.

Chapter 120

1So much the Egyptian priests said. I myself add the following to this story about Helen: if Helen had been at Ilium, she would have been given back to the Greeks, whether Alexander was willing or not.

2For Priam was not so far gone in mind, nor were the others of his kin, that they would have been willing to stake their own bodies and their children and the city, so that Alexander might live with Helen.

3And even if they had been so minded at the first—since many of the other Trojans were killed whenever they joined battle with the Greeks, and of Priam's own sons two or three, or even more, died in every battle, if I must use what the poets tell—with things like this happening, I believe that even if Priam himself had been living with Helen, he would have given her back to the Achaeans, to be rid of the evils that pressed upon them.

4Nor, again, was the kingship coming round to Alexander, so that, with Priam an old man, the whole matter would be in his hands; rather Hector, both older and a better man than he, was to receive it when Priam died; and it did not befit Hector to give way to a brother who was doing wrong—and that too when great evils were falling on himself and on all the other Trojans because of him.

5But they did not have Helen to give back; and though they told the Greeks the truth, the Greeks did not believe them—so I state my own judgment—because the divine power was contriving that, being destroyed to utter ruin, they should make this plain to mankind: that for great wrongs great punishments also come from the gods. So much, then, as seems good to me, has been said on this matter.

Chapter 121

1After Proteus, they said, Rhampsinitus received the kingship. The memorials he left are the western gateway of the temple of Hephaestus, and two statues that stand facing the gateway, twenty-five cubits tall. The Egyptians call the statue that faces north Summer, and the one that faces south Winter; the one they call Summer they honor and treat well, and toward the one called Winter they do the opposite.

Chapter 121A

1This king, they said, had great wealth of silver, such as none of the kings who came after him could surpass, or even come near. Wanting to store his money in safety, he had a stone chamber built, one wall of which stood on the outside of his house. But the builder schemed as follows: he got one of the stones ready so that it could be taken out of the wall with ease, by two men, or even by one.

2When the chamber was finished, the king stored his money in it. As time went on, the builder drew near the end of his life; he called his two sons, and told them that, for their sake, so that they might have plenty for life, he had contrived a way while building the king's treasury. He explained everything about the removal of the stone, and gave them its measurements, telling them that if they kept these, they would be stewards of the king's money.

3The builder died, and his sons did not wait long before setting to work: they came to the treasury by night, easily found the stone in the wall of the building, moved it, and carried out a great deal of money.

Chapter 121B

1When the king opened the chamber and saw the jars of money grown low, he was astonished; but he had no one to blame, for the seals were unbroken and the building shut fast. Yet each time he opened it, a second and a third time, he found the money less; for the thieves did not stop emptying it. So he did this: he ordered traps to be made, and set them around the jars in which the money lay.

2The thieves came as before, and one of them got in; and as he came up to the jar he was caught at once in the trap. The moment he understood what trouble he was in, he called his brother, showed him what had happened, and ordered him to come in as fast as he could and cut off his head, so that he, if seen and known for who he was, might not bring the ruin of his brother too. The brother thought he spoke well; he was persuaded, and did this; then he fitted the stone back into its place and went home with his brother's head.

Chapter 121C

1When day came, the king went into the chamber and was struck with amazement at seeing the thief's body in the trap without its head, while the chamber was still whole, having no way in and no way out. He was at a loss; and then he did this: he hung the thief's corpse up on the wall, set guards over it, and gave them this order—if they saw anyone weeping over it or mourning for it, they were to seize him and bring him before him.

2While the corpse hung there, the mother grieved bitterly; and she spoke to the son who was left alive, and ordered him to find some way, any way he could, to take down the body of his brother and bring it to her. If he neglected this, she threatened to go to the king and tell him that he had the money.

Chapter 121D

1The mother pressed the surviving son hard; and though he said much to her, he could not persuade her. So he contrived this: he got skins ready and filled them with wine, loaded them on donkeys, and drove them along. When he came opposite the guards who watched the hanging body, he pulled the feet out of two or three of the skins and let them run.

2As the wine poured out, he beat his head and cried out loudly, as if he did not know which donkey to turn to first. The guards, seeing the wine running freely, ran out into the road with jars, and gathered up the spilled wine, each counting it his gain.

3He abused them all, feigning anger; but when the guards comforted him, he pretended to grow gentle and to let his anger go, and at last he drove his donkeys out of the road and set their loads in order.

4As more talk passed between them, one of the guards made a joke and set him laughing; and he gave them one of the skins. The guards then lay down where they were, meaning to drink; and he took them up and urged them to stay and drink with him. They were persuaded, and stayed.

5Since they greeted him warmly over the drink, he gave them another of the skins. The guards drank so deep that they became dead drunk; overcome by sleep, they lay down to sleep right there where they had been drinking.

6When the night was well along, he took down the body of his brother; and in mockery he shaved the right cheeks of all the guards. Then he laid the corpse on the donkeys and drove home, having done for his mother all she had commanded.

Chapter 121E

1When word was brought to the king that the thief's corpse had been stolen, he took it very hard. He was determined, at any cost, to find out who the man could be that had contrived all this; and he did the following—which I do not believe.

2He set his own daughter in a certain chamber, with orders to receive all who came alike, and before lying with any man to make him tell her the cleverest and the most wicked deed of his life; and whoever told the story of the thief, she was to seize and not let go out.

3The girl did what her father had commanded. The thief, learning why these things were being done, resolved to get the better of the king by cunning; and this is what he did:

4he cut off the arm at the shoulder of a fresh corpse and went in carrying it hidden under his cloak. He came before the king's daughter, and when she asked him the same question as all the rest, he answered that the most wicked deed of his life was this: that when his brother had been caught in the king's treasury in the trap, he had cut off his head; and the most clever, that he had made the guards drunk and had taken down his brother's hanging body.

5When she heard this, she laid hold of him. But in the dark the thief held out to her the dead man's arm; she seized it and held it fast, thinking she held his own arm; and the thief let go of it and was gone through the doors, in flight.

Chapter 121F

1When this too was reported to the king, he was struck with wonder at the man's cunning and daring. But in the end he sent word through all the cities, offering safety and a great reward to the man who would come into his presence.

2The thief trusted the promise and came to him; and Rhampsinitus marveled greatly, and gave him his own daughter to wife, for he knew more than all other men. The Egyptians, they said, stand above all other men; and this man stood above the Egyptians.

Chapter 122

1After these things, they said, this same king went down alive to the place the Greeks believe to be Hades, and there played dice with Demeter; sometimes he won and sometimes he lost to her; and he came back again bearing a gift from her, a golden napkin.

2They said that because of Rhampsinitus' going down and his coming back, the Egyptians hold a festival, which I know was still kept in my time; but whether they keep it for this reason I cannot say.

3The priests weave the robe on that same day, and then they bind the eyes of one of their own number with a band. Then they lead him, wearing the robe, along the road that goes to the temple of Demeter, and turn back themselves. This priest with bound eyes, they say, two wolves lead to the temple of Demeter, twenty stades from the city; and again the wolves lead him back from the temple to the same place.

Chapter 123

1Let whoever believes such things make what use of them he can. I hold to one rule through my whole account: to write what each people says as I hear it. The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus were the first founders of the world below.

2The Egyptians were also the first to teach this doctrine: that the soul of man is immortal, and that, when the body perishes, it enters another living thing always being born. When it has gone round all the creatures of the land and of the sea and of the air, it enters again the body of a man; and its round journey it completes in three thousand years.

3Some of the Greeks have used this doctrine, some before others and some later, as their own; I know their names, but I do not write them.

Chapter 124

1The priests said that down to the time of King Rhampsinitus, Egypt had good laws throughout and thrived greatly. They said that Cheops, who ruled after him, drove them into every kind of evil. He closed all the temples first. He kept the people from sacrificing in them. Then he ordered all the Egyptians to work for him.

2They said some men were given the job of hauling stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains down to the Nile. The stones were ferried across the river in boats. Then he ordered other men to take delivery of them and drag them to the mountain called the Libyan mountain, dragging them right up onto it.

3They said the work was done by groups of 100,000 men, each group working for three months at a time. They said the road the men dragged the stones along took ten years to make. They said this road was a work only a little smaller than the pyramid. So it seems to me:

4that road is five stades long, ten fathoms wide, and eight fathoms high at its highest point, made of polished stone with figures of animals carved on it. They said the ten years went into this road and also into the chambers under the hill where the pyramids stand. He made those chambers as burial places for himself on an island, by leading in a channel from the Nile.

5They said the pyramid itself took twenty years to build. Each of its faces is eight plethra wide. It is square, and its height equals its width. The stone is smoothed and fitted together with the greatest care. No stone is less than thirty feet long.

Chapter 125

1This pyramid was built like steps. Some people call the steps rows; others call them small altars.

2After they first built it in this shape, they raised the remaining stones with machines made of short pieces of wood. They lifted them from the ground up to the first row of steps.

3When the stone had been lifted onto it, they set it on a second machine standing on the first row. From there it was dragged up to the second row by still another machine.

4There were as many machines as there were rows of steps. Or else they moved one single machine, easy to carry, up to each row whenever they needed to lift a stone. Both ways are told, just as each is reported.

5So the highest parts of the pyramid were finished first. Then they went on to the parts next below them. The parts at ground level and the very lowest were finished last.

6There are Egyptian writings on the pyramid recording how much was spent on radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen. The interpreter who read the writing to me said that, as I remember his words well, 1,600 talents of silver had been paid out.

7If that is true, how much more money must have gone to the iron for the work, and to food and clothing for the workmen? They took the stated time to build the works, and another time—and I think it was no short time—to cut the stones and haul them and dig out the part under the ground.

Chapter 126

1They said Cheops sank to such wickedness that, being short of money, he shut his own daughter up in a room and ordered her to get money from men—just how much, they did not say. They said she did what her father ordered, and she also planned on her own to leave a memorial of herself. She asked every man who came in to her to give her one stone for the building.

2They said the pyramid that stands in front of the great pyramid, the middle one of the three, was built out of these stones. Each of its sides is one and a half plethra.

Chapter 127

1The Egyptians said this Cheops ruled for fifty years. When he died, his brother Chephren took the throne. Chephren acted in the same way as his brother in everything else, and he built a pyramid too, though it did not come up to his brother's measurements.

2I measured this one myself. It has no chambers under the ground, and no channel from the Nile flows into it as into the other one. Instead, water flows around it through a built channel, around an island in the middle, and there, they say, Cheops himself lies buried.

3He cut the lowest course, which was of many-colored Ethiopian stone, back forty feet from the other's measurements, and he built it next to the great pyramid. Both stand on the same hill, which is about a hundred feet high. They said Chephren ruled for fifty-six years.

Chapter 128

1Counted together, these come to 156 years. During all that time the Egyptians say there was nothing but evil, and the temples stayed shut and were never opened. Out of hatred, the Egyptians do not want to say these kings' names. They even call the pyramids after Philitis the shepherd, who pastured his cattle in those places at that time.

Chapter 129

1They said Mycerinus, the son of Cheops, ruled Egypt after him. He undid his father's deeds. He opened the temples and let the people, worn down to the last degree by misery, go back to their work and their sacrifices. He also gave the fairest judgments of all the kings.

2For this reason they praise him above all the kings of Egypt who ever lived. He judged other matters well too. If anyone complained about a ruling, he would give that man something from his own property to make up for the man's anger.

3Mycerinus was gentle toward his people and lived like this. Yet his first misfortune was the death of his daughter, his only child in his house. He was in deep pain over what had happened. Because he wanted to bury his daughter with more ceremony than anyone else, he had a hollow wooden cow made. He covered it with gold, and then he buried his dead daughter inside it.

Chapter 130

1This cow was not hidden in the ground. It was still on view in my time, in the city of Sais, kept in a richly furnished room of the royal palace. They burn all kinds of incense beside it every day, and every night a lamp burns beside it all night long.

2Near the cow, in another room, stand statues of Mycerinus' concubines—or so the priests in Sais said. They are large wooden figures, about twenty at the most. They are carved naked. I cannot say who they are; I can only repeat what is said.

Chapter 131

1Some people tell this story about the cow and the statues: Mycerinus fell in love with his own daughter and slept with her against her will.

2Then, they say, the girl hanged herself in grief. He buried her in this cow. Her mother cut off the hands of the maids who had betrayed the girl to her father. And now, they say, the statues are of those women, shown suffering what they suffered in life.

3In my opinion these people are talking nonsense, especially about the hands of the statues. We saw that the statues had lost their hands with the passing of time. In my day the hands could still be seen lying at their feet.

Chapter 132

1The rest of the cow is covered with a purple cloth. Only its neck and head show, gilded with very thick gold. Between its horns there is a golden circle worked to copy the sun.

2The cow is not standing; it lies on its knees. It is the size of a large living cow. It is carried out of the room once every year, when the Egyptians beat themselves in mourning for a god I will not name on such a matter.

3Then they bring the cow out into the light too. They say that as she was dying, she asked her father Mycerinus to let her see the sun once a year.

Chapter 133

1After his daughter's death, this is what happened next to the king, they said: an oracle came to him from the city of Buto, saying that he would live only six more years and die in the seventh.

2He was alarmed. He sent a reproach to the god at the oracle. He complained that his father and his uncle had shut the temples, paid no heed to the gods, and destroyed men, and yet had lived a long time; but he, a pious man, was to die so soon.

3A second answer came to him from the oracle. It said his life was being hurried for this reason: he had not done what was fated. Egypt was fated to suffer for 150 years. The two kings before him had known this, but he had not.

4When Mycerinus heard this and saw that his fate was already sealed, he had many lamps made. As soon as night fell he lit them and spent his time drinking and living well, never letting up, day or night. He wandered through the marshes and the groves and went wherever he heard there were the most delightful ways to enjoy himself.

5He plotted all this to prove the oracle a liar. He wanted to turn his six years into twelve by making the nights into days.

Chapter 134

1He left behind a pyramid much smaller than his father's. Each side is three plethra, falling twenty feet short, and it is square. Half of it is built of Ethiopian stone. Some Greeks say this pyramid belongs to the courtesan Rhodopis, but they are wrong.

2It seems to me these people do not even know who Rhodopis was. Otherwise they would not have claimed she could have such a pyramid built. Building it would have swallowed up, so to speak, countless thousands of talents. Besides, Rhodopis was at the height of her fame under King Amasis, not under this king.

3Rhodopis lived many, many years after these kings who left the pyramids. She was Thracian by birth. She was the slave of Iadmon son of Hephaestopolis, a man of Samos, and she was a fellow slave of Aesop the teller of tales. Aesop too belonged to Iadmon. This fact makes that very clear:

4when Delphi proclaimed again and again, on orders from the oracle, that whoever wished could take up the blood-price for Aesop's death, no one else came forward. But Iadmon son of that Iadmon's son, another Iadmon, took it up. So Aesop too belonged to Iadmon.

Chapter 135

1Rhodopis was brought to Egypt by Xanthes of Samos. When she came there to work her trade, Charaxus of Mytilene, son of Scamandronymus and brother of the poet Sappho, freed her for a large sum of money.

2So Rhodopis became free. She stayed in Egypt. She was very charming, and she won great wealth—great for a Rhodopis, that is, but not great enough to reach the size of a pyramid like that.

3Anyone who wants to can still see the tenth part of her money today, and no one needs to spend great sums to do it. Rhodopis wanted to leave a memorial of herself in Greece. She decided to make something no one had yet thought of making and setting up in a temple, and to dedicate it at Delphi as a reminder of herself.

4She took a tenth of her money and had many iron spits made for roasting oxen, as many as the tenth would buy, and sent them to Delphi. They are still heaped together there today, behind the altar the Chians dedicated, facing the temple itself.

5It seems the courtesans of Naucratis love to become famous. This woman, the one this story is about, became so famous that all the Greeks learned the name of Rhodopis. Later another woman, named Archidice, became famous throughout Greece, though she was less talked about than the first.

6After freeing Rhodopis, Charaxus went home to Mytilene. Sappho mocked him with many taunts in a poem.

Chapter 136

1With Rhodopis I am done. The priests said that after Mycerinus the king of Egypt was Asychis. He built for Hephaestus the gateways facing the rising sun, by far the most beautiful and by far the largest. All the gateways have carved figures and countless kinds of buildings to show, but these are by far the finest.

2They said that during his reign money was so scarce that a law was made for the Egyptians: a man could borrow by putting up his father's dead body as security. A further clause was added to that law: the lender would also gain full power over the borrower's whole burial place. The penalty for a borrower who offered that security and then refused to pay the debt was this: when he died he would get no burial at all, not in his family tomb nor anywhere else, and he could not bury any of his own kin either.

3This king wanted to outdo the kings of Egypt who had ruled before him, so he left a brick pyramid as his memorial. It carries an inscription cut in stone, which says this:

4"Do not compare me with the stone pyramids. I am as far above them as Zeus is above the other gods. Men pushed poles down into the lake, and whatever mud stuck to the poles they gathered up and shaped into bricks. That is how they built me."

Chapter 137

1They said this is how things stood under him. After him a blind man from the city of Anysis became king; his name was Anysis. Under him the Ethiopian Sabacos, king of the Ethiopians, marched on Egypt with a great army.

2The blind man, they said, fled into the marshes, and the Ethiopian ruled Egypt for fifty years. During that time, they said, he did this:

3Whenever any Egyptian did wrong, he would not put a single one to death. He judged each man according to the size of his offense. He ordered him to raise earth and add a mound of soil in front of his own city, the city each wrongdoer came from. This is how the cities came to be even higher than before.

4First they had been raised by the men who dug the canals under King Sesostris. Then, in the time of the Ethiopian, they were raised a second time and became very high indeed.

5Of all the cities of Egypt, high ones and others, the city of Bubastis was raised highest, as it seems to me. In it stands the temple of Bubastis, the most pleasing to see. Other temples are bigger and cost more, but nothing is more delightful to look at than this one. Bubastis in the Greek language is Artemis.

Chapter 138

1Her temple is like this: except for the entrance, it stands on an island. Two canals come from the Nile, and they do not meet each other. Each runs up to the temple entrance, one flowing around it on this side and the other on that. Each canal is a hundred feet wide, and trees shade it.

2The gateway is ten fathoms high and is decorated with carved figures six cubits tall that are worth seeing. The temple stands in the middle of the city, and you can see it from every side as you walk around. The city has been raised high, but the temple has not been moved from the level where it was first built, so it stays in view.

3A wall runs around it, carved with figures. Inside there is a grove of very tall trees planted around a large temple building, and the statue stands in it. The temple enclosure is a stade long and a stade wide on every side.

4At the entrance there is a paved road of stone about three stades long. It runs through the marketplace toward the east. Its width is about four plethra. Trees that reach to the sky grow on both sides of the road. The road leads to the temple of Hermes. That is how this temple is built.

Chapter 139

1They said the Ethiopian's departure came about in the end like this: he saw a dream of this kind, and then he fled the country. He thought a man stood over him and advised him to gather all the priests in Egypt and cut them in half through the middle.

2He said that when he saw this vision, it seemed to him the gods were holding it out to him as a warning, so that by committing an unholy act against the temples he would bring some evil on himself from gods or men. So he would not do it. The time he had been fated to rule Egypt had run out, and he would leave.

3For the oracles the Ethiopians use are in Ethiopia. While Sabacos was still there, one of them had declared that he must rule Egypt for fifty years. When that time was up, and the vision of the dream kept troubling him, Sabacos left Egypt of his own free will.

Chapter 140

1When the Ethiopian left Egypt, the blind man came back from the marshes and ruled again. He had lived there fifty years on an island he had built up from ashes and earth. The Egyptians, as each had been ordered in secret by the Ethiopian, kept bringing him grain. He told them to bring ashes too as part of the gift.

2No one could find this island before Amyrtaeus. For more than 700 years, none of the kings before Amyrtaeus was able to find it. The island is named Elbo. It is ten stades across on every side.

Chapter 141

1After him, they said, the priest of Hephaestus became king; his name was Sethos. He held the fighting men of Egypt in contempt, as if he would never need them. He dishonored them in other ways too. He even took away the plowlands that had been given to each of them by the earlier kings, twelve choice plowlands for each man.

2Then Sanacharib, king of the Arabs and the Assyrians, marched on Egypt with a great army. The Egyptian fighting men refused to come to the priest's aid.

