[1] After Cyrus’ death, the kingdom passed to Cambyses, the son of Cyrus and of Cassandane the daughter of Pharnaspes. Cassandane had died while Cyrus was still alive, and as well as grieving deeply for her himself, he had ordered all his subjects to mourn her too. Anyway, with this woman as his mother and with Cyrus as his father, Cambyses thought of Ionians and Aeolians as slaves he had inherited from his father, and when he launched an expedition against Egypt, there were Greek subjects of his in the army, as well as contingents from various other peoples under his yoke.
[2] Before Psammetichus’ reign, the Egyptians had regarded themselves as the oldest race on earth, but when Psammetichus became king he decided to settle the issue, and ever since then they have regarded themselves as older than everyone else except the Phrygians. Because his enquiries were unable to elicit an answer to the question which was the oldest race on earth, he devised the following experiment. He gave a shepherd two new-born infants to rear, from ordinary families, and told him to bring them up among his flocks in such a way that no one ever spoke in their hearing; they were to lie in a remote hut by themselves, and he was to bring them she-goats from time to time, give them their fill of milk, and do whatever else needed doing. Psammetichus made these arrangements because he wanted to find out what the children’s very first word would be, once they were past the age of meaningless whimpering. And so it happened. One day, when the shepherd had been carrying out this programme for two years, he opened the door and went into the hut, and both children rushed up to him, reaching out their hands, and said ‘bekos’. The first time he heard this word, the shepherd did not do anything, but since it kept recurring on visit after visit, when he went there to tend to them, he passed the information on to his master. Psammetichus told him to bring the children to him, and the shepherd did so. When Psammetichus heard the word for himself, he started trying to find out which people call something ‘bekos’, and he was told that it was the Phrygian word for bread. This is the event which led the Egyptians to conclude that the Phrygians were an older race than themselves. I heard this version of the story from the priests of Hephaestus in Memphis, but the Greek version includes, among its many other absurdities, the detail that Psammetichus cut out some women’s tongues and then had the children live with these women.
[3] This is what I heard about the children and their upbringing, and I heard other things as well in Memphis during my conversations with the priests of Hephaestus. The information I gained there led me to travel to Thebes and to Heliopolis, to try to find out whether their accounts would agree with what I had heard in Memphis, because there are said to be no Egyptians more learned than the Heliopolitans. Because I believe that everyone is equal in terms of religious knowledge, I do not see any point in relating anything I was told about the gods, except their names alone. If I do refer to such matters, it will be because my account leaves me no choice.
[4] As far as human matters are concerned, the priests all agreed in what they told me. They claimed that the Egyptians were the first people to discover the year, and to distribute throughout the year the twelve parts into which they divided the seasons. They said that they discovered this from the stars. It seems to me that the Egyptian monthly system is cleverer than the Greek one: the progress of the seasons forces the Greeks to insert an intercalary month every other year, whereas because the Egyptians have twelve months of thirty days and add five extra days on to every year, the seasonal cycle comes round to the same point in their calendar each time.
The priests also told me that the Egyptians were the first to establish the epithets of the Twelve Gods and that the Greeks got these epithets from them, and they claim to have been the first to assign the gods altars, statues, and temples and to carve figures on to stones. They actually demonstrated the validity of most of these claims, but I have only their word for the fact that the first man to rule over Egypt was called Min. In his time, the whole of Egypt, except for the Thebaïd province, was a marsh and the whole present country below the lake of Moeris (which is a seven-day sail up the river from the sea) was under water.
[5] My view is that they are right in saying this about the country. Even someone—a man of intelligence, at any rate—who has not already heard about it, but just uses his eyes, can easily see that the Egypt to which the Greeks sail is new land which the Egyptians have gained as a gift from the river. The same also goes for the land up to three days’ sailing upstream from this lake; the priests told me nothing of the kind about it, but it is more of the same. The physical geography of Egypt is such that as you approach the country by sea, if you let down a sounding-line when you are still a day’s journey away from land, you will bring up mud in eleven fathoms of water. This shows that there is silt this far out.