3The priest, driven to despair, went into the temple hall and wept aloud before the statue about the danger he faced. As he wailed, sleep came over him. In his dream, he thought the god stood over him and told him to take courage: he would suffer no harm if he met the army of the Arabs, for the god himself would send him champions.

4Trusting this dream, he took with him the Egyptians willing to follow him and camped at Pelusium. That is where the armies enter the country. None of the fighting men followed him. The men who followed him were tradesmen, craftsmen, and market people.

5When the enemies arrived, field mice swarmed over them in the night. The mice ate their quivers and their bows, and gnawed the handles of their shields as well. So on the next day many of them fell as they fled, unarmed.

6And now this king stands in the temple of Hephaestus as a stone statue, holding a mouse in his hand. The writing on it says: "Let whoever looks on me be reverent."

Chapter 142

1Up to this point in the story, this is what the Egyptians and the priests told me. They showed that from the first king down to this priest of Hephaestus, the last to rule, there had been 341 generations of men, and in those generations just as many high priests and just as many kings.

2Three hundred generations of men make 10,000 years, for three generations of men are a hundred years. The forty-one generations left over, the ones that followed the three hundred, make 1,340 years more.

3So they said that in 11,340 years no god had ever appeared in human form. They said nothing like that had happened before, or after, in the rest of the kings of Egypt either.

4In all that time, they said, the sun had risen out of its usual place four times. Twice it had risen where it now sets, and twice it had set where it now rises. Nothing in Egypt changed because of this, they said: nothing in what the land produced or what the river produced, nothing in the sicknesses, nothing about the deaths.

Chapter 143

1Once before, the priests of Zeus did the same thing to me, who did not trace my own line, as they had done to Hecataeus the story-writer at Thebes, when he traced his descent and tied his family line to a god in the sixteenth generation.

2They led him into the great inner hall of the temple and counted out the wooden statues, as many as I said. For each high priest sets up a statue of himself there during his own lifetime.

3Counting and pointing, the priests showed me each statue as the son of his father. They went through them all, starting from the statue of the priest who had died most recently, until they had shown me every one.

4When Hecataeus traced his line and tied it to a god in the sixteenth generation, the priests answered his genealogy with their count. They refused to accept from him that any man was born from a god. This is how they answered him: they said each statue was a piromis born of a piromis, all the way up to the 345 statues they showed him [these being given the name piromis]. They did not trace them to a god or a hero. In the Greek language, a piromis is a good and worthy man.

Chapter 144

1These were the men whose statues those were. The priests showed that all of them had been men like that, far removed from the gods.

2Before these men, they said, the rulers of Egypt were gods. These gods did not live together with men, and one of them was always the supreme ruler. The last of them to rule Egypt was Horus, the son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo. He put down Typhon and was the last god to rule Egypt. Osiris in the Greek language is Dionysus.

Chapter 145

1Among the Greeks, Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan are counted the youngest of the gods. Among the Egyptians, Pan is the oldest and belongs to the eight gods called the first. Heracles belongs to the second group, the twelve they speak of. Dionysus belongs to the third group, who were born from the twelve gods.

2How many years the Egyptians themselves say there are down to King Amasis for Heracles, I made clear earlier. They say Pan lived even more years than that. Dionysus lived the fewest of the three; they reckon 15,000 years down to King Amasis for him.

3The Egyptians say they know this for certain, because they always count the years and always keep written records of them.

4Dionysus, the one said to have been born of Semele daughter of Cadmus, lived about 1,600 years before my time. Heracles son of Alcmene lived about 900 years before my time. Pan, whom the Greeks say was born of Penelope (for the Greeks say Pan was born of Penelope and Hermes), lived less time before my day than the Trojan War—about 800 years.

Chapter 146

1Anyone is free to use whichever of these two accounts he finds more convincing. My own view on them has been given. If these beings, like Heracles son of Amphitryon, and Dionysus son of Semele, and Pan son of Penelope, had appeared openly in Greece and grown old there, then one could say they were other men, born later, who took the names of the gods who lived before them.

2But now: the Greeks say that Dionysus, as soon as he was born, was sewn into Zeus' thigh and carried to Nysa, which is above Egypt, in Ethiopia. About Pan they cannot even say where he went after he was born. It is clear to me that the Greeks learned the names of these gods later than the names of the other gods. They trace the birth of Dionysus and Pan from the time they learned their names.

Chapter 147

1The Egyptians themselves tell these things. But now I will report what other people and Egyptians alike say happened in this country, agreeing with one another. To their account I will add some things I saw with my own eyes.

2After the priest of Hephaestus ruled, the Egyptians were set free. They could not live without a king even for a moment, so they set up twelve kings. They divided all Egypt into twelve parts.

3They joined their families by marriage and ruled under these laws: no one was to try to overthrow another, no one was to seek to have more than another, and they were to be the closest of friends.

4They made these laws and held to them strictly for a reason. Right at the start, when they first took power, an oracle had told them that whichever of them poured a libation from a bronze bowl in the temple of Hephaestus would rule all Egypt. They met together in all the temples.

Chapter 148

1They decided to leave a common memorial. They built the labyrinth for their fame. It stands just above Lake Moeris, more or less opposite the city called Crocodilopolis. I have seen it, and it is beyond what words can say.

2If anyone added up all the walls and great works the Greeks have made, the whole would prove to be less work and less expense than this labyrinth. And yet the temple at Ephesus and the one at Samos are impressive too.

3The pyramids are also beyond words, and each of them is a match for many great Greek works. But the labyrinth beats even the pyramids.

4It [for] has twelve covered courts, with gates facing one another. Six face north and six south, all in a line. A single outer wall runs around them all. Inside there are two kinds of rooms, some under the ground and some built above those. There are 3,000 in all, 1,500 of each kind.

5We ourselves walked through the upper rooms and saw them, and we report them from our own sight. We learned about the underground rooms only by word of mouth. The Egyptian overseers would not show them at all. They said the tombs of the kings who first built this labyrinth were there, and also the tombs of the sacred crocodiles.

6So we speak of the lower rooms from what we heard. We saw the upper rooms ourselves, and they are bigger than any human work. The passages through the rooms and the winding ways through the courts, with their endless variety, gave one marvel after another to visitors going from a court to the rooms, from the rooms to colonnades, from the colonnades to other roofs, and from the rooms to other courts.

7The roof of all this is stone, like the walls. The walls are covered with carved figures. Each court has a colonnade all around it, built of white stone fitted together with the greatest care. At the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid forty fathoms high, with large figures of animals carved on it. A road leads into it under the ground.

Chapter 149

1This labyrinth is such a marvel, but the lake called Lake Moeris, beside which it is built, offers an even greater one. Going around the lake is 3,600 stades, which is sixty schoinoi, as long as the whole coast of Egypt. The lake stretches long from north to south. At its deepest point it is fifty fathoms deep.

2That it was made by hand and dug out the lake shows by itself. In the middle of the lake, more or less, stand two pyramids. Each rises fifty fathoms above the water, and the part under the water is built to the same depth. On top of each sits a giant stone statue on a throne.

3So the pyramids are a hundred fathoms tall. A hundred fathoms comes to just one stade of six plethra, since the fathom is measured as six feet or four cubits. The foot is four palms wide, and the cubit six palms.

4The water in the lake is not natural to it; that land is terribly dry. The water was led in from the Nile by a canal. For six months it flows into the lake, and for six months it flows back out into the Nile again.

5During the six months the water flows out, the lake pays a talent of silver into the royal treasury every day from the fish. When the water flows in, the catch brings twenty minas a day.

Chapter 150

1The people of the country also said this lake sends its water out under the ground toward the Syrtis in Libya, flowing westward inland past the mountain above Memphis.

2I could not see the earth dug out of this excavation anywhere. Since this mattered to me, I asked the people living closest to the lake where the dug-out earth had gone. They told me where it had been carried, and they persuaded me easily. I already knew by report that something like it had happened at Nineveh, the city of the Assyrians.

3Sardanapallus son of Ninus, king of Assyria, kept great treasures in underground vaults. Thieves decided to get them out. Starting from their own houses, the thieves dug an underground passage toward the royal palace. Every night they carried out the earth from their digging and dumped it into the river Tigris, which flows past Nineveh. In the end they got what they wanted.

4I heard that something like this was done in the digging of the lake in Egypt too, except that it was done by day, not night. The Egyptians who dug carried the earth to the Nile, and the river was sure to scatter it. So they say this lake was dug.

Chapter 151

1The twelve kings ruled with justice. Once, on the last day of a festival, they were sacrificing in the temple of Hephaestus and were about to pour the last libation. The high priest brought out the golden bowls they usually poured from, but he made a mistake in the count: there were eleven bowls for twelve kings.

2Psammetichus, the last of them in line, found he had no bowl. So he took off his bronze helmet, held it out, and poured with that. All the other kings wore helmets too, and they happened to have theirs on at that moment.

3Psammetichus held out his helmet with no scheming in mind. But the others took in what he had done, and they remembered the oracle—that whoever of them poured from a bronze bowl would be the only king of Egypt. Remembering the oracle, they did not think it right to kill Psammetichus. On questioning him they found he had done it without any plan. So they decided to strip him of most of his power and drive him into the marshes, and to keep him from ever mixing with the rest of Egypt again.

Chapter 152

1This same Psammetichus had fled earlier from the Ethiopian Sabacos, who had killed his father Necos. Psammetichus had fled then to Syria. When the Ethiopian was freed from the vision of the dream, the Egyptians of the Saite district brought Psammetichus back.

2Later, while he was king for the second time, the eleven kings caught up with him over the helmet business, and he had to flee into the marshes.

3He knew he had been grossly insulted by them, and he planned to take revenge on his pursuers. He sent to the city of Buto, to the oracle of Leto—the most truthful oracle the Egyptians have. The answer came that vengeance would come from the sea, when men of bronze appeared.

4He utterly disbelieved that bronze men would come as his helpers. But before long, necessity caught up with him: Ionians and Carians, sailing out on a raid, were driven off course and carried to Egypt. They landed and armed themselves in bronze. An Egyptian who had never before seen men armed in bronze came into the marshes and told Psammetichus that bronze men had come from the sea and were plundering the plain.

5When he learned that the oracle was being fulfilled, Psammetichus became friendly to the Ionians and Carians. He made them great promises and persuaded them to join him. When he had persuaded them, he brought them together with the Egyptians who wanted his rule, and with these men he overthrew the kings.

Chapter 153

1Once Psammetichus had won all Egypt, he built for Hephaestus at Memphis the southern gateways, the ones facing the south wind. He built a court for Apis opposite the gateways, to keep Apis in whenever he appears. The court is surrounded by columns all around and full of carved figures. In place of pillars, the court has giant statues twelve cubits tall. Apis in the Greek language is Epaphus.

Chapter 154

1To the Ionians and Carians who had helped him win power, Psammetichus gave lands to live on, facing one another across the Nile. These lands were named the Camps. He gave them these lands, and he paid everything else he had promised.

2He also placed Egyptian boys with them to be taught the Greek language. From these boys, who learned the language, come the interpreters in Egypt today.

3The Ionians and Carians lived in those lands for a long time. They lie a little below the city of Bubastis toward the sea, by the mouth of the Nile called the Pelusian mouth. Much later, King Amasis moved them out of there and settled them in Memphis, to make them a guard for himself against the Egyptians.

4After these men settled in Egypt, we Greeks, mixing with them this way, have known accurately everything that happened in Egypt, beginning with King Psammetichus and after. These were the first foreigners to be settled in Egypt.

5In the places they moved out of, there were still, down to my time, the slipways of their ships and the ruins of their houses.

Chapter 155

1So Psammetichus ruled Egypt. I have mentioned the Egyptian oracle many times already, and since it deserves it, I will now give an account of it. This oracle in Egypt is a temple of Leto. It stands in a large city, in the direction of the mouth of the Nile called the Sebennytic mouth, upstream from the sea.

2The city where the oracle is is called Buto; I have named it earlier. In this Buto there is a temple of Apollo and Artemis. The temple building of Leto, in which the oracle is, is itself large. Its gateways are ten fathoms high.

3I will tell what I found the greatest wonder of all the things that could be seen. In this sacred enclosure there is a temple building of Leto made of a single stone. Its height and its length are the same, and each side wall equals them too. Every one of these measures is forty cubits. The roof is covered by another stone, whose eaves are four cubits wide.

Chapter 156

1So that temple building is the most wonderful of the visible things around this temple. The second wonder is the island called Chemmis.

2It lies in a deep, wide lake, next to the temple at Buto. The Egyptians say this island floats. I myself saw it neither floating nor moving, but I am amazed at hearing that an island really does float.

3In it stands a great temple of Apollo, and altars of triple shape are set up there. Many palm trees grow on the island, and many other trees, both fruit-bearing and barren.

4The Egyptians add this story to explain why the island floats. Leto, one of the eight gods first born, was living in the city of Buto, where this oracle is. She took Apollo from Isis to keep safe. She hid him on this island, the one now called the floating island, when Typhon came searching everywhere, wanting to find the son of Osiris.

5They say Apollo and Artemis are the children of Dionysus and Isis, and that Leto became their nurse and savior. In the Egyptian language, Apollo is Horus, Demeter is Isis, and Artemis is Bubastis.

6From this story alone, and from no other, Aeschylus son of Euphorion took what I am about to say. He was the only one of the earlier poets to do it: he made Artemis the daughter of Demeter. They say this is why the island became a floating one. So they tell it.

Chapter 157

1Psammetichus ruled Egypt for fifty-four years. For twenty-nine of them he sat outside Azotus, a great city of Syria, and besieged it until he took it. Of all the cities we know of, Azotus held out longest under siege.

Chapter 158

1The son of Psammetichus was Necos, and he became king of Egypt. He was the first to start the canal that runs to the Red Sea; the Persian Darius later dug it a second time. A trip along it takes four days, and it was dug wide enough for two triremes to sail side by side with their oars out.

2The water comes into it from the Nile. The canal begins a little above the city of Bubastis, by the Arabian city of Patumus, and runs out into the Red Sea. It is dug first through the part of the Egyptian plain that faces Arabia. Above the plain, it runs along the mountain that stretches past Memphis, in which the stone quarries are.

3The canal runs along the lower slopes of this mountain from west to east for a long stretch. Then it turns through the narrows and runs from the mountain toward the midday sun and the south wind, out to the Arabian Gulf.

4The shortest and quickest crossing from the northern sea to the southern sea, the one called the Red Sea, is from Mount Casius, the mountain that marks the border between Egypt and Syria. From there it is exactly 1,000 stades to the Arabian Gulf.

5That is the shortest way, but the canal is much longer, as much as it is crooked. In digging it under King Necos, 120,000 Egyptians lost their lives. Necos stopped the work partway through. An oracle had stood in his way, telling him he was laboring ahead of time for the foreigner. The Egyptians call all people foreigners who do not speak their language.

Chapter 159

1Necos gave up the canal and turned to warfare. He had triremes built, some for the northern sea and some in the Arabian Gulf for the Red Sea. The slipways for them are still visible.

2He used these ships when he needed them. Necos also met the Syrians on foot in battle at Magdolus and beat them. After the battle he took Cadytis, a great city of Syria.

3He happened to be wearing the garments he had won these successes in. He sent them as an offering to Apollo at Branchidae of the Milesians. After that he ruled all together for sixteen years and died, handing power to his son Psammis.

Chapter 160

1While Psammis was king of Egypt, messengers came from the Eleans. They boasted that the Eleans set up the contest at Olympia more fairly and more beautifully than anyone among all men. They thought that beyond this not even the wisest of men, the Egyptians, could find anything further.

2When the Eleans came to Egypt and said why they had come, this king called together the Egyptians said to be the wisest. When the Egyptians had gathered, they asked the Eleans to tell everything they did about the contest. The Eleans told the whole story and said they had come to learn whether the Egyptians could find anything fairer to add.

3The Egyptians thought it over. Then they asked the Eleans whether their own townspeople competed in the games. The Eleans said yes: both their own people and all other Greeks were equally free to compete.

4Then the Egyptians said that in setting up the games that way, the Eleans had missed all fairness. There was no way to keep from favoring a hometown competitor and wronging the visitor. If they truly wanted to run the games fairly—and that was why they had come to Egypt—they should hold the contest for outside competitors only, and let no Elean compete at all. This was the advice the Egyptians gave the Eleans.

Chapter 161

1Psammis ruled Egypt only six years. He marched an army against Ethiopia and then died. Apries son of Psammis took his place.

2After his great-grandfather Psammetichus, Apries was the most fortunate of the earlier kings. He ruled for twenty-five years. He marched an army against Sidon and fought a sea battle against Tyre.

3But when his time came to fare badly, it came through a cause I will tell at greater length in my Libyan stories, and briefly here.

4Apries sent an army against the Cyrenaeans and met with a crushing defeat. The Egyptians blamed him for this and turned against him. They thought Apries had sent them on purpose into open destruction, so that, once they were destroyed, he could rule the rest of the Egyptians more safely. So the men who returned, together with the friends of the dead, were bitterly angry and broke away from him.

Chapter 162

1When Apries learned this, he sent Amasis to them to end the revolt with words. But when Amasis arrived, he found the Egyptians would not do it. While he was still speaking, one Egyptian stepped up behind him, put a helmet on his head, and said he was putting it on for kingship.

2None of this was against Amasis' will, as he soon showed. Once the Egyptians in revolt had made him king, he got ready to march against Apries.

3When Apries heard this, he sent Patarbemis, one of the trusted Egyptians in his circle, to Amasis. He ordered him to bring Amasis back alive. When Patarbemis arrived and called Amasis, Amasis happened to be sitting on horseback. He raised himself and broke wind at him. He told Patarbemis to take that back to Apries.

4Still, Patarbemis pressed him: the king had summoned him, and he must come. Amasis answered that he had been getting ready to do this for a long time. He said Apries would not have to complain; he would come himself, and he would bring others with him.

5From what was said, and from seeing him make ready in a hurry to leave, Patarbemis understood Amasis' plan. He wanted to tell the king as fast as possible what was happening. When he came back to Apries without Amasis, Apries gave him no hearing at all. In furious anger, he ordered the man's ears and nose cut off.

6The other Egyptians who still supported Apries saw this. When they saw their most honored man so shamefully mutilated, they stopped waiting. They changed sides on the spot and gave themselves over to Amasis.

Chapter 163

1When Apries heard this too, he armed his mercenaries and marched against the Egyptians. He had about him 30,000 Carian and Ionian mercenaries. His royal palace was in the city of Sais; it was large and worth seeing.

2The men of Apries marched against the Egyptians, and the men of Amasis marched against the foreigners. Both sides came together at the city of Momemphis, and they were about to test each other.

Chapter 164

1The Egyptians have seven classes. Some are called priests, some warriors, some cowherds, some swineherds, some shopkeepers, some interpreters, and some boat captains. These are the classes of the Egyptians. Their names come from their trades.

2Their warriors are called the Calasiries and the Hermotybies. They come from these districts, for all Egypt is divided into districts.

Chapter 165

1The Hermotybian districts are these: Busiris, Sais, Chemmis, Papremis, the island called Prosopitis, and half of Natho. The Hermotybies come from these districts. When they were at their greatest number, they were 160,000. None of them has ever learned a manual trade. All of them are set apart for war.

Chapter 166

1The Calasirian districts are these: Thebes, Bubastis, Aphthis, Tanis, Mendes, Sebennytus, Athribis, Pharbaithus, Thmuis, Onuphis, Anysis, and Myecphoris. This last district is lived in on an island facing the city of Bubastis.

2These are the Calasirian districts. When they were at their greatest number, they were 250,000 men. They too are not allowed to practice any trade. They practice only the arts of war, each son taking it over from his father.

Chapter 167

1Whether the Greeks also learned this from the Egyptians, I cannot judge for sure. But I have seen that the Thracians, the Scythians, the Persians, the Lydians, and almost all foreigners hold of less worth than the rest of their citizens the men who learn trades and the descendants of such men. They hold that men free of manual work are noble, especially those set apart for war.

2All the Greeks have taken up this way of thinking, and the Lacedaemonians most of all. The Corinthians look down on craftsmen the least of all.

Chapter 168

1These honors were set apart for the warriors alone of the Egyptians, besides the priests: twelve choice plowlands for each man, free of tax. An Egyptian plowland is a hundred Egyptian cubits square, and the Egyptian cubit happens to equal the Samian cubit.

2All of them had these lands set apart. But the men did not farm them themselves at all; they took turns with them. A thousand Calasiries and a thousand Hermotybies served each year as the king's bodyguard. Besides the plowlands, these men got a daily allowance: five minas' weight of roasted grain each, two minas of beef, and four cups of wine. This is what they gave the men always on guard duty.

Chapter 169

1Apries came to Momemphis leading his mercenaries, and Amasis came with all the Egyptians. They joined battle. The foreigners fought well, but being far fewer in number, they lost for that reason.

2They say this was Apries' belief: that not even a god could drive him from his throne, so firmly did he think he had established himself. In that battle he was beaten, taken alive, and brought to the city of Sais, to the house that had once been his own and was now the palace of Amasis.

3For a while he was kept and fed in the palace, and Amasis treated him well. But in the end the Egyptians complained that he was not acting justly by keeping alive a man who was their enemy and his own. So Amasis handed Apries over to the Egyptians. They strangled him and then buried him in his family tomb.

4That tomb is in the temple of Athena, very close to the sanctuary, on the left as you go in. The Saites buried inside that temple all the kings who came from their district.

5Amasis' tomb stands farther from the sanctuary than the tomb of Apries and the tombs of Apries' ancestors. But it too is in the court of the temple: a great stone hall, beautifully worked, with pillars carved like palm trees and costly in every other way. Inside the hall stand double doors, and the burial place is behind them.

Chapter 170

1There are also tombs in Sais of the god whose name I do not think it right to speak on such a matter. They are in the temple of Athena, behind the temple building, running along the whole length of Athena's wall.

2Great stone pillars stand in this sacred enclosure. Next to it is a lake, ringed by a stone border, beautifully made, set in a circle. As far as I could judge, it is the same size as the round lake in Delos called the Wheel.

Chapter 171

1On this lake the Egyptians perform at night the shows of that god's sufferings, which they call the mysteries. About these I know more—how each of them is done—but I will keep my mouth shut.

2About the rite of Demeter that the Greeks call the Thesmophoria I too will keep my mouth shut, except for the parts of it that are lawful to tell.

3The daughters of Danaus were the ones who brought this rite out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women. Later, when the Dorians drove out the whole population of the Peloponnese, the rite was lost. The Arcadians, the only Peloponnesians left who did not leave, were the only ones who kept it.

Chapter 172

1When Apries had been dealt with this way, Amasis became king. He was from the Saite district, and from the city called Siouf.

2At first the Egyptians scorned Amasis and held him of no great account, because he had been a common man before, from a house not at all distinguished. But later Amasis won them over with wisdom, not with harshness.

3Amasis had countless fine things. Among them was a golden footbath, in which he and all his table companions always washed their feet. He had it broken up, and from it he made a statue of a god, and he set it up at the most fitting spot in the city. The Egyptians came to the statue and worshiped it with great reverence.

4When Amasis learned what his townspeople were doing, he called the Egyptians together and showed that the statue had been made from the footbath. Into that footbath the Egyptians had once vomited and urinated and washed their feet; now they worshiped it greatly.

5He said he himself had fared just like the footbath. He had been a common man before, but now he was their king. He told them to honor him and look after him.

Chapter 173

1In this way he won the Egyptians over until they thought it right to serve him. He ordered his day like this: from early morning until the marketplace filled, he busily handled the business brought to him. After that, he drank and joked with his companions, and he was idle and playful.

2His friends were annoyed by this. They advised him, saying: "King, you are not managing yourself rightly. You are letting yourself sink into coarse ways. You should sit on your solemn throne and handle the day's business with dignity. Then the Egyptians would know they were ruled by a great man, and you would have a better name. The way you act now is not kingly at all."

3He answered them this way: "Men who own bows string them when they need to use them. If a bow stayed strung all the time, it would crack, and then when the moment came they could not use it."

4"It is the same with a man. If he wanted to be serious forever and never give part of himself over to play, he would go mad without knowing it, or else be struck down paralyzed. I know this, so I give myself partly to each." That is how he answered his friends.

Chapter 174

1They say that even when Amasis was a private man, he loved drink and jokes and was not at all a serious man. Whenever his means ran short from his drinking and his good living, he would go around stealing. When people claimed he had their property and he denied it, they would haul him off to whatever oracle was nearest. He was often caught out by the oracles, and he often got away.

2When he became king, he did this: the gods whose oracles had cleared him of being a thief, he paid no attention to. He gave their temples no upkeep and nothing for repairs, and he did not visit them to sacrifice, holding them worthless, possessed of lying oracles. The gods whose oracles had declared him a thief, he honored most of all, as true gods giving most truthful answers.

Chapter 175

1One thing he did was this: at Sais he built for Athena an entrance way that is a wonder to see, far surpassing all others in height and size, and also in the size of the stones and the quality of them. Another was this: he set up there giant statues and very long man-headed sphinxes, and he brought in other stones of enormous size for repairs.

2He brought some of these from the stone quarries near Memphis; the ones of very great size he brought from the city of Elephantine, which is twenty days' sail away from Sais.

3But here is what I wonder at among these works, not least but most of all: he had a chamber of one single stone brought from the city of Elephantine. The hauling of it took three years, and two thousand men were assigned to drag it, and all of them were boat pilots. The outside of this chamber is twenty-one cubits long, fourteen cubits wide, and eight cubits high.

4These are the measurements on the outside of the single-stone chamber; inside, the length is eighteen cubits and a pygon, and the height is five cubits. It stands in the temple beside the entrance.

5They say it was not pulled farther into the temple for this reason: while the chamber was being hauled, its architect groaned aloud, both because so much time had passed and because he was worn out by the work; and Amasis took this as an omen and did not let it be hauled any farther. But some now say that one of the men levering it along was crushed by it, and that for that reason it was not pulled in.

Chapter 176

1Amasis also set up, in all the other famous temples, works whose size is worth seeing. Among them, in Memphis, is the giant statue lying on its back in front of the temple of Hephaestus; its feet are seventy-five feet long. On the same base stand two more giant statues of the same stone, each twenty feet in size, one on each side of the great one.

2There is another stone statue of the same size at Sais too, lying in the same way as the one at Memphis. Amasis is also the man who built the temple of Isis at Memphis, a great temple and the most worth seeing.

Chapter 177

1It is said that under King Amasis Egypt was at its most prosperous — both in what the river brought forth for the land and in what the land yielded to its people — and that the inhabited cities in it at that time came to twenty thousand in all.

2Amasis is also the one who set up this law for the Egyptians: every single Egyptian must declare to the ruler of his district each year what he lives by. A man who does not do this, or cannot show a lawful way of living, is to be put to death. Solon the Athenian took this law from Egypt and made it law for the Athenians, and they use it forever; it is a law without fault.

Chapter 178

1Amasis became a friend to the Greeks, and among the other favors he granted them, he gave the Greeks who came to Egypt the city of Naucratis to live in. And to those who did not want to live there but only to sail and trade there, he gave plots of ground where they could set up altars and sacred precincts for the gods.

2The largest of these precincts, the most famous and the most useful, the one called the Hellenion, was founded in common by these cities: of the Ionians, Chios, Teos, Phocaea, and Clazomenae; of the Dorians, Rhodes, Cnidos, Halicarnassus, and Phaselis; and of the Aeolians, the city of the Mytilenaeans alone.

3This precinct belongs to those cities, and those are the cities that provide the protectors of the trading post. The other cities that use it use it, but they have no share in it. Apart from these, the Aeginetans founded on their own a precinct of Zeus, the Samians another of Hera, and the Milesians one of Apollo.

Chapter 179

1In the old days Naucratis was the only trading port in Egypt, and there was no other. If anyone put in at any other mouth of the Nile, he had to swear that he had come there against his will, and then, his oath made, sail his own ship to the Canobic mouth. If the wind was against him and he could not sail, he had to move his cargo in barges around the Delta until he came to Naucratis. That is how highly Naucratis was honored.

Chapter 180

1When the Amphictyons contracted to have the temple now standing at Delphi built for three hundred talents (for the temple that stood there before burned down of its own accord), a fourth part of the contract price fell to the Delphians to supply.

2The Delphians traveled from city to city asking for gifts, and in this they brought back from Egypt no small amount: Amasis gave them a thousand talents of alum, and the Greeks living in Egypt twenty minas.

Chapter 181

1Amasis made a pact of friendship and alliance with the Cyrenaeans, and he judged it right to take a wife from there as well — either because he desired a Greek woman or else out of friendship for the Cyrenaeans.

2As for whom he married: some say she was the daughter of Battus, some the daughter of Arcesilaus, and some the daughter of Critobulus, one of the townspeople and a man of good standing; her name was Ladice. Whenever Amasis lay down to bed with her, he could not have intercourse with her, though he did with his other wives.

3When this had happened many times, Amasis said to the woman called Ladice: "Woman, you have cast a spell on me, and there is no way out for you — you are going to die the worst death of any woman."

4Since her denials did her no good and Amasis became no gentler toward her, Ladice prayed to Aphrodite in her heart: if Amasis had intercourse with her on that coming night — for this, she judged, would be her way out of danger — she would send a statue to Cyrene. After the prayer, Amasis at once had intercourse with her. And from that time on, whenever Amasis came to her, he had intercourse with her, and after this he loved her deeply.

5Ladice paid her vow to the goddess: she had a statue made and sent it to Cyrene, and it was still safe down to my own time, standing turned away from the city of the Cyrenaeans. And this Ladice, when Cambyses conquered Egypt and learned who she was, he sent back unharmed to Cyrene.

Chapter 182

1Amasis also dedicated offerings in Hellas: to Cyrene, a gilded statue of Athena and a picture of himself done in paint; to the Athena at Lindos, two stone statues and a linen corselet worth seeing; and to Hera at Samos, two wooden figures of himself, which stood set up in the great temple down to my time, behind the doors.

2He dedicated the ones to Samos because of his guest-friendship, his own and that of Polycrates son of Aeaces. Those to Lindos he dedicated not for any guest-friendship, but because the temple of Athena at Lindos is said to have been founded by the daughters of Danaus, when they put in there while fleeing the sons of Egyptus. These things Amasis dedicated; and he was the first man ever to take Cyprus and make it pay tribute.

Chapter 1

1After the death of Cyrus, Cambyses inherited his throne. He was the son of Cyrus and of Cassandane, the daughter of Pharnaspes, for whom Cyrus mourned deeply when she died before him, and had all his subjects mourn also.

2Cambyses was the son of this woman and of Cyrus. He considered the Ionians and Aeolians slaves inherited from his father, and prepared an expedition against Egypt, taking with him some of these Greek subjects besides others whom he ruled.

Chapter 2

1Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians believed that they were the oldest people on earth. But ever since Psammetichus became king and wished to find out which people were the oldest, they have believed that the Phrygians were older than they, and they than everybody else.

2Psammetichus, when he was in no way able to learn by inquiry which people had first come into being, devised a plan by which he took two newborn children of the common people and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave instructions that no one was to speak a word in their hearing; they were to stay by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due time the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do everything else necessary.

3Psammetichus did this, and gave these instructions, because he wanted to hear what speech would first come from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for one day, when the shepherd had done as he was told for two years, both children ran to him stretching out their hands and calling “Bekos!” as he opened the door and entered.

4When he first heard this, he kept quiet about it; but when, coming often and paying careful attention, he kept hearing this same word, he told his master at last and brought the children into the king's presence as required. Psammetichus then heard them himself, and asked to what language the word “Bekos” belonged; he found it to be a Phrygian word, signifying bread.

5Reasoning from this, the Egyptians acknowledged that the Phrygians were older than they. This is the story which I heard from the priests of Hephaestus' temple at Memphis; the Greeks say among many foolish things that Psammetichus had the children reared by women whose tongues he had cut out.

Chapter 3

1Besides this story of the rearing of the children, I also heard other things at Memphis in conversation with the priests of Hephaestus; and I visited Thebes and Heliopolis, too, for this very purpose, because I wished to know if the people of those places would tell me the same story as the priests at Memphis; for the people of Heliopolis are said to be the most learned of the Egyptians.

2Now, such stories as I heard about the gods I am not ready to relate, except their names, for I believe that all men are equally knowledgeable about them; and I shall say about them what I am constrained to say by the course of my history.

Chapter 4

1But as to 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 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 agree; but the Egyptians, reckoning thirty days to each of the twelve months, add five days in every year over and above the total, and thus the completed circle of seasons is made to agree with the calendar.

2Furthermore, the Egyptians (they said) first used the names 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. Most of this they showed me in fact to be the case. The first human king of Egypt, they said, was Min.

3In his time all of Egypt except the Thebaic district was a marsh: all the country that we now see was then covered by water, north of lake Moeris, which is seven days' journey up the river from the sea.

Chapter 5

1And I think that their account of the country was true. For even if a man has not heard it before, he can readily see, if he has sense, that that Egypt to which the Greeks sail is land deposited for the Egyptians, the river's gift—not only the lower country, but even the land as far as three days' voyage above the lake, which is of the same nature as the other, although the priests did not say this, too.

2For this is the nature of the land of Egypt: in the first place, when you approach it from the sea and are still a day's sail from land, if you let down a sounding line you will bring up mud from a depth of eleven fathoms. This shows that the deposit from the land reaches this far.

Chapter 6

1Further, the length of the seacoast of Egypt itself is sixty “schoeni” —of Egypt, that is, 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.

2Men that have scant land measure by feet; those that have more, by miles; those that have much land, by parasangs; and those who have great abundance of it, by schoeni.

3The parasang is three and three quarters miles, and the schoenus, which is an Egyptian measure, is twice that.

Chapter 7

1By this reckoning, then, the seaboard of Egypt will be four hundred and fifty miles 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 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.

2If a reckoning is made, only a little difference of length, not more than two miles, will be found between these two journeys; for the journey from Athens to Pisa is two miles short of two hundred, which is the number of miles between the sea and Heliopolis.

Chapter 8

1Beyond and above Heliopolis, Egypt is a narrow land. For it is bounded on the one side by the mountains of Arabia, which run north to south, always running south towards the sea called the Red Sea. In these mountains are the quarries that were hewn out for making the pyramids at Memphis. This way, then, the mountains run, and end in the places of which I have spoken; their greatest width from east to west, as I learned by inquiry, is a two months' journey, and their easternmost boundaries yield frankincense.

2Such are these mountains. On the side of Libya, Egypt is bounded by another range of rocky mountains among which are the pyramids; these are all covered with sand, and run in the same direction as those Arabian hills that run southward.

3Beyond Heliopolis, there is no great distance—in Egypt, that is: the narrow land has a length of only fourteen days' journey up the river. Between the aforesaid mountain ranges, the land is level, and where the plain is narrowest it seemed to me that there were no more than thirty miles 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.

Chapter 9

1From Heliopolis to Thebes is nine days' journey by river, and the distance is six hundred and eight miles, or eighty-one schoeni.

2This, then, is a full statement of all the distances in Egypt: the seaboard is four hundred and fifty miles long; and I will now declare the distance inland from the sea to Thebes: it is seven hundred and sixty-five miles. And between Thebes and the city called Elephantine there are two hundred and twenty-five miles.

Chapter 10

1The greater portion, then, of this country of which I have spoken was land deposited for the Egyptians as the priests told me, and I myself formed the same judgment; all that lies between the ranges of mountains above Memphis to which I have referred seemed to me to have once been 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.

2For of the rivers that brought down the stuff to make these lands, there is none worthy to be compared for greatness with even one of the mouths of the Nile, and the Nile has five mouths.

3There are also other rivers, not so great as the Nile, that have had great effects; I could rehearse their names, but principal among them is the Achelous, which, flowing through Acarnania and emptying into the sea, has already made half of the Echinades Islands mainland.

Chapter 11

1Now in Arabia, not far from Egypt, there is a gulf extending inland from the sea called Red, whose length and width are such as I shall show:

2in length, from its inner end out to the wide sea, it is a forty days' voyage for a ship rowed by oars; and in breadth, it is half a day's voyage at the widest. Every day the tides ebb and flow in it.

3I believe that where Egypt is now, there was once another such gulf; this extended from the northern sea towards Aethiopia, and the other, the Arabian gulf of which I shall speak, extended from the south towards Syria; the ends of these gulfs penetrated into the country near each other, and but a little space of land separated them.

4Now, if the Nile inclined to direct its current into this Arabian gulf, why should the latter not be silted up by it inside of twenty thousand years? In fact, I expect that it would be silted up inside of ten thousand years. Is it to be doubted, then, that in the ages before my birth a gulf even much greater than this should have been silted up by a river so great and so busy?

Chapter 12

1As for Egypt, then, I credit those who say it, and myself very much believe it to be the case; for I have seen that Egypt projects into the sea beyond the neighboring land, and shells are exposed to view on the mountains, and things are coated with salt, so that even the pyramids show it, and the only sandy mountain in Egypt is that which is above Memphis;

2besides, Egypt is like neither the neighboring land of Arabia nor Libya, not even like Syria (for Syrians inhabit the seaboard of Arabia ); it is a land of black and crumbling earth, as if it were alluvial deposit carried down the river from Aethiopia;

3but we know that the soil of Libya is redder and somewhat sandy, and Arabia and Syria are lands of clay and stones.

Chapter 13

1This, too, that the priests told me about Egypt, is a strong proof: when Moeris was king, if the river rose as much as thirteen feet, it watered all of Egypt below Memphis. Moeris had not been dead nine hundred years when I heard this from the priests. But now, if the river does not rise at least twenty-six or twenty-five feet, the land is not flooded.

2And, in my opinion, the Egyptians who inhabit the lands lower down the river than lake Moeris, and especially what is called the Delta—if this land of theirs rises in the same proportion and broadens likewise in extent, and the Nile no longer floods it—will forever after be in the same straits as they themselves once said the Greeks would be;

3for, learning that all the Greek land is watered by rain, but not by river water like theirs, they said that one day the Greeks would be let down by what they counted on, and miserably starve: meaning that, if heaven send no rain for the Greeks and afflict them with drought, the Greeks will be overtaken by famine, for there is no other source of water for them except Zeus alone.

Chapter 14

1And this prediction of the Egyptians about the Greeks was true enough. But now let me show the prospect for 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 proportion as formerly, will not the Egyptians who inhabit it go hungry, as there is no rain in their country and the river will be unable to inundate their fields?

2At present, of course, there are no people, either in the rest of Egypt or in the whole world, who live from the soil with so little labor; they do not have to break the land up with the plough, or hoe, or do any other work that other men do to get a crop; the river rises of itself, waters the fields, and then sinks back again; then each man sows his field and sends swine into it to tread down the seed, and waits for the harvest; then he has the swine thresh his grain, and so garners it.

Chapter 15

1Now if we agree with the opinion of the Ionians, who say that only the Delta is Egypt, and that its seaboard reaches from the so-called Watchtower of Perseus forty schoeni to the Salters' at Pelusium, while inland it stretches as far as the city of Cercasorus, where the Nile divides and flows to Pelusium and Canobus, and that all the rest of Egypt is partly Libya and partly Arabia —if we follow this account, we can show that there was once no land for the Egyptians;

2for we have seen that (as the Egyptians themselves say, and as I myself judge) the Delta is alluvial land and but lately (so to speak) came into being. Then if there was once no land for them, it was an idle notion that they were the oldest nation on earth, and they need not have made that trial to see what language the children would first speak.

3I maintain, rather, that the Egyptians did not come into existence together with what the Ionians call the Delta, but have existed since the human race came into being; and as the land grew in extent, there were many of them who stayed behind, and many who spread down over it. Be that as it may, the Theban district, a land of seven hundred and sixty-five miles in circumference, was in the past called Egypt.

Chapter 16

1If, then, our judgment of this is right, the Ionians are in error concerning Egypt; but if their opinion is 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;

2they must add to these a fourth part, the Delta of Egypt, if it belongs 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 apex of this Delta, so that this land must be between Asia and Libya.

Chapter 17

1We leave the Ionians' opinion aside, and our own judgment about the matter is this: Egypt is all that country which is inhabited by Egyptians, just as Cilicia and Assyria are the countries inhabited by Cilicians and Assyrians, and we know of no boundary line (rightly so called) below Asia and Libya except the borders of the Egyptians.

2But if we follow the belief of the Greeks, we shall consider all Egypt commencing from the Cataracts and the city of Elephantine to be divided into two parts, and to claim both the names, the one a part of Libya and the other of Asia.