[6] The length of the coastline of Egypt proper is sixty schoeni. That is, I take it that the coastline from the Gulf of Plinthine to Lake Serbonis (alongside which is Mount Casius) is Egypt, and from the one place to the other it is sixty schoeni. People with little land use fathoms as their standard of measurement, those who are somewhat better off for land use stades, those with plenty of land use parasangs, and those with an excessively huge amount of land use schoeni. A parasang is thirty stades, and one schoenus, which is the unit of measurement the Egyptians use, is sixty stades. It follows that the Egyptian coastline extends for 3,600 stades.
[7] From the coast to the interior of the country as far as Heliopolis Egypt is a broad country, consisting of plains, water, and marshland. The journey inland from the coast to Heliopolis is more or less as long as the journey from the Altar of the Twelve Gods in Athens to the temple of Olympian Zeus in Pisa. If one were to measure these two routes, one would find that the distance is not exactly the same—that they differ by the slight amount of not more than fifteen stades. The journey from Athens to Pisa is fifteen stades short of 1,500 stades, whereas the journey from the Egyptian coast to Heliopolis is exactly 1,500 stades.
[8] Continuing south from Heliopolis Egypt becomes narrow. On the Arabian side it is bounded by a mountain range which runs from north to south and then continues inland without a break towards what is known as the Red Sea. In these mountains are the quarries where the stone for the pyramids in Memphis was cut. Here the mountains start to decline and the range changes direction, as mentioned, towards the Red Sea. As I myself found out, it takes two months to traverse the mountains from east to west at their widest point, and the country at their eastern end produces frankincense. That is what this mountain range is like. As for the Libyan side of Egypt, it is bounded by another rocky mountain range, where the pyramids are to be found. These mountains are covered with sand and run parallel to the part of the Arabian range which runs south. So south of Heliopolis there is not much land, in Egyptian terms; in fact, within approximately four† days’ sailing upstream from Heliopolis, the land is narrow, for Egypt. Between the two mountain ranges mentioned the land is level, and it seemed to me that, at its narrowest point, there were no more than two hundred stades between the Arabian range and the Libyan mountains. Further upstream, however, Egypt broadens out again.
[9] That is what this part of the country is like. From Heliopolis upstream to Thebes is a voyage of nine days, covering 4,860 stades (or eighty-one schoeni). The total extent of Egypt in stades, then, is as follows. The coastline, as I have already explained, is 3,600 stades long, and now I can indicate how far it is from the coast to the interior of the land, as far as Thebes: it is 6,120 stades. Then from Thebes to the city of Elephantine is another 1,800 stades.
[10] Most of the land in question has been recently gained by the Egyptians; this was my personal impression as well as being what the priests told me. The land south of the city of Memphis, between the mountain ranges mentioned, looked to me as though in times past it was a gulf of the sea, as was the case with the land near Ilium, Teuthrania, Ephesus, and the plain of the Meander. But this is to compare small with large, because none of the rivers whose deposits gave rise to these lands bears comparison in terms of size with one of the mouths of the Nile—and the Nile has five mouths. There are other rivers as well which, though not as large as the Nile, have had substantial results. In particular (although I could name others), there is the Acheloüs, which flows through Acarnania into the sea and has already turned half the Echinades islands into mainland.
[11] In Arabia, quite close to Egypt, there is a gulf which is an extension of the Red Sea; this gulf is very long and narrow, as I shall now describe. Its length is such that if one started from the head of the gulf and rowed right down it to the open sea, the voyage would take forty days; its breadth, however, is half a day’s voyage, at the gulf’s widest point. The tide in this gulf ebbs and flows every day. In my opinion, in times past Egypt was another such gulf, so that there was one gulf extending from the northern sea towards Ethiopia, and another (the Arabian Gulf, which I will speak of shortly)† coming from the south towards Syria; the two gulfs almost bored through to join together at their heads, but a little strip of land kept them apart. So if the Nile decided to change its course and flow into this Arabian Gulf, what would stop the gulf from silting up within twenty thousand years? In fact, I expect it would take less than ten thousand years. Now, in all the time which has preceded my own lifetime, would even a much larger gulf than the one I am talking about not have become silted up by such a large and vigorous river?
[12] I am sure that those who give this account of Egypt are right, and I am particularly convinced of its correctness because I have seen that Egypt projects beyond the adjacent landmass, that shells appear in the mountains, that salt forms crusts on the surface of the ground and corrodes even the pyramids, and that the only sandy mountain range in Egypt is the one overlooking Memphis. Besides, I have observed the dissimilarity between Egyptian soil and that of Arabia and Libya, its neighbours, and that of Syria too (which is worth mentioning because the Syrians inhabit the coastline of Arabia): Egyptian soil is black and friable, which suggests that it was once mud and silt carried down from Ethiopia by the river. Libyan soil, on the other hand, I know to be redder and more sandy, while Arabian and Syrian soil is more clayey and stony.
[13] Another thing the priests told me about the land is an important piece of evidence. They told me that in the time of King Moeris the river had only to rise a minimum of eight cubits and it flooded the country north of Memphis. Now, Moeris had been dead less than nine hundred years, at the time when I was told this by the priests. Nowadays, however, unless the river rises a minimum of fifteen or sixteen cubits, it does not spill over on to the land. It seems to me that if the land continues to increase in height, and similarly expands in extent, at the same rate as it has in the past, until the Nile stops flooding the land, then the Egyptians who live north of the lake of Moeris, and especially those who live in the Delta (as it is called), will some time in the future be permanently in the situation they once said the Greeks would experience. When they found out that the whole of Greece relies on rainfall rather than its rivers, as Egypt does, to irrigate the land, they commented that the Greeks would one day have their high hopes dashed and would suffer the torments of starvation. What they were getting at was that if the god decides not to rain and maintains a state of drought instead, the Greeks will die of hunger, because Zeus is their only source of water.
[14] In saying this about the Greeks, the Egyptians were right. But now I will state the situation the Egyptians themselves are in. As I said before, if the land north of Memphis (which is the land that is growing) continues gaining height at the same rate as it has in the past, the Egyptians living there will starve, as long as the land is not watered by rain and the river cannot spill over on to their fields. What other possible consequence is there? At the moment, of course, they gather their crops with less effort than anyone else in the world, including the rest of Egypt. They do not work at breaking the land up into furrows with a plough, they do not have to wield hoes or carry out any of the other crop-farming tasks which everyone else does. Instead, the river rises of its own accord and irrigates their fields, and when the water has receded again, each of them sows seed in his own field and sends pigs into it to tread the seed down. Once this has been done, he only has to wait for harvest-time, and then he has his pigs thresh the grain. And that is how he brings in his crops.
[15] Now, if we want to adopt the Ionian view—that Egypt consists of only the Delta, defined as the 40-schoeni stretch of coastline between the watch-hill of Perseus (as it is known) and the fish-salting works of Pelusium, and as extending inland as far as city of Cercasorus, where the Nile divides and flows respectively to Pelusium and to Canobus, while all the rest of Egypt, on this view, belongs either to Libya or to Arabia—if we choose to follow this view, we can demonstrate that in times past the Egyptians had no country at all. For the Delta is now alluvial and is, so to speak, a brand-new phenomenon; this is what the Egyptians themselves claim, and I agree. If they had no land, then, why do they waste their time with the belief that they were the earliest human race? They would not have had to carry out that experiment with the infants to find out what would be the first language they would speak. The facts of the matter, in my opinion, are that the Egyptians did not come into existence along with the Delta that the Ionians call Egypt,† but that they have always existed, as long as there have been human beings, and that as their land grew a good number of them stayed behind, but a good number also gradually moved downstream. However, it is true that long ago the Thebaïd (which is 6,120 stades around its borders) was called Egypt.
[16] So if I interpret these matters correctly, the Ionians are not being very intelligent about Egypt. However, if the Ionian view is correct, I can demonstrate that the Greeks and the Ionians themselves do not know how to count. They claim that the whole world is divided into three parts—Europe, Asia, and Libya. But then they should add a fourth part, the Delta of Egypt, if it does not belong to either Asia or Libya. After all, on their account, the Nile does not form the border between Asia and Libya, but divides at the apex of this Delta and flows around it; and it follows from this that the Delta must be between Asia and Libya.