3For 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.

4One of these, which is called the Pelusian mouth, flows east; the second flows west, and is called the Canobic mouth. But the direct channel of the Nile, when the river in its downward course reaches the apex 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.

5There are also two channels which separate themselves from the Sebennytic and so flow into the sea: by name, the Saïtic and the Mendesian.

6The Bolbitine and Bucolic mouths are not natural but excavated channels.

Chapter 18

1The response of oracle of Ammon in fact bears witness to my opinion, that Egypt is of such an extent as I have argued; I learned this by inquiry after my judgment was already formed about Egypt.

2The men of the cities of Marea and Apis, in the part of Egypt bordering on Libya, believing themselves to be Libyans and not Egyptians, and disliking the injunction of the religious law that forbade them to eat cows' meat, sent to Ammon saying that they had no part of or lot with Egypt: for they lived (they said) outside the Delta and did not consent to the ways of its people, and they wished to be allowed to eat all foods.

3But the god forbade them: all the land, he said, watered by the Nile in its course was Egypt, and all who lived lower down than the city Elephantine and drank the river's water were Egyptians. Such was the oracle given to them.

Chapter 19

1When the Nile is in flood, it overflows not only the Delta but also the lands called Libyan and Arabian, as far as two days' journey from either bank in places, and sometimes more than this, sometimes less. Concerning its nature, I could not learn anything either from the priests or from any others.

2Yet I was anxious to learn from them why the Nile comes down with a rising flood for a hundred days from the summer solstice; and when this number of days is passed, sinks again with a diminishing stream, so that the river is low for the whole winter until the summer solstice again.

3I was not able to get any information from any of the Egyptians regarding this, when I asked them what power the Nile has to be contrary in nature to all other rivers. I wished to know this, and asked; also, why no breezes blew from it as from every other river.

Chapter 20

1But some of the Greeks, wishing to be notable for cleverness, put forward three opinions about this river, two of which I would not even mention except just to show what they are.

2One of them maintains that the Etesian winds are the cause of the river being in flood, because they hinder the Nile from emptying into the sea. But there are many times when the Etesian winds do not blow, yet the Nile does the same as before.

3And further, if the Etesian winds were the cause, then the other rivers which flow contrary to those winds should be affected like the Nile, and even more so, since being smaller they have a weaker current. Yet there are many rivers in Syria and many in Libya, and they behave nothing like the Nile.

Chapter 21

1The second opinion is less grounded on knowledge than the previous, though it is more marvellous to the ear: according to it, the river effects what it does because it flows from Ocean, which flows around the whole world.

Chapter 22

1The third opinion is by far the most plausible, yet the most erroneous of all. 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 comes out into Egypt.

2How can it flow from snow, then, seeing that it comes from the hottest places to lands that are for the most part cooler? In fact, for a man who can reason about such things, the principal and strongest evidence that the river is unlikely to flow from snows is that the winds blowing from Libya and Ethiopia are hot.

3In the second place, the country is rainless and frostless; but after snow has fallen, it has to rain within five days; so that if it snowed, it would rain in these lands. And thirdly, the men of the country are black because of the heat.

4Moreover, kites and swallows live there all year round, and cranes come every year to these places to winter there, flying from the wintry weather of Scythia. Now, were there but the least fall of snow in this country through which the Nile flows and where it rises, none of these things would happen, as necessity proves.

Chapter 23

1The opinion about Ocean is grounded in obscurity and needs no disproof; for I know of no Ocean river; and I suppose that Homer or some older poet invented this name and brought it into his poetry.

Chapter 24

1If, after having condemned the opinions proposed, I must indicate what I myself think about these obscure matters, I shall say why I think the Nile floods in the summer. During the winter, the sun is driven by storms from his customary course and passes over the inland parts of Libya.

2For the briefest demonstration, everything has been said; for whatever country this god is nearest, or over, it is likely that that land is very thirsty for water and that the local rivers are dried up.

Chapter 25

1A lengthier demonstration goes as follows. In its passage over the inland parts of Libya, the sun does this: as the air is always clear in that region, the land warm, and the winds cool, the sun does in its passage exactly as it would do in the summer passing through the middle of the heaven:

2it draws the water to itself, and having done so, expels it away to the inland regions, and the winds catch it and scatter and dissolve it; and, as is to be expected, those that blow from that country, the south and the southwest, are the most rainy of all winds.

3Yet I think that the sun never lets go of all of the water that it draws up from the Nile yearly, but keeps some back near itself. Then, as the winter becomes milder, the sun returns to the middle of the heaven, and after that draws from all rivers alike.

4Meanwhile, the other rivers are swollen to high flood by the quantity of water that falls into them from the sky, because the country is rained on and cut into gullies; but in the summer they are low, lacking the rain and being drawn up too by the sun.

5But the Nile, being fed by no rain, and being the only river drawn up by the sun in winter, at this time falls far short of the height that it had in summer; which is but natural; for in summer all other waters too and not it alone are attracted to the sun, but in the winter it alone is afflicted.

Chapter 26

1I am convinced, therefore, that the sun is the cause of this phenomenon. The dryness of the air in these parts is also caused by the sun, in my opinion, because it burns its way through it; hence, it is always summer in the inland part of Libya.

2But were the stations of the seasons changed, so that the south wind and the summer had their station where the north wind and winter are now 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 it now passes over Libya, and I think that in its passage over all Europe it would have the same effect on the Ister as it now does on the Nile.

Chapter 27

1And as to why no breeze blows from the river, this is my opinion: it is not natural that any breeze blow from very hot places; breezes always come from that which is very cold.

Chapter 28

1Let this be, then, as it is and as it was in the beginning. But as to the sources of the Nile, no one that conversed with me, Egyptian, Libyan, or Greek, professed to know them, except the recorder of the sacred treasures of Athena in the Egyptian city of Saïs.

2I thought he was joking 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, one called Crophi and the other Mophi.

3The springs of the Nile, which are bottomless, rise between these hills; half the water flows north towards Egypt, and the other half south towards Ethiopia.

4He said that Psammetichus king of Egypt had put to the test whether the springs are bottomless: for he had a rope of many thousand fathoms' length woven and let down into the spring, but he could not reach to the bottom.

5This recorder, then, if he spoke the truth, showed, I think, that there are strong eddies and an upward flow of water, such that with the stream rushing against the hills the sounding-line when let down cannot reach bottom.

Chapter 29

1I was unable to learn anything from anyone else, but this much further I did learn by the most extensive investigation that I could make, going as far as the city of Elephantine to look myself, and beyond that by question and hearsay.

2Beyond 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 breaks, the boat will be carried away by the strength of the current.

3This part of the river is a four days' journey by boat, and the Nile here is twisty just as the Maeander; a distance of twelve schoeni must be passed in the foregoing manner. After that, you come to a level plain, where there is an island in the Nile, called Takhompso.

4The country above Elephantine now begins to be inhabited by Ethiopians: half the people of the island are Ethiopians, and half Egyptians. Near the island is a great lake, on whose shores live nomadic Ethiopians. After crossing this, you come to the stream of the Nile, which empties into this lake.

5Then you 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.

6Having traversed this part in forty days as I have said, you take boat again and so travel for twelve days until you come to a great city called Meroe, which is said to be the capital of all Ethiopia.

7The people of the place worship no other gods but Zeus and Dionysus; these they greatly honor, and they have a place of divination sacred to Zeus; they send out armies whenever and wherever this god through his oracle commands them.

Chapter 30

1From this city you make a journey by water equal in distance to that by which you came from Elephantine to the capital city of Ethiopia, and you come to the land of the Deserters. These Deserters are called Asmakh, which translates, in Greek, as “those who stand on the left hand of the king”.

2These once revolted and joined themselves to the Ethiopians, two hundred and forty thousand Egyptians of fighting age. The reason was as follows. In the reign of Psammetichus, there were watchposts at Elephantine facing Ethiopia, at Daphnae of Pelusium facing Arabia and Assyria, and at Marea facing Libya.

3And 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 no one came to relieve them; so, organizing and making common cause, they revolted from Psammetichus and went to Ethiopia.

4Psammetichus heard of it and pursued them; and when he overtook them, he asked them in a long speech not to desert their children and wives and the gods of their fathers. Then one of them, the story goes, pointed to his genitals and said that wherever that was, they would have wives and children.

5So they came to Ethiopia, and gave themselves up to the king of the country; who, to make them a gift in return, told them to dispossess certain Ethiopians with whom he was feuding, and occupy their land. These Ethiopians then learned Egyptian customs and have become milder-mannered by intermixture with the Egyptians.

Chapter 31

1To a distance of four months' travel by land and water, then, there is knowledge of the Nile, besides the part of it that is in Egypt. So many months, as reckoning shows, are found to be spent by one going from Elephantine to the country of the Deserters. The river flows from the west and the sun's setting. Beyond this, no one has clear information to declare; for all that country is desolate because of the heat.

Chapter 32

1But I heard this from some men of Cyrene, who told me that they had gone to the oracle of Ammon, and conversed there with Etearchus king of the Ammonians, and that from other subjects the conversation turned to the Nile, how no one knows the source of it. Then Etearchus told them that once he had been visited by some Nasamonians.

2These are a Libyan people, inhabiting the country of the Syrtis and a little way to the east of the Syrtis.

3When these Nasamonians were asked on their arrival if they brought any news concerning the Libyan desert, they told Etearchus that some sons of their leading men, proud and violent youths, when they came to manhood, besides planning other wild adventures, had chosen by lot five of their company to visit the deserts of Libya and see whether they could see any farther than those who had seen the farthest.

4It must be known that the whole northern seacoast of Libya, from Egypt as far as the promontory of Soloeis, which is the end of Libya, is inhabited throughout its length by Libyans, many tribes of them, except the part held by Greeks and Phoenicians; the region of Libya that is above the sea and the inhabitants of the coast is infested by wild beasts; and farther inland than the wild-beast country everything is sand, waterless and desolate.

5When the young men left their companions, being well supplied with water and provisions, they journeyed first through the inhabited country, and after passing this they came to the region of wild beasts.

6After this, they travelled over the desert, towards the west, and crossed a wide sandy region, until after many days they saw trees growing in a plain; when they came to these and were picking the fruit of the trees, they were met by little men of less than common stature, 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.

7The men led them across great marshes, after crossing which they came to a city where all the people were of a stature like that of the guides, and black. A great river ran past this city, from the west towards the rising sun; crocodiles could be seen in it.

Chapter 33

1This is enough of the story told by Etearchus the Ammonian; except 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;

2as to the river that ran past the city, Etearchus guessed it to be the Nile; and reason proves as much. For the Nile flows from Libya, right through the middle of it; and as I guess, reasoning about things unknown from visible signs, it rises proportionally as far away as does the Ister.

3For the Ister flows from the land of the Celts and the city of Pyrene through the very middle of Europe; now the Celts live beyond the Pillars of Heracles, being neighbors of the Cynesii, who are the westernmost of all the peoples inhabiting Europe.

4The Ister, then, flows clean across Europe and ends its course in the Euxine sea, at Istria, which is inhabited by Milesian colonists.

Chapter 34

1The Ister, since it flows through inhabited country, is known from many reports; but no one can speak of the source of the Nile; for Libya, though which it runs, is uninhabited and desert. Regarding its course, I have related everything that I could learn by inquiry; and it issues into Egypt. Now Egypt lies about opposite to the mountainous part of Cilicia;

2from there, it is a straight five days' journey for an unencumbered man to Sinope on the Euxine; and Sinope lies opposite 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.

Chapter 35

1It is sufficient to say this much concerning the Nile. But concerning Egypt, I am going to speak at length, because it has the most wonders, and everywhere presents works beyond description; therefore, I shall say the more concerning Egypt.

2Just as the Egyptians have a climate peculiar to themselves, and their river is different in its nature from all other rivers, so, too, have they instituted customs and laws contrary for the most part to those of the rest of mankind. Among them, the women buy and sell, the men stay at home and weave; and whereas in weaving all others push the woof upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards.

3Men carry burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. Women pass water standing, men sitting. They ease their bowels indoors, and eat out of doors in the streets, explaining that things unseemly but necessary should be done alone in private, things not unseemly should be done openly.

4No 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.

Chapter 36

1Everywhere else, priests of the gods wear their hair long; in Egypt, they are shaven. For all other men, the rule in mourning for the dead is that 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.

2The 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 to live so; they make food from a coarse grain which some call spelt.

3They knead dough with their feet, and gather mud and dung with their hands. The Egyptians and those who have learned it from them are the only people who practise circumcision. Every man has two garments, every woman only one.

4The rings and sheets of sails are made fast outside the boat elsewhere, but inside it in Egypt. The Greeks write and calculate from left to right; the Egyptians do the opposite; yet they say that their way of writing is towards the right, and the Greek way towards the left. They employ two kinds of writing; one is called sacred, the other demotic.

Chapter 37

1They are religious beyond measure, more than any other people; and the following are among their customs. They drink from cups of bronze, which they clean out daily; this is done not by some but by all.

2They are especially careful always to wear newly-washed linen. They practise circumcision for cleanliness' sake; for they would rather be clean than more becoming. Their priests shave the whole body every other day, so that no lice or anything else foul may infest them as they attend upon the gods.

3The priests wear a single linen garment and sandals of papyrus: they may have 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.

4But also they receive many benefits: they do not consume or spend anything of their own; sacred food is cooked for them, beef and goose are brought in great abundance to each man every day, and wine of grapes is given to them, too. They may not eat fish.

5The 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 legume. Many (not only one) 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.

Chapter 38

1They believe that bulls belong to Epaphus, and for this reason scrutinize them as follows; if they see even one black hair on them, the bull is considered impure.

2One of the priests, appointed to the task, examines the beast, making it stand and lie, and drawing out its tongue, to determine whether it is clean of the stated signs which I shall indicate hereafter. He looks also to the hairs of the tail, to see if they grow naturally.

3If it is clean in all these respects, the priest marks it by wrapping papyrus around 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 approving the beast; I will now describe how it is sacrificed.

Chapter 39

1After leading the marked beast to the altar where they will sacrifice it, 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 done so sever the head from the body.

2They flay the carcass of the victim, then invoke many curses on its head, which they carry away. Where there is a market, and Greek traders in it, the head is taken to the market and sold; where there are no Greeks, it is thrown into the river.

3The imprecation which they utter over the heads is that whatever ill threatens those who sacrifice, or the whole of Egypt, fall upon that head.

4In 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.

Chapter 40

1But in regard to the disembowelling and burning of the victims, there is a different way for each sacrifice. I shall now, however, speak of that goddess whom they consider the greatest, and in whose honor they keep highest festival.

2After praying in the foregoing way, they take the whole stomach out of the flayed bull, leaving the entrails and the fat in the carcass, and cut off the legs, the end of the loin, the shoulders, and the neck.

3Having done this, they fill what remains of the carcass with pure bread, honey, raisins, figs, frankincense, myrrh, and other kinds of incense, and then burn it, pouring a lot of oil on it.

4They 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.

Chapter 41

1All Egyptians sacrifice unblemished bulls and bull-calves; they may not sacrifice cows: these are sacred to Isis.

2For the images of Isis are in woman's form, horned like a cow, exactly as the Greeks picture Io, and cows are held by far the most sacred of all beasts of the herd by all Egyptians alike.

3For this reason, no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek man, or use a knife, or a spit, or a cauldron belonging to a Greek, or taste the flesh of an unblemished bull that has been cut up with a Greek knife.

4Cattle 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 carcass is decomposed, and the time appointed is at hand, a boat comes to each city from the island called Prosopitis,

5an island in the Delta, nine schoeni in circumference. There are many other towns on Prosopitis; the one from which the boats come to gather the bones of the bulls is called Atarbekhis; a temple of Aphrodite stands in it of great sanctity.

6From this town many go out, some to one town and some to another, to dig up the bones, which they then carry away and all bury in one place. As they bury the cattle, so do they all other beasts at death. Such is their ordinance respecting these also; for they, too, may not be killed.

Chapter 42

1All that have a temple of Zeus of Thebes or are of the Theban district sacrifice goats, but will not touch sheep.

2For no gods are worshipped by all Egyptians in common except Isis and Osiris, who they say is Dionysus; these are worshipped by all alike. Those who have a temple of Mendes or are of the Mendesian district sacrifice sheep, but will not touch goats.

3The Thebans, and those who by the Theban example will not touch sheep, give the following reason for their ordinance: they say that Heracles wanted very much to see Zeus and that Zeus did not want to be seen by him, but that finally, when Heracles prayed, Zeus contrived

4to show 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.

5It was from this, I think, that the Ammonians got their name, too; for the Egyptians call Zeus “Amon”. The Thebans, then, consider rams sacred for this reason, and do not sacrifice them.

6But one day a 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 it. Having done this, all that are at the temple mourn for the ram, and then bury it in a sacred coffin.

Chapter 43

1Concerning Heracles, I heard it said that he was one of the twelve gods. But nowhere in Egypt could I hear anything about the other Heracles, whom the Greeks know.

2I have indeed a lot of other evidence 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), besides this: that Amphitryon and Alcmene, the parents of this Heracles, were both Egyptian by descent; and that the Egyptians deny knowing the names Poseidon and the Dioscuri, nor are these gods reckoned among the gods of Egypt.

3Yet if they got the name of any deity from the Greeks, of these not least but in particular would they preserve a recollection, if indeed they were already making sea voyages and some Greeks, too, were seafaring men, as I expect and judge; so that the names of these gods would have been even better known to the Egyptians than the name of Heracles.

4But Heracles is a very ancient god in Egypt; as the Egyptians themselves say, the change of the eight gods to the twelve, one of whom they acknowledge Heracles to be, was made seventeen thousand years before the reign of Amasis.

Chapter 44

1Moreover, wishing to get clear information about this matter where it was possible so to do, I took ship for Tyre in Phoenicia, where I had learned by inquiry that there was a holy temple of Heracles.

2There I saw it, richly equipped with many other offerings, besides two pillars, one of refined gold, one of emerald: a great pillar that shone at night; and in conversation with the priests, I asked how long it was since their temple was built.

3I found that their account did not tally with the belief of the Greeks, either; 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 ago. At Tyre I saw yet another temple of the so-called Thasian Heracles.

4Then 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 of Heracles the son of Amphitryon in Hellas.

5Therefore, what I have discovered by inquiry plainly shows that Heracles is an ancient god. And furthermore, 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.

Chapter 45

1And the Greeks say many other ill-considered things, too; among them, this is a silly story which they tell about Heracles: that 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 started in on him at the altar, he resisted and killed them all.

2Now it seems to me that by this story the Greeks show themselves altogether ignorant of the character and customs of the Egyptians; for how should they sacrifice men when they are forbidden to sacrifice even beasts, except swine and bulls and bull-calves, if they are unblemished, and geese?

3And furthermore, as Heracles was alone, and, still, only a man, as they say, how is it natural that he should kill many myriads? In talking so much about this, may I keep the goodwill of gods and heroes!

Chapter 46

1This is 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.

2Now in their painting and sculpture, the image of Pan is made with the head and the legs of a goat, as among the Greeks; not that he is thought to be in fact such, or unlike other gods; but why they represent him so, I have no wish to say.

3The Mendesians consider all goats sacred, the male even more than the female, and goatherds are held in special estimation: one he-goat is most sacred of all; when he dies, it is ordained that there should be great mourning in all the Mendesian district.

4In the Egyptian language Mendes is the name both for the he-goat and for Pan. In my lifetime a strange thing occurred in this district: a he-goat had intercourse openly with a woman. This came to be publicly known.

Chapter 47

1Swine are held by the Egyptians to be unclean beasts. In the first place, if an Egyptian touches a hog in passing, he goes to the river and dips himself in it, clothed as he is; and in the second place, swineherds, though native born Egyptians, 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.

2Nor do the Egyptians think it right to sacrifice swine to any god except the Moon and Dionysus; to these, they sacrifice their swine at the same time, in the same season of full moon; then they eat the meat. The Egyptians have an explanation of why they sacrifice swine at this festival, yet abominate them at others; I know it, but it is not fitting that I relate it.

3But 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 around the belly, then consigns it all to the 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, with but slender means, mold swine out of dough, which they then take and sacrifice.

Chapter 48

1To Dionysus, on the evening of his festival, everyone offers a piglet which he kills before his door and then gives to the swineherd who has sold it, for him to take away.