[17] Anyway, let us say no more about the Ionian view. My personal opinion about these matters is as follows. Egypt is the whole land inhabited by Egyptians, just as Cilicia or Assyria are the countries where Cilicians or Assyrians live; and I know of no true boundary between Asia and Libya except the borders of Egypt. If we adopt the Greek view, we will have to regard the whole of Egypt, all the way from the Cataracts and Elephantine, as consisting of two halves, each with a different name—one half being part of Libya, the other part of Asia. After all, from the Cataracts all the way to the sea, the Nile flows right through the middle of Egypt and divides it into two. It flows in a single bed until Cercasorus, where it divides into three branches. One turns east (this one is called the Pelusian mouth), another turns west (this one is called the Canobic mouth), and the third branch of the Nile carries straight on: it continues towards the coast until it reaches the apex of the Delta, and then it divides the Delta in two and issues into the sea. The largest proportion of the river’s water is carried by this branch, and it is particularly famous; it is called the Sebennytic mouth. There are also two other mouths which break off from the Sebennytic mouth and carry on to the sea, and the names they have been given are the Saïtic mouth and the Mendesian mouth. The Bolbitine and Bucolic mouths, however, are not natural mouths, but are man-made canals.
[18] Evidence in support of my view that Egypt is the size I show it to be can also be found in an oracle delivered by Ammon, which I heard about after I had formed my own opinions about Egypt. The citizens of Marea and Apis, which are in the part of Egypt that borders Libya, regarded themselves as Libyans rather than Egyptians and did not like some of the religious observances they had to follow; in particular, they did not want to have to abstain from cow’s meat. So they sent emissaries to Ammon, claiming that they and the Egyptians had nothing in common, in the sense that they lived outside the Delta and were completely different, and saying that they wanted to be able to eat everything. But the god refused to let them go ahead. His response to them was to say that any land watered by the Nile in flood was Egypt, and that anyone living north of Elephantine who drank the water of the Nile was an Egyptian.
[19] When it bursts its banks, the Nile inundates not only the Delta, but also some tracts of land which are supposed to be Libyan and Arabian, for as much as two days’ journey on either side, though it may be more or less than this. I could not gain any information about the nature of the river from the priests or from anyone else. I was particularly eager to find out from them why the Nile starts coming down in a flood at the summer solstice and continues flooding for a hundred days, but when the hundred days are over the water starts to recede and decrease in volume, with the result that it remains low for the whole winter, until the summer solstice comes round again. No one in Egypt could give me any information about this at all, when I asked them what it was about the Nile that made it behave in the opposite way from all other rivers. My desire to know about these matters led me to make enquiries, and I also tried to find out why it is the only river in the world from which no breezes blow.
[20] Three different theories have been advanced by certain Greek thinkers, who were, however, motivated by a desire to enhance their reputation as clever people. Two of these views would not be worth mentioning, in my opinion, except that I do want to give some idea of what they are. The first claims that the Etesian winds prevent the Nile from flowing out into the sea, and so cause it to flood. However, the fact is that the Nile carries on as usual even when the Etesian winds are not blowing. Moreover, if the Etesian winds were responsible for the Nile’s flooding, the same thing that happens to the Nile would also happen to any other rivers which run counter to these winds; in fact, it would happen even more, in so far as, being smaller rivers, they have weaker currents. But there are plenty of rivers in Syria, and plenty of others in Libya, whose behaviour is nothing like that of the Nile.
[21] The second theory is even more ignorant than the one I have just mentioned, though it is more striking in expression; it claims that it is because the Nile flows from the Ocean that it manages to do what it does, and that the Ocean surrounds the whole world.
[22] The third theory, despite being the most plausible, is also the furthest from the truth. It claims that the water of the Nile comes from melting snow, but this is just as nonsensical as the others. The Nile flows from Libya and through the middle of Ethiopia until it ends up in Egypt. How, then, could it rise in snowy regions, when its course takes it from the hottest places in the world to places which are, by and large, cooler? The idea that it rises in snowy regions makes no sense at all, as anyone capable of rational thought could realize. The first and most convincing piece of evidence is that the winds which blow from these regions are warm. Secondly, it never rains and frost never forms in the regions in question, whereas it is absolutely inevitable that rain will fall within five days of snow, and so if there was snow in these regions, there would also be rain. Thirdly, it is so hot there that the people are black. Also, kites and swallows stay there all the year round without leaving, and cranes flee the winter in Scythia and migrate to these regions to spend the winter there. In short, it necessarily follows that if it snowed even a little bit in the regions through which the Nile flows and where it rises, none of these things would happen.
[23] It is impossible to argue against the person who spoke about the Ocean, because the tale is based on something which is obscure and dubious. I do not know of the existence of any River Ocean, and I think that Homer or one of the other poets from past times invented the name and introduced it into his poetry.
[24] I suppose that, having criticized the theories that have been proposed, I should state my own theory about this obscure issue. So this is why I think the Nile floods in the summer. In winter, the sun is driven by storms out of its original path and into the inland regions of Libya. That sums up my view as briefly as possible. After all, it stands to reason that the nearer the god is to a land, and the closer he passes over it, the more that land will lack water and the more its rivers will dry up.
[25] If I am to express my view in more detail, it is as follows. In inland Libya, the air is constantly clear, the land is exposed to the sun, and there are no cold winds, so as the sun passes over those parts it does exactly what it usually does in summer as it passes through the mid-heaven: it draws the water to itself and then pushes it away inland, where the winds take over, and scatter and disperse the moisture. Just as one would expect, then, the winds that blow from there—the south and south-westerly winds—are by far the most rainy of all the winds. (However, I am sure that the sun does not in fact get rid of the whole of the Nile’s annual volume of water each time, but keeps some of it in its own vicinity.) As the winter storms die down, the sun resumes its former course across the mid-heaven, and from then on it draws water equally from all rivers, not just the Nile. Meanwhile, however, all the other rivers have been swollen by plenty of rain-water, and because the land is rainy and full of ravines, they pour down in torrents, whereas during summer, when the rains fail and they are being sucked up by the sun, their currents are feeble. The Nile, on the other hand, is not being fed by rain and is being sucked up by the sun, and so it stands to reason that it is the only river which flows at this time of year at a considerably reduced volume, compared with its volume during the summer. In the summer months, the sun draws water out of the Nile just as much as it does out of all bodies of water, but in winter it is the only one to suffer, And this, I have concluded, is how the sun is responsible for these phenomena.
[26] The sun is also responsible, in my opinion, for the dryness of the air there: it scorches the air as it passes through it. That is why inland Libya is in the grip of constant summer. If the seasons changed position, so that the part of the sky currently occupied by the north wind and winter was occupied by the south wind and noon, and vice versa—if this happened, then when the sun was driven from the mid-heaven by the storms of winter and the north wind, it would go to inland Europe (just as now it goes to inland Libya), and as it passed over Europe I expect it would have the same effect on the Ister as it now does on the Nile.
[27] As for the fact that there is no cool breeze off the Nile, it is in my opinion hardly surprising that no such breeze blows from places that are warm; a cool breeze tends to blow from somewhere cold.
[28] Well, as far as this subject is concerned, it has always been the way it is and we can leave it to continue. As for the question where the Nile rises, no Egyptian or Libyan or Greek I have spoken to claimed to have the definitive answer, except the scribe of the treasury of Athena in the city of Saïs in Egypt—and I got the impression that he was joking when he said that he knew the answer for certain. But what he said was that there were two mountains with sharply pointed peaks between the cities of Syene in the Thebaïd and Elephantine, which were called Crophi and Mophi; between them, he said, rise the springs of the Nile, which are bottomless, and half of their water flows north towards Egypt, while the other half flows south towards Ethiopia. He also told me that King Psammetichus of Egypt found a way to test the fact that the springs are bottomless. He had a rope made, many thousands of fathoms long, and this was let down but did not reach the bottom. Now, if this story of the scribe’s was true, all he proved, to my mind, was that there are strong whirlpools and counter-currents there, and because the water was dashing against the mountains, this prevented them reaching the bottom when they let their sounding-line down.
[29] I was unable to get any information from anyone else. However, I myself travelled as far as Elephantine and saw things with my very own eyes, and subsequently made enquiries of others; as a result of these two methods, the very most I could find out was as follows.