2The rest of the festival of Dionysus is observed 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 two feet high moved by strings, the male member nodding and nearly as big as the rest of the body, which are carried about the villages by women; a flute-player goes ahead, the women follow behind singing of Dionysus.

3Why the male member is so large and is the only part of the body that moves, there is a sacred legend that explains.

Chapter 49

1Now then, it seems to me that Melampus son of Amytheon was not ignorant of but was familiar with this sacrifice. For Melampus was the one who taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus and the way of sacrificing to him and the phallic procession; he did not exactly unveil the subject taking all its details into consideration, for the teachers who came after him made a fuller revelation; but it was from him that the Greeks learned to bear the phallus along in honor of Dionysus, and they got their present practice from his teaching.

2I say, then, that Melampus acquired the prophetic art, being a discerning man, and that, besides many other things which he learned from Egypt, he also taught the Greeks things concerning Dionysus, altering few of them; for I will not say that what is done in Egypt in connection with the god and what is done among the Greeks originated independently: for they would then be of an Hellenic character and not recently introduced.

3Nor again will I say that the Egyptians took either this or any other custom from the Greeks. But I believe that Melampus learned the worship of Dionysus chiefly from Cadmus of Tyre and those who came with Cadmus from Phoenicia to the land now called Boeotia.

Chapter 50

1In fact, the names of nearly all the gods came to Hellas from Egypt. For I am convinced by inquiry that they have come from foreign parts, and I believe that they came chiefly from Egypt.

2Except the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, as I have already said, and Hera, and Hestia, and Themis, and the Graces, and the Nereids, the names of all the gods have always existed in Egypt. I only say what the Egyptians themselves say. The gods whose names they say they do not know were, as I think, named by the Pelasgians, except Poseidon, the knowledge of whom they learned from the Libyans.

3Alone of all nations the Libyans have had among them the name of Poseidon from the beginning, and they have always honored this god. The Egyptians, however, are not accustomed to pay any honors to heroes.

Chapter 51

1These customs, then, and others besides, which I shall indicate, were taken by the Greeks from the Egyptians. It was not so with the ithyphallic images of Hermes; the production of these came from the Pelasgians, from whom the Athenians were the first Greeks to take it, and then handed it on to others.

2For the Athenians were then already counted as Greeks when the Pelasgians came to live 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 learned from the Pelasgians and now practice, understands what my meaning is.

3Samothrace was formerly inhabited by those Pelasgians who came to live among the Athenians, and it is from them that the Samothracians take their rites.

4The Athenians, then, were the first Greeks to make ithyphallic images of Hermes, and they did this because the Pelasgians taught them. The Pelasgians told a certain sacred tale about this, which is set forth in the Samothracian mysteries.

Chapter 52

1Formerly, in all their sacrifices, the Pelasgians called upon gods without giving name or appellation to any (I know this, because I was told at Dodona ); for as yet they had not heard of such. They called them gods from the fact that, besides setting everything in order, they maintained all the dispositions.

2Then, after a long while, first they learned the names of the rest of the gods, which came to them from Egypt, and, much later, the name of Dionysus; and presently they asked the oracle at Dodona about the names; for this place of divination, held to be the most ancient in Hellas, was at that time the only one.

3When the Pelasgians, then, asked at Dodona whether they should adopt the names that had come from foreign parts, the oracle told them to 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.

Chapter 53

1But whence each of the gods came to be, or whether all had always been, and how they appeared in form, they did not know until yesterday or the day before, so to speak;

2for I suppose Hesiod and Homer flourished not more than four hundred years earlier than I; and these are the ones who taught the Greeks the descent of the gods, and gave the gods their names, and determined their spheres and functions, and described their outward forms.

3But the poets who are said to have been earlier than these men were, in my opinion, later. 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.

Chapter 54

1But about the oracles in Hellas, and that one which is in Libya, the Egyptians give the following account. The priests of Zeus of Thebes told me that two priestesses had been carried away from Thebes by Phoenicians; one, they said they had heard was taken away and sold in Libya, the other in Hellas; these women, they said, were the first founders of places of divination in the aforesaid countries.

2When I asked them how it was that they could speak with such 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 learned later the story which they were telling me.

Chapter 55

1That, then, I heard from the Theban priests; and what follows, the prophetesses of Dodona say: that two black doves had come flying from Thebes in Egypt, one to Libya and one to Dodona;

2the latter settled on an oak tree, and there uttered human speech, declaring that a place of divination from Zeus must be made there; the people of Dodona understood that the message was divine, and therefore established the oracular shrine.

3The dove which came to Libya told the Libyans (they say) to make an oracle of Ammon; this also is sacred to Zeus. Such was the story told by the Dodonaean priestesses, the eldest of whom was Promeneia and the next Timarete and the youngest Nicandra; and the rest of the servants of the temple at Dodona similarly held it true.

Chapter 56

1But my own belief about it is this. If the Phoenicians did in fact carry away the sacred women and sell one in Libya and one in Hellas, then, in my opinion, the place where this woman was sold in what is now Hellas, but was formerly called Pelasgia, was Thesprotia;

2and then, being a slave there, 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 would remember that temple in the land to which she had come.

3After this, as soon as she understood the Greek language, she taught divination; and she said that her sister had been sold in Libya by the same Phoenicians who sold her.

Chapter 57

1I expect 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;

2then 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 a foreign tongue, 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.

3The fashions of divination at Thebes of Egypt and at Dodona are like one another; moreover, the practice of divining from the sacrificed victim has also come from Egypt.

Chapter 58

1It would seem, too, that the Egyptians were the first people to establish solemn assemblies, and processions, and services; the Greeks learned all that from them. I consider this proved, because the Egyptian ceremonies are manifestly very ancient, and the Greek are of recent origin.

Chapter 59

1The Egyptians hold solemn assemblies not once a year, but often. The principal one of these and the most enthusiastically celebrated is that in honor of Artemis at the town of Bubastis, and the next is that in honor of Isis at Busiris.

2This town is in the middle of the Egyptian Delta, and there is in it a very great temple of Isis, who is Demeter in the Greek language.

3The third greatest festival is at Saïs in honor of Athena; the fourth is the festival of the sun at Heliopolis, the fifth of Leto at Buto, and the sixth of Ares at Papremis.

Chapter 60

1When the people are on their way to Bubastis, they go by river, a great number in every boat, men and women together. 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.

2As they travel 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 lift their skirts. They do this whenever they come alongside any riverside town.

3But 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 besides. It is customary for men and women (but not children) to assemble there to the number of seven hundred thousand, as the people of the place say.

Chapter 61

1This is what they do there; I have already described how they keep the feast of Isis at Busiris. There, after the sacrifice, all the men and women lament, in countless numbers; but it is not pious for me to say who it is for whom they lament.

2Carians who live in Egypt do even more than this, inasmuch as they cut their foreheads with knives; and by this they show that they are foreigners and not Egyptians.

Chapter 62

1When they assemble at Saïs on the night of the sacrifice, they keep lamps burning outside around their houses. These lamps are saucers full of salt and oil on which the wick floats, and they burn all night. This is called the Feast of Lamps.

2Egyptians who do not come to this are mindful on the night of sacrifice to keep their own lamps burning, and so they are alight not only at Saïs but throughout Egypt. A sacred tale is told showing why this night is lit up thus and honored.

Chapter 63

1When the people go to Heliopolis and Buto, they offer sacrifice only. At Papremis sacrifice is offered and rites performed just as elsewhere; but when the sun is setting, a few of the priests hover about the image, while most of them go and stand in the entrance to the temple with clubs of wood in their hands; others, more than a thousand men fulfilling vows, who also carry wooden clubs, stand in a mass opposite.

2The image of the god, in a little gilded wooden shrine, they carry away on the day before this to another sacred building. The few who are left with the image draw a four-wheeled wagon conveying the shrine and the image that is in the shrine; the others stand in the space before the doors and do not let them enter, while the vow-keepers, taking the side of the god, strike them, who defend themselves.

3A fierce fight with clubs breaks out there, and they are hit on their heads, and many, I expect, even die from their wounds; although the Egyptians said that nobody dies.

4The natives say that they made this assembly a custom from the following incident: the mother of Ares lived in this temple; Ares had been raised apart from her and came, when he grew up, wishing to visit his mother; but as her attendants kept him out and would not let him pass, never having seen him before, Ares brought men from another town, manhandled the attendants, and went in to his mother. From this, they say, this hitting for Ares became a custom in the festival.

Chapter 64

1Furthermore, it was the Egyptians who first made it a matter of religious observance not to have intercourse with women in temples or to enter a temple after such intercourse without washing. Nearly all other peoples are less careful in this matter than are the Egyptians and Greeks, and consider a man to be like any other animal;

2for beasts and birds (they say) are seen to mate both in the temples and in the sacred precincts; now were this displeasing to the god, the beasts would not do so. This is the reason given by others for practices which I, for my part, dislike;

Chapter 65

1but the Egyptians in this and in all other matters are exceedingly strict against desecration of their temples.

2Although 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 men's households and some not; but if I were to say why they are left alone as sacred, I should end up talking of matters of divinity, which I am especially averse to treating; I have never touched upon such except where necessity has compelled me.

3But I will indicate how it is customary to deal with the animals. Men and women are appointed guardians to provide nourishment for each kind respectively; a son inherits this office from his father.

4Townsfolk in each place, when they pay their vows, pray to the god to whom the animal is dedicated, shaving all or one half or one third of their children's heads, and weighing the hair in a balance against a sum of silver; then the weight in silver of the hair is given to the female guardian of the creatures, who buys fish with it and feeds them.

5Thus, food is provided for them. Whoever kills one of these creatures intentionally is punished with death; if he kills accidentally, he pays whatever penalty the priests appoint. Whoever kills an ibis or a hawk, intentionally or not, must die for it.

Chapter 66

1There are many household animals; and there would be many more, were it not for what happens among the cats. When the females have a litter, they are no longer receptive to the males; those that seek to have intercourse with them cannot;

2so their recourse 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 approach the males; for they are creatures that love offspring.

3And when a fire breaks out, very strange things happen among the cats. The Egyptians stand around 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.

4When this happens, there is great mourning in Egypt. The occupants of a house where a cat has died a natural death shave their eyebrows and no more; where a dog has died, the head and the whole body are shaven.

Chapter 67

1Dead cats are taken away to sacred buildings in the town of Bubastis, where they are embalmed and buried; female dogs are buried by the townsfolk in their own towns in sacred coffins; and the like is done with mongooses. Shrewmice and hawks are taken away to Buto, ibises to the city of Hermes.

2There are few bears, and the wolves are little bigger than foxes; both these are buried wherever they are found lying.

Chapter 68

1The nature of crocodiles is as follows. 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 spends the greater part of the day on dry ground, and the night in the river, the water being warmer than the air and dew.

2No mortal creature of all which we know 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 proportional size, but it grows to a length of twenty-eight feet and more.

3It has eyes like pigs' eyes, and long, protruding teeth. It is the only animal that has no tongue. It does not move the lower jaw, but brings the upper jaw down upon the lower, uniquely among beasts.

4It also has 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 of leeches. All birds and beasts flee from it, except the sandpiper, with which it is at peace because this bird does the crocodile a service;

5for whenever the crocodile comes ashore out of the water and then opens its mouth (and it does this mostly 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.

Chapter 69

1Some of the Egyptians consider crocodiles sacred; others do not, but treat them as enemies. Those who live near Thebes and lake Moeris consider them very sacred.

2Every household raises one crocodile, trained to be tame; they put ornaments of glass and gold on its ears and bracelets on its forefeet, provide special food and offerings for it, and give the creatures the best of treatment while they live; after death, the crocodiles are embalmed and buried in sacred coffins.

3But around Elephantine they are not held sacred, and are even eaten. The Egyptians do not call them crocodiles, but khampsae. The Ionians named them crocodiles, from their resemblance to the lizards which they have in their walls.

Chapter 70

1There are many different ways of crocodile hunting; I will write of the way that I think most worth mentioning. The hunter baits a hook with a hog's back, and lets it float into the midst of the river; he himself stays on the bank with a young live pig, which he beats.

2Hearing the squeals of the pig, the crocodile goes after the sound, and meets the bait, 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—no light matter, without that.

Chapter 71

1Hippopotamuses are sacred in the district of Papremis, but not elsewhere in Egypt. They present the following appearance: four-footed, with cloven hooves like cattle; blunt-nosed; with a horse's mane, visible tusks, a horse's tail and voice; big as the biggest bull. Their hide is so thick that, when it is dried, spearshafts are made of it.

Chapter 72

1Otters are found in the river, too, which the Egyptians consider sacred; and they consider 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.

Chapter 73

1There is another sacred bird, too, whose name is phoenix. I myself have never seen it, only pictures of it; for the bird seldom comes into Egypt: once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say.

2It is said that the phoenix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and size.

3What they say this bird manages to do is incredible to me. Flying from Arabia to the temple of the sun, they say, he conveys his father encased in myrrh and buries him at the temple of the Sun.

4This is how he conveys him: he first molds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, then tries lifting it, and when he has tried it, he then hollows out the egg and puts his father into it, and plasters over with more myrrh the hollow of the egg into which he has put his father, which is the same in weight with his father lying in it, and he conveys him encased to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. This is what they say this bird does.

Chapter 74

1Near 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.

Chapter 75

1There is a place in Arabia not far from the town of Buto where I went to learn about the winged serpents. When I arrived there, I saw innumerable bones and backbones of serpents: many heaps of backbones, great and small and even smaller.

2This place, where the backbones lay scattered, is where a narrow mountain pass opens into a great plain, which adjoins the plain of Egypt.

3Winged serpents are said to fly from Arabia at the beginning of spring, making for Egypt; but the ibis birds encounter the invaders in this pass and kill them.

4The Arabians say that the ibis is greatly honored by the Egyptians for this service, and the Egyptians give the same reason for honoring these birds.

Chapter 76

1Now this is the appearance of the ibis. It is all quite black, with the legs of a crane, and a beak sharply hooked, and is as big as a landrail. Such is the appearance of the ibis which fights with the serpents. Those that most associate with men (for there are two kinds of ibis )

2have the whole head and neck bare of feathers; their plumage is white, except the head and neck and wingtips and tail (these being quite black); the legs and beak of the bird are like those of the other ibis. The serpents are like water-snakes.

3Their wings are not feathered but very like the wings of a bat.I have now said enough concerning creatures that are sacred.

Chapter 77

1Among the Egyptians themselves, those who live in the cultivated country are the most assiduous of all men at preserving the memory of the past, and none whom I have questioned are so skilled in history.

2They practice the following way of life. For three consecutive days in every month they purge themselves, pursuing health by means of emetics and drenches; for they think that it is from the food they eat that all sicknesses come to men.

3Even without this, the Egyptians are the healthiest of all men, next to the Libyans; the explanation of which, in my opinion, 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.

4They eat bread, making loaves which they call “cyllestis,” of coarse grain. For wine, they use a drink made from barley, for they have no vines in their country. They eat fish either raw and sun-dried, or preserved with brine.

5Quails and ducks and small birds are salted and eaten raw; all other kinds of birds, as well as fish (except those that the Egyptians consider sacred) are eaten roasted or boiled.

Chapter 78

1After rich men's repasts, a man carries around an image in a coffin, painted and carved in exact imitation of a corpse two or four feet long. This he shows to each of the company, saying “While you drink and enjoy, look on this; for to this state you must come when you die.” Such is the custom at their symposia.

Chapter 79

1They keep the customs of their fathers, adding none to them. Among other notable customs of theirs is this, that they have one song, the Linus-song, which is sung in Phoenicia and Cyprus and elsewhere; each nation has a name of its own for this,

2but it happens to be the same song that the Greeks sing, and call Linus; so that of many things in Egypt that amaze me, one is: where did the Egyptians get Linus? Plainly they have always sung this song; but in Egyptian Linus is called Maneros.

3The Egyptians told me that Maneros was the only son of their first king, who died prematurely, and this dirge was sung by the Egyptians in his honor; and this, they said, was their earliest and their only chant.

Chapter 80

1There is a custom, too, which no Greeks except the Lacedaemonians have in common with the Egyptians: younger men, encountering their elders, yield the way and stand aside, and rise from their seats for them when they approach.

2But they are like none of the Greeks in this: passers-by do not address each other, but salute by lowering the hand to the knee.

Chapter 81

1They wear linen tunics with fringes hanging about the legs, called “calasiris,” and loose white woolen mantles over these. But nothing woolen is brought into temples, or buried with them: that is impious.

2They agree in this with practices called Orphic and Bacchic, but in fact Egyptian and Pythagorean: for it is impious, too, for one partaking of these rites to be buried in woolen wrappings. There is a sacred legend about this.

Chapter 82

1Other things originating with the Egyptians are these. Each month and day belong to one of the gods, and according to the day of one's birth are determined how one will fare and how one will end and what one will be like; those Greeks occupied with poetry exploit this.

2More portents have been discovered by them than by all other peoples; when a portent occurs, they take note of the outcome and write it down; and if something of a like kind happens again, they think it will have a like result.

Chapter 83

1As to the art of divination among them, it belongs to no man, but to some of the gods; there are in their country oracles of Heracles, Apollo, Athena, Artemis, Ares, and Zeus, and of Leto (the most honored of all) in the town of Buto. Nevertheless, they have several ways of divination, not just one.

Chapter 84

1The practice of medicine is so specialized 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 internal diseases.

Chapter 85

1They mourn and bury the dead like this: whenever a man of note is lost to his house by death, all the women of the house daub their faces or heads with mud; then they leave the corpse in the house and roam about the city lamenting, with their garments girt around them and their breasts showing, and with them all the women of their relatives;

2elsewhere, the men lament, with garments girt likewise. When this is done, they take the dead body to be embalmed.

Chapter 86

1There are men whose sole business this is and who have this special craft.

2When a dead body is brought to them, they show those who brought it wooden models of corpses, painted likenesses; the most perfect way of embalming belongs, they say, to One whose name it would be impious for me to mention in treating such a matter; 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 those who brought the body in which way they desire to have it prepared.

3Having agreed on a price, the bearers go away, and the workmen, left alone 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.

4Then, 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;

5they sew it up again after filling the belly with pure ground myrrh and casia and any other spices, except frankincense. After doing this, they conceal the body for seventy days, embalmed in saltpetre; no longer time is allowed for the embalming;

6and when the seventy days have passed, 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;

7then they give the dead man back to his friends. These make a hollow wooden figure like a man, in which they enclose the corpse, shut it up, and keep it safe in a coffin-chamber, placed erect against a wall.

Chapter 87

1That is how they prepare the dead in the most costly way; those who want the middle way and shun the costly, they prepare as follows.

2The embalmers charge their syringes with cedar oil and fill the belly of the dead man with it, without making a cut or removing the intestines, but injecting the fluid through the anus and preventing it from running out; then they embalm the body for the appointed days; on the last day they drain the belly of the cedar oil which they put in before.

3It has such great power as to bring out with it the internal organs and intestines all dissolved; meanwhile, the flesh is eaten away by the saltpetre, and in the end nothing is left of the body but hide and bones. Then the embalmers give back the dead body with no more ado.

Chapter 88

1The third manner of embalming, the preparation of the poorer dead, is this: they cleanse the belly with a purge, embalm the body for the seventy days and then give it back to be taken away.

Chapter 89

1Wives of notable men, and women of great beauty and reputation, are not at once given to the embalmers, but only after they have been dead for three or four days;

2this is done to deter the embalmers from having intercourse with the women. For it is said that one was caught having intercourse with the fresh corpse of a woman, and was denounced by his fellow-workman.

Chapter 90

1Anyone, Egyptian or foreigner, known to have been carried off by a crocodile or drowned by the river itself, must by all means be embalmed and wrapped as attractively as possible and buried in a sacred coffin by the people of the place where he is cast ashore;

2none of his relatives or friends may touch him, but his body is considered something more than human, and is handled and buried by the priests of the Nile themselves.

Chapter 91

1The Egyptians shun using Greek customs, and (generally speaking) the customs of all other peoples as well. Yet, though the rest are wary of this, there is a great city called Khemmis, in the Theban district, near the New City.

2In this city is a square temple of Perseus son of Danae, in a grove of palm trees. Before this temple stand great stone columns; and at the entrance, two great stone statues. In the outer court there is a shrine with an image of Perseus standing in it.