After Elephantine the land rises steeply, so that from then on one has to have a rope running from the boat to both banks, as one harnesses an ox, and to proceed like that. If the rope were to break, the boat would be carried downstream by the force of the current. This kind of terrain lasts for four days’ travelling, and the Nile here twists and turns as much as the Meander. One has to travel in this fashion for a distance of twelve schoeni, and then you come to a level plain, where the Nile flows around an island called Tachompso. The inhabitants of the country south of Elephantine, and of half the island, are Ethiopians, while the other half of the island is occupied by Egyptians. Near the island is a vast lake (on whose margins Ethiopian nomads live) which you have to sail across to rejoin the Nile, which flows into this lake. At this point you leave your boat and travel by foot by the side of the river for forty days, because there are sharp rocks sticking out of the water and a number of reefs which are unnavigable. Once you have spent the forty days passing through this region, you take another boat and twelve days of travel will bring you to a big city called Meroë, which is said to be the capital city of all Ethiopia. The only gods worshipped by the people here are Zeus and Dionysus, whom they revere greatly; an oracle of Zeus has been established there. They make war when and where Zeus commands them through his oracular pronouncements.
[30] If you continue upriver past this city for the same amount of time again as you spent travelling from Elephantine to the Ethiopian capital, you will reach the Deserters, or Asmakh as they are called—a word which, translated into Greek, means ‘those who stand to the left of the king’. They were originally 240,000 Egyptian soldiers who deserted to Ethiopia, for the following reason. In the time of King Psammetichus, there were garrisons established in various places: one in Elephantine to afford protection against the Ethiopians, another in Pelusian Daphnae against the Arabians and Syrians, and another in Marea against Libya. (Even in my day there were Persian guard-posts in the same places as there had been in the time of King Psammetichus: the ‘Persians manned garrisons in both Elephantine and Daphnae.) Anyway, the Egyptian troops had been on garrison duty for three years, and no one had come to relieve them. They discussed the matter among themselves and came to the unanimous decision that they should mutiny against Psammetichus and go over to Ethiopia. When Psammetichus found out what they were doing, he came after them. He caught up with them and made a long speech pleading with them and trying to persuade them not to abandon their ancestral deities and their wives and children. At this, one of the soldiers, so the story goes, pointed to his genitals and said that wherever this was he would have wives and children. When they reached Ethiopia, they entrusted themselves to the Ethiopian king, who gave them a gift in return. Some of the Ethiopians had become rebellious, and he told the Egyptians to drive out the disaffected people and then they could have their land to live in. As a result of their living there, the Ethiopians have learnt Egyptian customs and become less wild.
[31] Anyway, the Nile is known to exist for the distance of four months’ river and land travel beyond where it enters Egypt; if you add it all up, that is how many months you will find the journey from Elephantine to these Deserters takes. At this point, the Nile is flowing from the west. But from then there is no reliable information to be had about it: the land is uninhabited because of the heat.
[32] However, I heard from some men from Cyrene how once, in the course of a visit to the oracle of Ammon, they got into conversation with Etearchus the king of the Ammonians. The conversation happened to come around to the Nile and how no one knows about its source, and Etearchus told them about a visit he had once had from some Nasamones, a Libyan tribe who live around the Gulf of Syrtis and the land a little way east of the Syrtis. During the course of their visit, the Nasamones were asked whether they could add to what was known about the uninhabited desert parts of Libya. In response, they told how some high-spirited chiefs’ sons of their tribe, once they had reached adulthood, concocted a number of extraordinary schemes, including casting lots to choose five of their number to go and explore the Libyan desert, to find out if they could see more than had ever been seen before. Libyans—many tribes of them—have spread out along the whole of the Libyan coastline of the northern sea, from Egypt to Cape Soloeis (where Libya ends), except for land occupied by Greeks and Phoenicians. Then there is the part of Libya which is inland from the sea and from the people who occupy the seaboard: this is the part of Libya which is infested by wild animals. Further inland from the part full of animals Libya is sandy desert, totally waterless, and completely uninhabited by anyone or anything. So when the young men left their friends, the story goes, they were well equipped with food and water; they first passed through the inhabited region and then reached the part which is infested by wild animals. Next they started to travel in a westerly direction through the desert. After they had crossed a great deal of sandy country, surrounded by nothing but desert, they at last, after many days, saw trees growing on a plain. They approached the trees and tried to pick the fruit that was growing on them, but as they were doing so they were set upon by small men of less than normal human stature, who captured them and took them away. The two groups—the Nasamones and their guides—could not understand each other’s language at all. They were taken through vast swamps and on the other side of these swamps they came to a town where everyone was the same size as their guides and had black skin. The town was on a sizeable river, which was flowing from west to east, and in it they could see crocodiles.
[33] So much for my account of what the Ammonian king Etearchus said. The only thing I will add is that, according to the Cyreneans, he said that the Nasamones made it back home and that the people they had reached were all magicians. Also, Etearchus came to the conclusion that the river which the town was on was the Nile. Now, this makes sense, in fact, because the Nile cuts through the middle of Libya before entering Egypt from there, and since we may draw on the familiar to understand the unknown, I reckon that its total length is the same as that of the Ister. The Ister rises in the land of the Celts, at the city of Pyrene (the Celts live beyond the Pillars of Heracles and are neighbours of the Cynesians who are the westernmost European people), and flows through the middle of Europe; its course takes it right through Europe to the Milesian colony of Istria, on the Euxine Sea, where it ends.
[34] Now, since the Ister flows through inhabited lands, it is well known, but no one can state where the source of the Nile is, because the part of Libya through which the river flows is uninhabited desert. I have already given the fullest possible information about its course that my enquiries could gain me. It ends up in Egypt, which is more or less exactly opposite the mountainous part of Cilicia, and the direct route from there to Sinope on the Euxine Sea would take a man travelling light five days. Sinope in its turn is opposite where the Ister issues into the sea. This is why I think the Nile flows through the whole of Libya and is the same length as the Ister. Anyway, that is enough about the Nile.
[35] I am going to talk at some length about Egypt, because it has very many remarkable features and has produced more monuments which beggar description than anywhere else in the world. That is why more will be said about it. In keeping with the idiosyncratic climate which prevails there and the fact that their river behaves differently from any other river, almost all Egyptian customs and practices are the opposite of those of everywhere else. For instance, women go out to the town square and retail goods, while men stay at home and do the weaving; and whereas everyone else weaves by pushing the weft upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards. Or again, men carry loads on their heads, while women do so on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up, while men do so squatting. They relieve themselves indoors, but eat outside on the streets; the reason for this, they say, is that things that are embarrassing but unavoidable should be done in private, while things which are not embarrassing should be done out in the open. There are no female priestesses of any god or goddess; all their gods, and goddesses too, are served in this capacity by men. Sons do not have to look after their parents if they do not want to, but daughters must even if they are reluctant.
[36] Everywhere else in the world, priests have long hair, but in Egypt they shave their heads. In times of mourning, it is the norm elsewhere for those most affected by the bereavement to crop their hair; in Egypt, however, in the period following a death, they let both their hair and their beards grow, when they had previously been shaved. Everywhere else in the world people live separately from their animals, but animals and humans live together in Egypt. Other people live off barley and ordinary wheat, but Egyptians regard it as demeaning to make those grains one’s staple diet; their staple is hulled wheat, or ‘emmer’ as it is sometimes known. They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands, and they pick up dung with their hands too.† Other people, unless they have been influenced by the Egyptians, leave their genitals in their natural state, but the Egyptians practise circumcision. Men have two cloaks each, but women have only one. In other countries rings and reefing-ropes are attached to the outside of the sail, but in Egypt they are on the inside. As Greeks write and do their sums they move their hands from left to right, but Egyptians move from right to left; although this is their actual practice, they say that they are doing it right, while the Greeks are left-handed. They have two kinds of script, one of which is called ‘sacred’ or ‘hieroglyphic’, while the other is called ‘demotic’.
[37] Because they are exceedingly religious, more so than any other people in the world, they have the following customs. Everyone, without any exceptions, scrubs clean the bronze cup he uses for drinking every day. The linen cloaks they wear are always freshly washed; this is something they are very particular about. Their concern for cleanliness also explains why they practise circumcision, since they value cleanliness more than comeliness. Priests shave every part of their bodies every other day, to stop themselves getting lice or in general being at all unclean as they minister to the gods. The priests wear only one garment made out of linen, while their shoes are papyrus; they are not allowed to wear any other kind of clothing or footwear, and they wash with cold water twice every day and twice at night too. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the priests practise thousands upon thousands of other religious observances. However, they gain plenty of benefits as well: they do not have anything of their own to wear out or to consume, but even their food, which is sacred, is cooked for them; each of them is also provided with a generous daily allowance of beef and goose-meat, and their wine is donated as well. They are not allowed to eat fish. The Egyptians do not cultivate beans in their country at all, and any beans that grow there are not eaten either raw or cooked. Priests cannot even stand the sight of beans, since they consider them to be an impure form of legume. Each deity has a number of priests, not just one, though there is a single high priest in each case; when a priest dies, his son is appointed in his place.