3The people of this Khemmis say that Perseus is seen often up and down this land, and often within the temple, and that the sandal he wears, which is four feet long, keeps turning up, and that when it does turn up, all Egypt prospers.

4This is what they say; and their doings in honor of Perseus are Greek, inasmuch as they celebrate games that include every form of contest, and offer animals and cloaks and skins as prizes.

5When I asked why Perseus appeared only to them, 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 travelled to Greece, were of Khemmis; and they traced descent from these down to Perseus.

6They told how he came to Khemmis, too, when he came to Egypt for the reason alleged by the Greeks as well—namely, to bring the Gorgon's head from Libya —and recognized all his relatives; and how he had heard the name of Khemmis from his mother before he came to Egypt. It was at his bidding, they said, that they celebrated the games.

Chapter 92

1All these are the customs of Egyptians who live above the marsh country. Those who inhabit the marshes have the same customs as the rest of Egyptians, even that each man has one wife just like Greeks. They have, besides, devised means to make their food less costly.

2When the river is in flood and flows over the plains, many lilies, which the Egyptians call lotus, grow in the water. They gather these and dry them in the sun; then they crush the poppy-like center of the plant and bake loaves of it.

3The root of this lotus is edible also, and of a sweetish taste; it is round, and the size of an apple.

4Other lilies grow in the river, too, that are like roses; the fruit of these is found in a calyx springing from the root by a separate stalk, and is most like a comb made by wasps; this produces many edible seeds as big as olive pits, which are eaten both fresh and dried.

5They also use the byblus which grows annually: it is gathered from the marshes, the top of it cut off and put to other uses, and the lower part, about twenty inches long, eaten or sold. Those who wish to use the byblus at its very best, roast it before eating in a red-hot oven. Some live on fish alone. They catch the fish, take out the intestines, then dry them in the sun and eat them dried.

Chapter 93

1Fish that go in schools are seldom born in rivers; they are raised in the lakes, and this is how they behave: when the desire of spawning comes on them, they swim out to sea in schools, the males leading, and throwing out their milt, while the females come after and swallow and conceive from it.

2When the females have grown heavy in the sea, then all the fish swim back to their own haunts. But the same no longer lead; now the leadership goes to the females. They go before in a school as the males had, and now and then throw off some of their eggs (which are like millet-seeds), which the males devour as they follow. These millet-seeds, or eggs, are fish.

3The fish that are reared come from the eggs that survive and are not devoured. 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.

4This happens because they keep close to the left bank as they swim seawards, and keep to the same bank also on their return, grazing it and keeping in contact with it as well as they can, I suppose lest the current make them miss their way.

5When 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.

6Where these probably come from, I believe that I can guess. When the Nile falls, the fish have dropped their eggs into the mud before they leave with the last of the water; and when in the course of time the flood comes again in the following year, from these eggs at once come the fish.

Chapter 94

1So much, then, for the fish. The Egyptians who live around the marshes use an oil drawn from the castor-berry, which they call kiki. They sow this plant, which grows wild in Hellas, on the banks of the rivers and lakes;

2sown in Egypt, it produces abundant fruit, though malodorous; when they gather this, some bruise and press it, others boil after roasting it, and collect the liquid that comes from it. This is thick and useful as oil for lamps, and gives off a strong smell.

Chapter 95

1Against the mosquitos that abound, the following have been devised by them: those who dwell higher up than the marshy country are well served by the towers where they ascend to sleep, for the winds prevent the mosquitos from flying aloft;

2those living about the marshes have a different recourse, instead of the towers. Every one of them has a net, with which he catches fish by day, and at night he sets it around the bed where he rests, then creeps under it and sleeps.

3If he sleeps wrapped in a garment or cloth, the mosquitos bite through it; but through the net they absolutely do not even venture.

Chapter 96

1The boats in which they carry cargo are made of the acacia, which is most like the lotus of Cyrene in form, and its sap is gum. Of this tree they cut logs of four feet long and lay them like courses of bricks, and build the boat

2by fastening these four foot logs to long and close-set stakes; and having done so, they set crossbeams athwart and on the logs. They use no ribs. They caulk the seams within with byblus.

3There 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 continues; they are towed from the bank; but downstream they are managed thus:

4they 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, connected to it by a rope, and the stone is connected by a rope to the after part of the boat.

5So, 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.

Chapter 97

1When the Nile overflows the land, only the towns are seen high and dry above the water, very like 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 not ferried, as usual, in the course of the stream, but clean over the plain.

2Indeed, the boat going up from Naucratis to Memphis passes close by the pyramids themselves, though the course does not go by here, 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 Arkhandrus' town.

Chapter 98

1Anthylla is a town of some reputation, and is especially assigned to the consort of the reigning king of Egypt, to provide her shoes. This has been done since Egypt has been under Persian dominion.

2The other town, I think, is named after Arkhandrus son of Phthius the Achaean, and son-in-law of Danaus; for it is called Arkhandrus' town. It may be that there was another Arkhandrus; but the name is not Egyptian.

Chapter 99

1So far, all I have said is the record of my own autopsy and judgment and inquiry. Henceforth I will record Egyptian chronicles, according to what I have heard, adding something of what I myself have seen.

2The 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 twelve and one half miles above Memphis, by damming the stream, thereby drying up the ancient channel, and carried the river by a channel so that it flowed midway between the hills.

3And to this day the Persians keep careful watch on this bend of the river, strengthening its dam every year to keep the current in; for were the Nile to burst its dikes and overflow here, all Memphis would be in danger of flooding.

4Then, when this first king Min had made dry land of what he thus cut off, 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 from the river to its north and west (for the Nile itself bounds it on the east); and secondly, he built in it the great and most noteworthy temple of Hephaestus.

Chapter 100

1After 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.

2The 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 treachery.

3She built a spacious underground chamber; then, with the pretence of inaugurating it, but with quite another intent in her mind, she gave a great feast, inviting to it those Egyptians whom she knew to have had the most complicity in her brother's murder; and while they feasted, she let the river in upon them by a vast secret channel.

4This was all that the priests told of her, except that when she had done this she cast herself into a chamber full of hot ashes, to escape vengeance.

Chapter 101

1But of the other kings they related no achievement or act of great note, except of Moeris, the last of them.

2This Moeris was remembered as having built the northern forecourt of the temple of Hephaestus, and dug a lake, of as great a circumference as I shall later indicate; and built pyramids there 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.

Chapter 102

1Leaving the latter aside, then, I shall speak of the king who came after them, whose name was Sesostris.

2This king, the priests said, set out with a fleet of long ships from the Arabian Gulf and subjugated all those living by the Red Sea, until he came to a sea which was too shallow for his vessels.

3After returning from there back to Egypt, he gathered a great army (according to the account of the priests) and marched over the mainland, subjugating every nation to which he came.

4When those that he met were valiant men and strove hard for freedom, he set up pillars in their land, the inscription on which showed his own name and his country's, and how he had overcome them with his own power;

5but when the cities had made no resistance and been easily taken, then he put an inscription on the pillars just as he had done where the nations were brave; but he also drew on them the private parts of a woman, wishing to show clearly that the people were cowardly.

Chapter 103

1He marched over the country doing this until he had crossed over from Asia to Europe and defeated 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.

2From there, he turned around and went back home; and when he came to the Phasis river, that King, Sesostris, may have detached some part of his army and left it there to live in the country (for I cannot speak with exact knowledge), or it may be that some of his soldiers grew weary of his wanderings, and stayed by the Phasis.

Chapter 104

1For it is plain to see that the Colchians are Egyptians; and what I say, I myself noted before I heard it from others. When it occurred to me, I inquired of both peoples; and the Colchians remembered the Egyptians better than the Egyptians remembered the Colchians;

2the Egyptians said that they considered the Colchians part of Sesostris' army. I myself guessed it, partly because they are dark-skinned and woolly-haired; though that indeed counts for nothing, since other peoples are, too; but my better proof was that the Colchians and Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only nations that have from the first practised circumcision.

3The Phoenicians and the Syrians of Palestine acknowledge that they learned the custom from the Egyptians, and the Syrians of the valleys of the Thermodon and the Parthenius, as well as their neighbors the Macrones, say that they learned it lately from the Colchians. These are the only nations that circumcise, and it is seen that they do just as the Egyptians.

4But as to the Egyptians and Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which nation learned it from the other; for it is evidently a very ancient custom. That the others learned it through traffic with Egypt, I consider clearly proved by this: that Phoenicians who traffic with Hellas cease to imitate the Egyptians in this matter and do not circumcise their children.

Chapter 105

1Listen to something else about the Colchians, in which they are like the Egyptians: they and the Egyptians alone work linen and have the same way of working it, a way peculiar to themselves; and they are alike in all their way 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.

Chapter 106

1As to the pillars that 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 district of Syria, with the aforesaid writing and the women's private parts on them.

2Also, there are in Ionia two figures of this man carved in rock, one on the road from Ephesus to Phocaea, and the other on that from Sardis to Smyrna.

3In both places, the figure is over twenty feet high, with a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and the rest of his equipment proportional; for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian;

4and right across the breast from one shoulder to the other a text is cut in the Egyptian sacred characters, saying: “I myself won this land with the strength of my shoulders.” There is nothing here to show who he is and whence he comes, but it is shown elsewhere.

5Some of those who have seen these figures guess they are Memnon, but they are far indeed from the truth.

Chapter 107

1Now when this Egyptian Sesostris (so the priests said) reached Daphnae of Pelusium on his way home, leading many captives from the peoples whose lands he had subjugated, his brother, whom he had left in charge in Egypt, invited him and his sons to a banquet and then piled wood around the house and set it on fire.

2When Sesostris was aware of this, he at once consulted his wife, whom (it was said) he had with him; and she advised him to lay two of his six sons on the fire and make a bridge over the burning so that they could walk over the bodies of the two and escape. This Sesostris did; two of his sons were thus burnt but the rest escaped alive with their father.

Chapter 108

1After returning to Egypt, and avenging himself on his brother, Sesostris found work for the multitude which he brought with him from the countries which he had subdued.

2It 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 involuntarily made what had been a land of horses and carts empty of these.

3For from this time Egypt, although a level land, could use no horses or carts, because there were so many canals going every which way. The reason why the king thus intersected the country was this:

4those 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.

Chapter 109

1For this reason Egypt was intersected. This king also (they said) divided the country among all the Egyptians by giving each an equal parcel of land, and made this his source of revenue, assessing the payment of a yearly tax.

2And any man who was robbed by the river of part of his land could come to Sesostris and declare what had happened; then the king would send men to look into it and calculate the part by which the land was diminished, so that thereafter it should pay in proportion to the tax originally imposed.

3From this, in my opinion, the Greeks learned the art of measuring land; the sunclock and the sundial, and the twelve divisions of the day, came to Hellas from Babylonia and not from Egypt.

Chapter 110

1Sesostris 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 of his wife, each fifty feet high, and statues of his four sons, each thirty-three feet.

2Long 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 subjugated the Scythians, besides as many nations as Darius had conquered, and Darius had not been able to overcome the Scythians;

3therefore, 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.

Chapter 111

1When Sesostris died, he was succeeded in the kingship (the priests said) by his son Pheros. This king waged no wars, and chanced to become blind, for the following reason: the Nile came down in such a flood as there had never been, rising to a height of thirty feet, and the water that flowed over the fields was roughened by a strong wind;

2then, it is said, the king was so audacious as to seize a spear and hurl it into the midst of the river eddies. Right after this, he came down with 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 term of his punishment was drawing to an end, and that he would regain his sight by washing his eyes with the urine of a woman who had never had intercourse with any man but her own husband.

3Pheros tried his own wife first; and, as he remained blind, all women, one after another. When he at last recovered his sight, he took all the women whom he had tried, except the one who had made him see again, and gathered them into one town, the one which is now called “Red Clay”; having concentrated them together there, he burnt them and the town;

4but the woman by whose means he had recovered his sight, he married. Most worthy of mention among the many offerings which he dedicated in all the noteworthy temples for his deliverance from blindness 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 over one hundred and sixty-six feet high and thirteen feet thick.

Chapter 112

1Pheros was succeeded (they said) by a man of Memphis, whose name in the Greek tongue was Proteus. This Proteus has a very attractive and well-appointed temple precinct at Memphis, south of the temple of Hephaestus.

2Around the precinct live Phoenicians of Tyre, and the whole place is called the Camp of the Tyrians. There is in the precinct of Proteus a temple called the temple of the Stranger Aphrodite; I guess this is a temple of Helen, daughter of Tyndarus, partly because I have heard the story of Helen's abiding with Proteus, and partly because it bears the name of the Foreign Aphrodite: for no other of Aphrodite's temples is called by that name.

Chapter 113

1When I inquired 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; and from there (as the wind did not let up) he came to Egypt, to the mouth of the Nile called the Canopic mouth, and to the Salters'.

2Now there was (and still is) on the coast a temple of Heracles; if a servant of any man takes refuge there and is branded with certain sacred marks, delivering himself to the god, he may not be touched. This law continues today the same as it has always been from the first.

3Hearing of the temple law, some of Alexandrus' servants ran away from him, threw themselves on the mercy of the god, and brought an accusation against Alexandrus meaning to injure him, telling the whole story of Helen and the wrong done Menelaus. They laid this accusation before the priests and the warden of the Nile mouth, whose name was Thonis.

Chapter 114

1When Thonis heard it, he sent this message the quickest way to Proteus at Memphis:

2“A stranger has come, a Trojan, who has committed an impiety in Hellas. After defrauding his guest-friend, he has come bringing the man's wife and a very great deal of wealth, driven to your country by the wind. Are we to let him sail away untouched, or are we to take away what he has come with?”

3Proteus sent back this message: “Whoever this is who has acted impiously against his guest-friend, seize him and bring him to me, that I may know what he will say.”

Chapter 115

1Hearing this, Thonis seized Alexandrus and detained his ships there, and then brought him with Helen and all the wealth, and the suppliants too, to Memphis.

2When all had arrived, Proteus asked Alexandrus who he was and whence he sailed; Alexandrus told him his lineage and the name of his country, and about his voyage, whence he sailed.

3Then Proteus asked him where he had got Helen; when Alexandrus was evasive in his story and did not tell the truth, the men who had taken refuge with the temple confuted him, and related the whole story of the wrong.

4Finally, Proteus declared the following judgment to them, saying, “If I did not make it a point never to kill a stranger who has been caught by the wind and driven to my coasts, I would have punished you on behalf of the Greek, you most vile man. You committed the gravest impiety after you had had your guest-friend's hospitality: you had your guest-friend's wife.

5And as if this were not enough, you got her to fly with you and went off with her. And not just with her, either, but you plundered your guest-friend's wealth and brought it, too.

6Now, then, since I make it a point not to kill strangers, I shall not let you take away this woman and the wealth, but I shall watch them for the Greek stranger, until he come and take them away; but as for you and your sailors, I warn you to leave my country for another within three days, and if you do not, I will declare war on you.”

Chapter 116

1This, the priests said, was how Helen came to Proteus. And, in my opinion, Homer knew this story, too; but seeing that it was not so well suited to epic poetry as the tale of which he made use, he rejected it, showing that he knew it.

2This is apparent from the passage in the Iliad (and nowhere else does he return to the story) where he relates the wanderings of Alexander, and shows how he and Helen were carried off course, and wandered to, among other places, Sidon in Phoenicia.

3This is in the story of the Prowess of Diomedes, where the verses run as follows: There were the robes, all embroidered, The work of women of Sidon, whom godlike Alexandrus himself Brought from Sidon, crossing the broad sea, The same voyage on which he brought back Helen of noble descent.

4[He mentions it in the Odyssey also: The daughter of Zeus had such ingenious drugs, Good ones, which she had from Thon's wife, Polydamna, an Egyptian, Whose country's fertile plains bear the most drugs, Many mixed for good, many for harm:]

5and again Menelaus says to Telemachus: I was eager to return here, but the gods still held me in Egypt, Since I had not sacrificed entire hecatombs to them.

6In these verses the poet shows that he knew of Alexander's wanderings to Egypt; for Syria borders on Egypt, and the Phoenicians, to whom Sidon belongs, dwell in Syria.

Chapter 117

1These verses and this passage prove most clearly that the Cyprian poems are not the work of Homer but of someone else. 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.

Chapter 118

1Enough, then, of Homer and the Cyprian poems. But, when I asked the priests whether the Greek account of what happened at Troy were idle or not, they gave me the following answer, saying that they had inquired and knew from Menelaus himself.

2After the rape of Helen, a great force of Greeks came to the Trojan land on Menelaus' behalf. After disembarking and disposing their forces, they sent messengers to Ilion, one of whom was Menelaus himself.

3When these were let inside the city walls, they demanded the restitution of Helen and of the property which Alexandrus had stolen from Menelaus and carried off, and they demanded reparation for the wrongs; but the Trojans gave the same testimony then and later, sworn and unsworn: that they did not have Helen or the property claimed, but all of that was in Egypt, and they could not justly make reparation for what Proteus the Egyptian had.

4But the Greeks, thinking that the Trojans were mocking them, laid siege to the city, until they took it; but there was no Helen there when they breached the wall, but they heard the same account as before; so, crediting the original testimony, they sent Menelaus himself to Proteus.

Chapter 119

1Menelaus then went to Egypt and up the river to Memphis; there, relating the truth of the matter, he met with great hospitality and got back Helen, who had not been harmed, and also all his wealth, besides.

2Yet, although getting this, Menelaus was guilty of injustice toward the Egyptians. For adverse weather detained him when he tried to sail away; after this continued for some time, he carried out something impious,

3taking two native children and sacrificing them. When it became known that he had done this, he fled with his ships straight to Libya, hated and hunted; and where he went from there, the Egyptians could not say. The priests told me that they had learned some of this by inquiry, but that they were sure of what had happened in their own country.

Chapter 120

1The Egyptians' priests said this, and I myself believe their story about Helen, for I reason thus: had Helen been in Ilion, then with or without the will of Alexandrus she would have been given back to the Greeks.

2For surely Priam was not so mad, or those nearest to him, as to consent to risk their own persons and their children and their city so that Alexandrus might cohabit with Helen.

3Even if it were conceded that they were so inclined in the first days, yet when not only many of the Trojans were slain in fighting against the Greeks, but Priam himself lost to death two or three or even more of his sons in every battle (if the poets are to be believed), in this turn of events, had Helen been Priam's own wife, I cannot but think that he would have restored her to the Greeks, if by so doing he could escape from the evils besetting him.

4Alexandrus was not even heir to the throne, in which case matters might have been in his hands since Priam was old, but Hector, who was an older and a better man than Alexandrus, was going to receive the royal power at Priam's death, and ought not have acquiesced in his brother's wrongdoing, especially when that brother was the cause of great calamity to Hector himself and all the rest of the Trojans.

5But since they did not have Helen there to give back, and since the Greeks would not believe them although they spoke the truth—I am convinced and declare—the divine powers provided that the Trojans, perishing in utter destruction, should make this clear to all mankind: that retribution from the gods for terrible wrongdoing is also terrible. This is what I think, and I state it.

Chapter 121

1The 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; he set two statues here forty-one feet high; the northernmost of these the Egyptians call Summer, and the southernmost Winter; the one that they call Summer they worship and treat well, but do the opposite to the statue called Winter.

Chapter 121A

1This king (they told me) had great wealth in silver, so great that none of the succeeding kings could surpass or come near it. To store his treasure safely, he had a stone chamber built, one of its walls abutting on the outer side of his palace. But the builder of it shrewdly provided that one stone be so placed as to be easily removed by two men or even by one.

2So when the chamber was finished, the king stored his treasure in it, and as time went on, the builder, drawing near the end of his life, summoned his sons (he had two) and told them how he had provided for them, that they have an ample livelihood, by the art with which he had built the king's treasure-house; explaining clearly to them how to remove the stone, he gave the coordinates of it, and told them that if they kept these in mind, they would be the custodians of the king's riches.

3So when he was dead, his sons got to work at once: coming to the palace by night, they readily found and managed the stone in the building, and took away much of the treasure.

Chapter 121B

1When the king opened the building, he was amazed to see the containers lacking their treasure; yet he did not know whom to accuse, seeing that the seals were unbroken and the building shut fast. But when less treasure appeared the second and third times he opened the building (for the thieves did not stop plundering), he had traps made and placed around the containers in which his riches were stored.

2The thieves came just as before, and one of them crept in; when he came near the container, right away he was caught in the trap. When he saw the trouble he was in, he called to his brother right away and explained to him the problem, and told him to come in quickly and cut off his head, lest he be seen and recognized and destroy him, too. He seemed to have spoken rightly to the other, who did as he was persuaded and then, replacing the stone, went home, carrying his brother's head.

Chapter 121C

1When day came, the king went to the building, and was amazed to see in the trap the thief's body without a head, yet the building intact, with no way in or out. At a loss, he did as follows: he suspended the thief's body from the wall and set guards over it, instructing them to seize and bring to him any whom they saw weeping or making lamentation.

2But the thief's mother, when the body had been hung up, was terribly stricken: she had words with her surviving son, and told him that he was somehow to think of some way to cut loose and bring her his brother's body, and if he did not obey, she threatened to go to the king and denounce him as having the treasure.

Chapter 121D

1So when his mother bitterly reproached the surviving son and for all that he said he could not dissuade her, he devised a plan: he harnessed asses and put skins full of wine on the asses, then set out driving them; and when he was near those who were guarding the hanging body, he pulled at the feet of two or three of the skins and loosed their fastenings;

2and as the wine ran out, he beat his head and cried aloud like one who did not know to which ass he should turn first, while the guards, when they saw the wine flowing freely, ran out into the road with cups and caught what was pouring out, thinking themselves in luck;

3feigning anger, the man cursed all; but as the guards addressed him peaceably, he pretended to be soothed and to relent in his anger, and finally drove his asses out of the road and put his harness in order.

4And after more words passed and one joked with him and got him to laugh, he gave them one of the skins: and they lay down there just as they were, disposed to drink, and included him and told him to stay and drink with them; and he consented and stayed.

5When they cheerily saluted him in their drinking, he gave them yet another of the skins; and the guards grew very drunk with the abundance of liquor, and lay down right there where they were drinking, overpowered by sleep;

6but he, when it was late at night, cut down the body of his brother and shaved the right cheek of each of the guards for the indignity, and loading the body on his asses, drove home, fulfilling his mother's commands.

Chapter 121E

1When the king learned that the body of the thief had been taken, he was beside himself and, obsessed with finding who it was who had managed this, did as follows—they say, but I do not believe it.

2He put his own daughter in a brothel, instructing her to accept all alike and, before having intercourse, to make each tell her the shrewdest and most impious thing he had done in his life; whoever told her the story of the thief, she was to seize and not let get out.

3The girl did as her father told her, and the thief, learning why she was doing this, did as follows, wanting to get the better of the king by craft.

4He cut the arm off a fresh corpse 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 said that his most impious act had been when he had cut the head off his brother who was caught in a trap in the king's treasury; and his shrewdest, that after making the guards drunk he had cut down his brother's hanging body.

5When she heard this, the princess grabbed for him; but in the darkness the thief let her have the arm of the corpse; and clutching it, she held on, believing that she had the arm of the other; but the thief, after giving it to her, was gone in a flash out the door.

Chapter 121F

1When 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 immunity and a great reward if he would come into the king's presence.

2The thief trusted the king and came before him; Rhampsinitus was very admiring and gave him his daughter to marry on the grounds that he was the cleverest of men; for as the Egyptians (he said) surpassed all others in craft, so he surpassed the Egyptians.

Chapter 122

1They said that later this king went down alive to what the Greeks call Hades and there played dice with Demeter, and after winning some and losing some, came back with a gift from her of a golden hand towel.

2From the descent of Rhampsinitus, when he came back, they said that the Egyptians celebrate a festival, which I know that they celebrate to this day, but whether this is why they celebrate, I cannot say.

3On the day of the festival, the priests weave a cloth and bind it as a headband on the eyes of one of their number, whom they then lead, wearing the cloth, into a road that goes to the temple of Demeter; they themselves go back, but this priest with his eyes bandaged is guided (they say) by two wolves to Demeter's temple, a distance of three miles from the city, and led back again from the temple by the wolves to the same place.

Chapter 123

1These Egyptian stories are for the benefit of whoever believes such tales: my rule in this history is that I record what is said by all as I have heard it. The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus are the rulers of the lower world.

2The Egyptians were the first who maintained the following doctrine, too, 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, it enters once more into a human body at birth, a cycle which it completes in three thousand years.

3There are Greeks who have used this doctrine, some earlier and some later, as if it were their own; I know their names, but do not record them.

Chapter 124

1They said that Egypt until the time of King Rhampsinitus was altogether well-governed and prospered greatly, but that Kheops, who was the next king, brought the people to utter misery. For first he closed all the temples, so that no one could sacrifice there; and next, he compelled all the Egyptians to work for him.

2To some, he assigned the task of dragging stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains to the Nile; and after the stones were ferried across the river in boats, he organized others to receive and drag them to the mountains called Libyan.

3They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months. For ten years the people wore themselves out building the road over which the stones were dragged, work which was in my opinion not much lighter at all than the building of the pyramid

4(for the road is nearly a mile long and twenty yards wide, and elevated at its highest to a height of sixteen yards, and it is all of stone polished and carved with figures). The aforesaid ten years went to the building of this road and of the underground chambers in the hill where the pyramids stand; these, the king meant to be burial-places for himself, and surrounded them with water, bringing in a channel from the Nile.

5The 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.

Chapter 125

1This pyramid was made like stairs, which some call steps and others, tiers.

2When this, its first form, was completed, the workmen used short wooden logs as levers to raise the rest of the stones; they heaved up the blocks from the ground onto the first tier of steps;

3when the stone had been raised, it was set on another lever that stood on the first tier, and the lever again used to lift it from this tier to the next.

4It may be that there was a new lever on each tier of steps, or perhaps there was only one lever, quite portable, which they carried up to each tier in turn; I leave this uncertain, as both possibilities were mentioned.

5But this is certain, that the upper part of the pyramid was finished off first, then the next below it, and last of all the base and the lowest part.

6There are writings on the pyramid in Egyptian characters indicating how much was spent on radishes and onions and garlic for the workmen; and I am sure that, when he read me the writing, the interpreter said that sixteen hundred talents of silver had been paid.

7Now if that is so, how much must have been spent on the iron with which they worked, and the workmen's food and clothing, considering that the time aforesaid was spent in building, while hewing and carrying the stone and digging out the underground parts was, as I suppose, a business of long duration.

Chapter 126

1And so evil a man was Kheops that, needing money, he put his own daughter in a brothel and made her charge a fee (how much, they did not say). She did as her father told her, but was disposed to leave a memorial of her own, and asked of each coming to her that he give one stone;

2and of these stones they said the pyramid was built that stands midmost of the three, over against the great pyramid; each side of it measures one hundred and fifty feet.

Chapter 127

1The Egyptians said that this Kheops reigned for fifty years; at his death he was succeeded by his brother Khephren, who was in all respects like Kheops. Khephren also built a pyramid, smaller than his brother's. I have measured it myself.

2It 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, Kheops himself lies.

3This pyramid was built on the same scale as the other, except that it falls forty feet short of it in height; it stands near the great pyramid; the lowest layer of it is of variegated Ethiopian stone. Both of them stand on the same ridge, which is about a hundred feet high. Khephren, they said, reigned for fifty-six years.

Chapter 128

1Thus, they reckon that for a hundred and six years Egypt was in great misery and the temples so long shut were never opened. The people hate the memory of these two kings so much that they do not much wish to name them, and call the pyramids after the shepherd Philitis, who then pastured his flocks in this place.

Chapter 129

1The next king of Egypt, they said, was Kheops' son Mycerinus. Disliking his father's doings, he opened the temples and let the people, ground down to the depth of misery, go to their business and their sacrifices; and he was the most just judge among all the kings.

2This is why he is praised above all the rulers of Egypt; for not only were his judgments just, but Mycerinus would give any who were not satisfied with the judgment a present out of his own estate to compensate him for his loss.

3Though mild toward his people and conducting himself as he did, yet he suffered calamities, the first of which was the death of his daughter, the only child of his household. Deeply grieved over this misfortune, he wanted to give her a burial somewhat more sumptuous than ordinary; he therefore made a hollow cow's image of gilded wood and placed the body of his dead daughter therein.

Chapter 130

1This cow was not buried in the earth but was to be seen even in my time, in the town of Saïs, where it stood in a furnished room of the palace; incense of all kinds is offered daily before it, and a lamp burns by it all through every night.

2Near this cow in another chamber statues of Mycerinus' concubines stand, so the priests of Saïs said; and in fact there are about twenty colossal wooden figures there, made like naked women; but except what I was told, I cannot tell who these are.

Chapter 131

1But some tell the following story about the cow and the statues: that Mycerinus conceived a passion for his own daughter and then had intercourse with her against her will;

2and they say that afterwards the girl strangled herself for grief, and that he buried her in this cow, but that her mother cut off the hands of the attendants who had betrayed the daughter to her father, and that now their statues are in the same condition as the living women were.

3But this I believe to be a silly story, especially about the hands of the figures. For in fact we ourselves saw that the hands have fallen off through age, and were lying at their feet even in my day.

Chapter 132

1As for the cow, it is covered with a purple robe, only the head and neck exposed, encrusted with a very thick layer of gold. Between the horns is the golden figure of the sun's orb.

2It does not stand, but kneels; it is as big as a live cow of great size. This image is carried out of the chamber once every year, whenever the Egyptians mourn the god whose name I omit in speaking of these matters:

3then the cow is brought out into the light; for they say that before she died she asked her father, Mycerinus, that she see the sun once a year.

Chapter 133

1After what happened to his daughter, the following happened next to this king: an oracle came to him from the city of Buto, announcing that he had just six years to live and was to die in the seventh.

2The king took this badly, and sent back to the oracle a message of reproach, blaming the god that his father and his uncle, though they had shut up the temples, and disregarded the gods, and destroyed men, had lived for a long time, but that he who was pious was going to die so soon.

3But a second oracle came announcing that for this very reason his life was hastening to a close: he had done what was contrary to fate; Egypt should have been afflicted for a hundred and fifty years, and the two kings before him knew this, but not he.

4Hearing this, Mycerinus knew that his doom was fixed. Therefore, he had many lamps made, and would light these at nightfall and drink and enjoy himself, not letting up day or night, roaming to the marsh country and the groves and wherever he heard of the likeliest places of pleasure.

5This was his recourse, so that by turning night into day he might make his six years into twelve and so prove the oracle false.

Chapter 134

1This king, too, left a pyramid, but far smaller than his father's, each side twenty feet short of three hundred feet long, square at the base, and as much as half its height of Ethiopian stone. Some Greeks say that it was built by Rhodopis, the courtesan, but they are wrong;

2indeed, it is clear to me that they say this without even knowing who Rhodopis was (otherwise, they would never have credited her with the building of a pyramid on which what I may call an uncountable sum of money was spent), or that Rhodopis flourished in the reign of Amasis, not of Mycerinus;

3for very many years later than these kings who left the pyramids came Rhodopis, who was Thracian by birth, and a slave of Iadmon son of Hephaestopolis the Samian, and a fellow-slave of Aesop the story-writer. For he was owned by Iadmon, too, as the following made crystal clear:

4when the Delphians, obeying an oracle, issued many proclamations summoning anyone who wanted it to accept compensation for the killing of Aesop, no one accepted it except the son of Iadmon's son, another Iadmon; hence Aesop, too, was Iadmon's.

Chapter 135

1Rhodopis came to Egypt to work, brought by Xanthes of Samos, but upon her arrival was freed for a lot of money by Kharaxus of Mytilene, son of Scamandronymus and brother of Sappho the poetess.

2Thus Rhodopis lived as a free woman in Egypt, where, as she was very alluring, she acquired a lot of money—sufficient for such a Rhodopis, so to speak, but not for such a pyramid.

3Seeing that to this day anyone who likes can calculate what one tenth of her worth was, 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 thought of or dedicated in a temple and presenting this at Delphi to preserve her memory;

4so she spent one tenth of her substance on the manufacture of a great number of iron beef spits, as many as the tenth 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.

5The courtesans of Naucratis seem to be peculiarly alluring, for the woman of whom this story is told became so famous that every Greek knew the name of Rhodopis, and later on a certain Archidice was the theme of song throughout Greece, although less celebrated than the other.

6Kharaxus, after giving Rhodopis her freedom, returned to Mytilene. He is bitterly attacked by Sappho in one of her poems. This is enough about Rhodopis.

Chapter 136

1After Mycerinus, the priests said, Asukhis became king of Egypt. He built the eastern outer court of Hephaestus' temple; this is by far the finest and grandest of all the courts, for while all have carved figures and innumerable felicities of architecture, this court has far more than any.

2As not much money was in circulation during this king's reign, they told me, a law was made for the Egyptians allowing a man to borrow on the security of his father's corpse; and the law also provided that the lender become master of the entire burial-vault of the borrower, and that the penalty for one giving this security, should he fail to repay the loan, was that he was not to be buried at his death either in that tomb of his fathers or in any other, nor was he to bury any relative of his there.

3Furthermore, in his desire to excel 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:

4“Do not think me less than pyramids of stone; for I excel them as much as Zeus does other gods; for they stuck a pole down into a marsh and collected what mud clung to the pole, made bricks of it, and thus built me.” These were the acts of Asukhis.

Chapter 137

1After him reigned a blind man called Anysis, of the town of that name. In his reign Egypt was invaded by Sabacos king of Ethiopia and a great army of Ethiopians.

2The blind man fled to the marshes, and the Ethiopian ruled Egypt for fifty years, during which he distinguished himself for the following:

3he would never put to death any Egyptian wrongdoer but sentenced all, according to the severity of their offenses, to raise embankments in their native towns. Thus the towns came to stand yet higher than before;

4for after first being built on embankments made by the excavators of the canals in the reign of Sesostris, they were yet further raised in the reign of the Ethiopian.

5Of the towns in Egypt that were raised, in my opinion, Bubastis is especially prominent, where there is also a temple of Bubastis, a building most worthy of note. Other temples are greater and more costly, but none more pleasing to the eye than this. Bubastis is, in the Greek language, Artemis.

Chapter 138

1Her temple is of this description: except for the entrance, it stands on an island; for two channels approach it from the Nile without mixing with one another, running as far as the entryway of the temple, the one and the other flowing around it, each a hundred feet wide and shaded by trees.

2The outer court is sixty feet high, adorned with notable figures ten feet high. The whole circumference of the city commands a view down into the temple in its midst; 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 above.

3A stone wall, cut with figures, runs around it; within is a grove of very tall trees growing around a great shrine where the image of the goddess is; the temple is a square, each side measuring an eighth of a mile.

4A road, paved with stone, about three eighths of a mile long leads to the entrance, running eastward through the marketplace, towards the temple of Hermes; this road is about four hundred feet wide, and bordered by trees reaching to heaven. Such is this temple.

Chapter 139

1Now the departure of the Ethiopian (they said) came about in this way. After seeing in a dream one who stood over him and urged him to gather together all the Priests in Egypt and cut them in half, he fled from the country.

2Seeing this vision, he said, he supposed it to be a manifestation sent to him by the gods, so that he might commit sacrilege and so be punished by gods or men; he would not (he said) do so, but otherwise, for the time foretold for his rule over Egypt was now fulfilled, after which he was to depart:

3for when he was still in Ethiopia, the oracles that are consulted by the people of that country told 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 volition.

Chapter 140

1When the Ethiopian left Egypt, the blind man (it is said) was king once more, returning from the marshes where he had lived for fifty years on an island that he built of ashes and earth; for the Egyptians who were to bring him food without the Ethiopian's knowledge were instructed by the king to bring ashes whenever they came, to add to their gift.

2This 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 over a mile long and of an equal breadth.

Chapter 141

1The next king was the priest of Hephaestus whose name was Sethos. He despised and had no regard for the warrior Egyptians, thinking he would never need them; besides otherwise dishonoring them, he took away the chosen lands which had been given to them, twelve fields to each man, in the reign of former kings.

2So when presently king Sanacharib came against Egypt, with a great force of Arabians and Assyrians, the warrior Egyptians would not march against him.

3The priest, in this quandary, went into the temple shrine and there before the god's image bitterly lamented over what he expected to suffer. Sleep came on him while he was lamenting, and it seemed to him the god stood over him and told him to take heart, that he would come to no harm encountering the power of Arabia: “I shall send you champions,” said the god.

4So he trusted the vision, and together with those Egyptians who would follow him camped at Pelusium, where the road comes into Egypt; and none of the warriors would go with him, but only merchants and craftsmen and traders.

5Their enemies came there, too, and during the night were overrun by a horde of field mice that gnawed quivers and bows and the handles of shields, with the result that many were killed fleeing unarmed the next day.

6And to 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 at me, and believe.”

Chapter 142

1Thus far went the record given 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, and that in this time this also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests.

2Now three hundred generations are ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a hundred. And over and above the three hundred, the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years.

3Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt.

4Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to experience; twice he came up where he now goes down, and twice went down where he now comes up; yet Egypt at these times underwent no change, either in the produce of the river and the land, or in the matter of sickness and death.

Chapter 143

1Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, where he made a genealogy for himself that had him descended from a god in the sixteenth generation. But the priests of Zeus did with him as they also did with me (who had not traced my own lineage).

2They brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me wooden figures there which they counted to the total they had already given, for every high priest sets up a statue of himself there during his lifetime;

3pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each succeeded his father; they went through the whole line of figures, back to the earliest from that of the man who had most recently died.

4Thus, 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”; in Greek, one who is in all respects a good man.

Chapter 144

1Thus they showed that all those whose statues stood there had been good men, but quite unlike gods.

2Before these men, they said, the rulers of Egypt were gods, but none had been contemporary with the human priests. Of these gods one or another had in succession been supreme; the last of them to rule the country was Osiris' son Horus, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he deposed Typhon, and was the last divine king of Egypt. Osiris is, in the Greek language, Dionysus.

Chapter 145

1Among 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 earliest 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.

2How 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.

3The Egyptians claim to be sure of all this, since they have reckoned the years and chronicled them in writing.

4Now 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.

Chapter 146

1With regard to these two, Pan and Dionysus, one may follow whatever story one thinks most credible; but I give my own opinion concerning them here. Had Dionysus son of Semele and Pan son of Penelope appeared 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;

2but 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 do not know what became of him after his birth. It is therefore plain to me that the Greeks learned 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.

Chapter 147

1So far I have recorded what the Egyptians themselves say. I shall now relate what is recorded alike by Egyptians and foreigners, and shall add something of what I myself have seen.

2After 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 districts and set up twelve kings.

3These kings intermarried, and agreed to be close friends, no one deposing another or seeking to possess more than another.

4The reason for this agreement, which they scrupulously kept, was this: no sooner were they established in their districts than an oracle was given them that whichever of them poured a libation from a bronze vessel in the temple of Hephaestus (where, as in all the temples, they used to assemble) would be king of all Egypt.

Chapter 148

1Moreover, they decided to preserve the memory of their names by a common memorial, and so they made a labyrinth a little way beyond lake Moeris and near the place called the City of Crocodiles. I have seen it myself, and indeed words cannot describe it;

2if one were to collect the walls and evidence of other efforts of the Greeks, the sum would not amount to the labor and cost of this labyrinth. And yet the temple at Ephesus and the one on Samos are noteworthy.

3Though the pyramids beggar description and each one of them is a match for many great monuments built by Greeks, this maze surpasses even the pyramids.

4It has twelve roofed courts with doors facing each other: six face north and six 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.

5We ourselves viewed those that are above ground, and speak of what we have seen, but we learned through conversation about the underground chambers; the Egyptian caretakers would by no means show them, as they were, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles.

6Thus we can only speak from hearsay of the lower chambers; the upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human. The exits 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.

7Over all this is a roof, made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with cut figures, and every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high, on which great figures are cut. A passage to this has been made underground.

Chapter 149

1Such is this labyrinth; and still more marvellous is lake Moeris, on which it stands. This lake has a circumference of four hundred and fifty miles, or sixty schoeni: as much as the whole seaboard of Egypt. Its length is from north to south; the deepest part has a depth of fifty fathoms.

2That 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 each is a colossal stone figure seated on a throne.

3Thus 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.

4The water of the lake is not natural (for the country here is exceedingly arid) but brought by a channel from the Nile; six months it flows into the lake, and six back into the river.

5For the six months that it flows out of 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.

Chapter 150

1Furthermore, the natives said that this lake drains underground into the Libyan Syrtis, and extends under the mountains that are above Memphis, having the inland country on its west.

2When I could not see anywhere the earth taken from the digging of this lake, since this was curious to me, I asked those who live nearest the lake where the stuff was that had been dug out. They told me where it had been carried, and I readily believed them, for I had heard of a similar thing happening in the Assyrian city of Ninus.

3Sardanapallus king of Ninus had great wealth, which he kept in an underground treasury. Some thieves plotted to carry it off; they surveyed their course and dug an underground way from their own house to the palace, carrying the earth taken out of the passage dug by night to the Tigris, which runs past Ninus, until at last they accomplished their end.

4This, I was told, had happened when the Egyptian lake was dug, except 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 expected) by the river. Thus is this lake said to have been dug.

Chapter 151

1Now the twelve kings were just, and in time came to sacrifice in Hephaestus' temple. On the last day of the feast, as they were about to pour libations, the high priest brought out the golden vessels which they commonly used for this; but he counted wrongly and had only eleven for the twelve.

2So the last in line, Psammetichus, as he had no vessel, took off his bronze helmet and held it out and poured the libation with it. All the kings were accustomed to wear helmets, and were then helmeted;

3it was not in guile, then, that Psammetichus held out his headgear; but the rest perceived what Psammetichus had done, and remembered the oracle that promised the sovereignty of all Egypt to whoever poured a libation from a vessel of bronze; therefore, though they considered Psammetichus not deserving of death (for they examined him and found that he had acted without intent), they decided to strip him of most of his power and to chase him away into the marshes, and that he was not to concern himself with the rest of Egypt.

Chapter 152

1This Psammetichus had formerly been in exile in Syria, where he had fled from Sabacos the Ethiopian, who killed his father Necos; then, when the Ethiopian departed because of what he saw in a dream, the Egyptians of the district of Saïs brought him back from Syria.

2Psammetichus was king for the second time when he found himself driven away into the marshes by the eleven kings because of the helmet.

3Believing, therefore, that he had been abused by them, he meant to be avenged on those who had expelled him. He sent to inquire in the town of Buto, where the most infallible oracle in Egypt is; the oracle answered that he would have vengeance when he saw men of bronze coming from the sea.

4Psammetichus did not in the least believe that men of bronze would come to aid him. But after a short time, Ionians and Carians, voyaging for plunder, were forced to put in on the coast of Egypt, where they disembarked in their armor of bronze; and an Egyptian came into the marsh country and brought news to Psammetichus (for he had never before seen armored men) that men of bronze had come from the sea and were foraging in the plain.

5Psammetichus saw in this the fulfillment 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 over, deposed the eleven kings with these allies and those Egyptians who volunteered.

Chapter 153

1Having made himself master of all Egypt, he made the southern outer court of Hephaestus' temple at Memphis, and built facing this a court for Apis, where Apis is kept and fed whenever he appears; this court has an inner colonnade all around it and many cut figures; the roof is held up by great statues twenty feet high for pillars. Apis in Greek is Epaphus.

Chapter 154

1To the Ionians and Carians who had helped him, Psammetichus gave places to live in called The Camps, opposite each other on either side of the Nile; and besides this, he paid them all that he had promised.

2Moreover, he put Egyptian boys in their hands to be taught Greek, and from these, who learned the language, are descended the present-day Egyptian interpreters.

3The Ionians and Carians lived for 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 and settled them at Memphis to be his guard against the Egyptians.

4It is a result of our communication with these settlers in Egypt (the first of foreign speech to settle in that country) that we Greeks have exact knowledge of the history of Egypt from the reign of Psammetichus onwards.

5There still remained in my day, in the places out of which the Ionians and Carians were turned, the winches for their ships and the ruins of their houses. This is how Psammetichus got Egypt.

Chapter 155

1I have often mentioned the Egyptian oracle, and shall give an account of this, as it deserves. This oracle is sacred to Leto, and is situated in a great city by the Sebennytic arm of the Nile, on the way up from the sea.

2Buto is the name of the city where this oracle is; I have already mentioned it. In Buto there is a temple of Apollo and Artemis. The shrine of Leto where the oracle is, is itself very great, and its outer court is sixty feet high.

3But what caused me the most wonder among the things apparent there I shall mention. In this precinct is the shrine of Leto, the height and length of whose walls is all made of a single stone slab; each wall has an equal length and height; namely, seventy feet. Another slab makes the surface of the roof, the cornice of which is seven feet broad.

Chapter 156

1Thus, then, the shrine is the most marvellous of all the things that I saw in this temple; but of things of second rank, the most wondrous is the island called Khemmis.

2This lies in a deep and wide lake near the temple at Buto, and the Egyptians say that it floats. I never saw it float, or move at all, and I thought it a marvellous tale, that an island should truly float.

3However that may be, there is a great shrine of Apollo on it, and three altars stand there; many palm trees grow on the island, and other trees too, some yielding fruit and some not.

4This is the story that the Egyptians tell to explain why the island moves: that on this island that did not move before, Leto, one of the eight gods who first came to be, who was living at Buto where this oracle of hers is, taking charge of Apollo from Isis, hid him for safety in this island which is now said to float, when Typhon came hunting through the world, keen to find the son of Osiris.

5Apollo 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.

6It was from this legend and no other that Aeschylus son of Euphorion took a notion which is in no poet before him: that Artemis was the daughter of Demeter. For this reason the island was made to float. So they say.

Chapter 157

1Psammetichus ruled Egypt for fifty-three years, twenty-nine of which he spent before Azotus, a great city in Syria, besieging it until he took it. Azotus held out against a siege longer than any city of which we know.

Chapter 158

1Psammetichus had a son, Necos, who became king of Egypt. It was he who began building 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.

2It 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. Digging began in the part of the Egyptian plain nearest to Arabia; the mountains that extend to Memphis (the mountains where the stone quarries are) come close to this plain;

3the canal is led along the foothills 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.

4Now the shortest and most direct passage from the northern to the southern or Red Sea is from the Casian promontory, the boundary between Egypt and Syria, to the Arabian Gulf, and this is a distance of one hundred and twenty five miles, neither more nor less;

5this is the most direct route, but the canal is far longer, inasmuch as it is more crooked. In Necos' reign, a hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians died digging it. Necos stopped work, stayed by a prophetic utterance that he was toiling beforehand for the barbarian. The Egyptians call all men of other languages barbarians.

Chapter 159

1Necos, then, stopped work on the canal and engaged in preparations for war; some of his ships of war were built on the northern sea, and some in the Arabian Gulf, by the Red Sea coast: the winches for landing these can still be seen.

2He used these ships when needed, and with his land army met and defeated the Syrians at Magdolus, taking the great Syrian city of Cadytis after the battle.

3He sent to Branchidae of Miletus and dedicated there to Apollo the garments in which he won these victories. Then he died after a reign of sixteen years, and his son Psammis reigned in his place.

Chapter 160

1While this Psammis was king of Egypt, he was visited by ambassadors from Elis, the Eleans boasting that they had arranged the Olympic games with all the justice and fairness in the world, and claiming that even the Egyptians, although the wisest of all men, could not do better.

2When the Eleans came to Egypt and announced why they had come, Psammis assembled the Egyptians reputed to be wisest. These assembled and learned all that the Eleans were to do regarding the games; after explaining this, the Eleans said that they had come to learn whether the Egyptians could discover any juster way.

3The Egyptians deliberated, and then asked the Eleans if their own citizens took part in the contests. The Eleans answered that they did: all Greeks from Elis or elsewhere might contend.

4Then the Egyptians said that in establishing this rule they fell short of complete fairness: “For there is no way that you will not favor your own townsfolk in the contest and wrong the stranger; if you wish in fact to make just rules and have come to Egypt for that reason, you should admit only strangers to the contest, and not Eleans.” Such was the counsel of the Egyptians to the Eleans.

Chapter 161

1Psammis reigned over Egypt for only six years; he invaded Ethiopia, and immediately thereafter died, and Apries the son of Psammis reigned in his place.

2He was more fortunate than any former king (except his great-grandfather Psammetichus) during his rule of twenty-five years, during which he sent an army against Sidon and fought at sea with the king of Tyre.

3But when it was fated that evil should overtake him, the cause of it was something that I will now deal with briefly, and at greater length in the Libyan part of this history.

4Apries sent a great force 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, so that after their perishing in this way he might be the more secure 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.

Chapter 162

1Hearing of this, Apries sent Amasis to dissuade them. When Amasis came up with the Egyptians, he exhorted them to desist; but as he spoke an Egyptian came behind him and put a helmet on his head, saying it was the token of royalty.

2And Amasis showed that this was not displeasing to him, for after being made king by the rebel Egyptians he prepared to march against Apries.

3When Apries heard of it, he sent against Amasis an esteemed Egyptian named Patarbemis, one of his own court, instructing him to take the rebel alive and bring him into his presence. When Patarbemis came and summoned Amasis, Amasis (who was on horseback) rose up and farted, telling the messenger to take that back to Apries.

4But when in spite of this Patarbemis insisted that Amasis obey the king's summons and go to him, Amasis answered that he had long been preparing to do just that, and Apries would find him above reproach, for he would present himself, and bring others.

5Hearing this, Patarbemis could not mistake Amasis; he saw his preparations and hastened to depart, the more quickly to make known to the king what was going on. When Apries saw him return without Amasis, he did not stop to reflect, but in his rage and fury had Patarbemis' ears and nose cut off.

6The rest of the Egyptians, who were until now Apries' friends, seeing this outrage done to the man who was most prominent among them, changed sides without delay and offered themselves to Amasis.

Chapter 163

1Learning of this, too, Apries armed his guard and marched against the Egyptians; he had a bodyguard of Carians and Ionians, thirty thousand of them, and his royal palace was in the city of Saïs, a great and marvellous palace.

2Apries' men marched against the Egyptians, and so did Amasis' men against the foreigners. So they both came to Momemphis and were going to make trial of one another.

Chapter 164

1The Egyptians are divided into seven classes: priests, warriors, cowherds, swineherds, merchants, interpreters, and pilots. There are this many classes, each named after its occupation.

2The warriors are divided into Kalasiries and Hermotubies, and they belong to the following districts (for all divisions in Egypt are made according to districts).

Chapter 165

1The Hermotubies are from the districts of Busiris, Saïs, Khemmis, and Papremis, the island called Prosopitis, and half of Natho—from all of these; their number, at its greatest, attained to a hundred and sixty thousand. None of these has learned any common trade; they are free to follow the profession of arms alone.

Chapter 166

1The Kalasiries are from the districts of Thebes, Bubastis, Aphthis, Tanis, Mendes, Sebennys, Athribis, Pharbaïthis, Thmuis, Onuphis, Anytis, Myecphoris (this last is in an island opposite the city of Bubastis )—

2from all of these; their number, at its greatest, attained to two hundred and fifty thousand men. These too may practise no trade but war, which is their hereditary calling.

Chapter 167

1Now whether this, too, the Greeks have learned from the Egyptians, I cannot confidently judge. I know that in Thrace and Scythia and Persia and Lydia and nearly all foreign countries, those who learn trades are held in less esteem than the rest of the people, and those who have least to do with artisans' work, especially men who are free to practise the art of war, are highly honored.

2This much is certain: that this opinion, which is held by all Greeks and particularly by the Lacedaemonians, is of foreign origin. It is in Corinth that artisans are held in least contempt.

Chapter 168

1The warriors were the only Egyptians, except the priests, who had special privileges: for each of them an untaxed plot of twelve acres was set apart. This acre is a square of a hundred Egyptian cubits each way, the Egyptian cubit being equal to the Samian.

2These 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, each received 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.

Chapter 169

1When Apries with his guards and Amasis with the whole force of Egyptians came to the town of Momemphis, they engaged; and though the foreigners fought well, they were vastly outnumbered, and therefore were beaten.

2Apries, they say, supposed that not even a god could depose him from his throne, so firmly did he think he was established; and now, defeated in battle and taken captive, he was brought to Saïs, to the royal dwelling which belonged to him once but now belonged to Amasis.

3There, he was kept alive for a while in the palace and well treated by Amasis. But presently the Egyptians complained that there was no justice in keeping alive one who was their own and their king's bitterest enemy; whereupon Amasis gave Apries up to them, and they strangled him and then buried him in the burial-place of his fathers.

4This is in the temple of Athena, very near to the sanctuary, on the left of the entrance. The people of Saïs buried within the temple precinct all kings who were natives of their district.

5The tomb of Amasis is farther from the sanctuary than the tomb of Apries and his ancestors; yet it, too, is within the temple court; it is a great colonnade of stone, richly adorned, the pillars made in the form of palm trees. In this colonnade are two portals, and the place where the coffin lies is within their doors.

Chapter 170

1There is also at Saïs the burial-place of one whose name I think it impious to mention in speaking of such a matter; it is in the temple of Athena, behind and close to the length of the wall of the shrine.

2Moreover, great stone obelisks stand in the precinct; and there is a lake nearby, adorned with a stone margin and made in a complete circle; it is, as it seemed to me, the size of the lake at Delos which they call the Round Pond.

Chapter 171

1On this lake they enact by night the story of the god's sufferings, a rite which the Egyptians call the Mysteries. I could say more about this, for I know the truth, but let me preserve a discreet silence.

2Let me preserve a discreet silence, too, concerning that rite of Demeter which the Greeks call Thesmophoria, except as much of it as I am not forbidden to mention.

3The daughters of Danaus were those who brought this rite out of Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women; afterwards, when the people of the Peloponnese were driven out by the Dorians, it was lost, except in so far as it was preserved by the Arcadians, the Peloponnesian people which was not driven out but left in its home.

Chapter 172

1After Apries was deposed, Amasis became king; he was from a town called Siuph in the district of Saïs.

2Now at first he was scorned and held in low regard by the Egyptians on the ground that he was a common man and of no high family; but presently he won them over by being shrewd and not arrogant.

3He had among his countless treasures a golden washbowl, in which he and all those who ate with him were accustomed to clean their feet. This he broke in pieces and out of it made a god's image, which he set in a most conspicuous spot in the city; and the Egyptians came frequently to this image and held it in great reverence.

4When Amasis learned what the townsfolk were doing, he called the Egyptians together and told them that the image had been made out of the washbowl, in which Egyptians had once vomited and urinated and cleaned their feet, but which now they greatly revered.

5“Now then,” he said, “I have fared like the washbowl, since if before I was a common man, still, I am your king now.” And he told them to honor and show respect for him.

Chapter 173

1The following was how he scheduled his affairs: in the morning, until the the hour when the marketplace filled, he readily conducted whatever business was brought to him; the rest of the day, he drank and joked at the expense of his companions and was idle and playful.

2But this displeased his friends, who admonished him thus: “O King, you do not conduct yourself well by indulging too much in vulgarity. You, a celebrated man, ought to conduct your business throughout the day, sitting on a celebrated throne; and thus the Egyptians would know that they are governed by a great man, and you would be better spoken of; as it is, what you do is by no means kingly.”

3But he answered them like this: “Men that have bows string them when they must use them, and unstring them when they have used them; were bows kept strung forever, they would break, and so could not be used when needed.

4Such, too, is the nature of man. Were one to be always at serious work and not permit oneself a bit of relaxation, he would go mad or idiotic before he knew it; I am well aware of that, and give each of the two its turn.” Such was his answer to his friends.

Chapter 174

1It is said that even when Amasis was a private man he was fond of drinking and joking and was not at all a sober man; and that when his drinking and pleasure-seeking cost him the bare necessities, he would go around stealing. Then when he contradicted those who said that he had their possessions, they would bring him to whatever place of divination was nearby, and sometimes the oracles declared him guilty and sometimes they acquitted him.

2When he became king, he did not take care of the shrines of the gods who had acquitted him of theft, or give them anything for maintenance, or make it his practice to sacrifice there, for he knew them to be worthless and their oracles false; but he took scrupulous care of the gods who had declared his guilt, considering them to be gods in very deed and their oracles infallible.

Chapter 175

1Amasis made a marvellous outer court for the temple of Athena at Saïs, far surpassing all in its height and size, and in the size and quality of the stone blocks; moreover, he set up huge images and vast man-headed sphinxes, and brought enormous blocks of stone besides for the building.

2Some of these he brought from the stone quarries of Memphis; the largest came from the city of Elephantine, twenty days' journey distant by river from Saïs.

3But what I admire most of his works is this: he brought from Elephantine a shrine made of one single block of stone; its transport took three years and two thousand men had the carriage of it, all of them pilots. This chamber is thirty-five feet long, twenty-three feet wide, thirteen feet high.

4These are the external dimensions of the chamber which is made of one block; its internal dimensions are: thirty-one feet long, twenty feet wide, eight feet high. It stands at the entrance of the temple;

5it was not dragged within (so they say) because while it was being drawn the chief builder complained aloud of the great expense of time and his loathing of the work, and Amasis taking this to heart would not let it be drawn further. Some also say that a man, one of those who heaved up the shrine, was crushed by it, and therefore it was not dragged within.

Chapter 176

1Furthermore, 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.

2There is at Saïs another stone figure of like size, supine as is the figure at Memphis. It was Amasis, too, who built the great and most marvellous temple of Isis at Memphis.

Chapter 177

1It 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 number of inhabited cities in the country was twenty thousand.

2It was Amasis also who made the law that every Egyptian declare his means of livelihood to the ruler of his district annually, and that omitting to do so or to prove that one had a legitimate livelihood be punishable with death. Solon the Athenian got this law from Egypt and established it among his people; may they always have it, for it is a perfect law.

Chapter 178

1Amasis became a philhellene, and besides other services which he did for some of the Greeks, he gave those who came to Egypt the city of Naucratis to live in; and to those who travelled to the country without wanting to settle there, he gave lands where they might set up altars and make holy places for their gods.

2Of 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.

3It is to these that the precinct belongs, and these are the cities that furnish overseers of the trading port; if any other cities advance claims, they claim what does not belong to them. The Aeginetans made a precinct of their own, sacred to Zeus; and so did the Samians for Hera and the Milesians for Apollo.

Chapter 179

1Naucratis was in the past the only trading port in Egypt. Whoever came to any other mouth of the Nile had to swear that he had not come intentionally, and had then to take his ship and sail to the Canobic mouth; or if he could not sail against contrary winds, he had to carry his cargo in barges around the Delta until he came to Naucratis. In such esteem was Naucratis held.

Chapter 180

1When the Amphictyons paid three hundred talents to have the temple that now stands at Delphi finished (as that which was formerly there burnt down by accident), it was the Delphians' lot to pay a fourth of the cost.

2They went about from city to city collecting gifts, and got most from Egypt; for Amasis gave them a thousand talents' weight of astringent earth, and the Greek settlers in Egypt twenty minae.

Chapter 181

1Amasis made friends and allies of the people of Cyrene. And he decided to marry from there, either because he had his heart set on a Greek wife, or for the sake of the Corcyreans' friendship;

2in any case, he married a certain Ladice, said by some to be the daughter of Battus, of Arcesilaus by others, and by others again of Critobulus, an esteemed citizen of the place. But whenever Amasis lay with her, he became unable to have intercourse, though he managed with every other woman;

3and when this happened repeatedly, Amasis said to the woman called Ladice, “Woman, you have cast a spell on me, and there is no way that you shall avoid perishing the most wretchedly of all women.”

4So Ladice, when the king did not relent at all although she denied it, vowed in her heart to Aphrodite that, if Amasis could have intercourse with her that night, since that would remedy the problem, she would send a statue to Cyrene to her. And after the prayer, immediately, Amasis did have intercourse with her. And whenever Amasis came to her thereafter, he had intercourse, and he was very fond of her after this.

5Ladice paid her vow to the goddess; she had an image made and sent it to Cyrene, where it stood safe until my time, facing outside the city. Cambyses, when he had conquered Egypt and learned who Ladice was, sent her away to Cyrene unharmed.

Chapter 182

1Moreover, Amasis dedicated offerings in Hellas. He gave to Cyrene a gilt image of Athena and a painted picture of himself; to Athena of Lindus, two stone images and a marvellous linen breast-plate; and to Hera in Samos, two wooden statues of himself that were still standing in my time behind the doors in the great shrine.

2The offerings in Samos were dedicated because of the friendship between Amasis and Polycrates, son of Aeaces; what he gave to Lindus was not out of friendship for anyone, but because the temple of Athena in Lindus is said to have been 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.