[38] Bulls are thought to be the property of Epaphus and are therefore examined as follows. If even a single black hair is found growing on a bull, he is regarded as unclean. One of the priests is given the job of searching for black hairs on the animal and he has to examine it when it is on its back, as well as when it is standing up. He also pulls out its tongue, to see if it is free from certain prescribed features, which I will describe later. He examines its tail hairs too, to make sure they are growing properly. If the bull is pure in all these respects, the priest marks it by winding papyrus around its horns, which is then sealed with clay and stamped with the priest’s signet-ring. The bull is then led away. The penalty for sacrificing a bull which has not been marked in this way is death. So that is how they test the animal.
[39] The way they perform the sacrifice is as follows. They take the marked beast to the altar where the sacrifice is to take place and light a fire. Then they sprinkle wine over the sacrificial victim and on to the altar, invoke the deity, and cut the animal’s throat. Once this is done, they cut off its head. They skin the body, but call down many curses on the creature’s head and bear it away. In towns which have a square and where there are resident Greek traders, they take the head to the square and sell it, but if there are no Greeks around, they throw it away in the river. The intention expressed in the curses they call down on the victims’ heads is to divert on to the creature’s head any evil that might befall either the particular worshippers or Egypt as a whole. The same practice as regards the heads of the sacrificial animals and the sprinkling of wine is followed all over Egypt in all their sacrifices, and as a result of this practice no Egyptian will eat the head of any living creature.
[40] The way the entrails are removed and burnt varies from victim to victim in Egypt. I shall talk about the most important goddess in their religion and about the most important festival they celebrate. After skinning the bull, they offer up prayers and remove all the intestines, but leave the rest of its innards and the fat in the body. Then they cut off its legs, the very end of its rump, its shoulders, and its neck. Next, they fill the remainder of the bull’s body with purified loaves, honey, raisins, figs, frankincense, myrrh, and other perfumed spices, and then they burn it all, while pouring over it huge quantities of oil. They fast before performing the sacrifice, and everyone beats his breast in grief as the entrails are being burnt. Once they have finished grieving, they serve up the remaining bits of the entrails as a meal.
[41] It is universal practice in Egypt to sacrifice unblemished bulls and male calves, but they are not allowed to offer cows for sacrifice, because they are sacred to Isis. The way Isis is represented in statuary is as a woman with cow’s horns (as the Greeks depict Io), and all Egyptians regard cows as far more sacred than any other herd animal. That is why no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek on the mouth, or use a Greek’s knife, skewers, or cooking-pot; in fact they will not eat the flesh of even an unblemished bull if a Greek knife was used to cut it up.
The way they bury their cattle as they die is as follows. They throw cows into the river, but bulls are interred by the local inhabitants on the margins of their community, with one or both horns sticking out of the ground as a marker. When the flesh has rotted and the allotted time has come, a baris comes to each community from Prosopitis, which is an island in the Delta with a circumference of nine schoeni. There are various communities on the island, but the one from which the bareis come to collect the bulls’ bones is called Atarbechis, and it contains a sanctuary dedicated to Aphrodite. People are constantly making trips from this town all over the place to the various other communities, where they dig up the bones, take them back to Atarbechis and bury them in a single spot. They do not kill other dying animals either, but their practice as regards them too is to bury them in the same way that they bury their cattle.
[42] Apart from the fact that Isis and Osiris (whom they identify with Dionysus) are worshipped by everyone throughout Egypt, not all Egyptians worship the same gods. For instance, anyone whose place of worship is a sanctuary of Theban Zeus, or who comes from the Theban province, will have nothing to do with sheep, but uses goats as his sacrificial animals, whereas anyone with a sanctuary of Mendes or who comes from the province of Mendes, will have nothing to do with goats, but uses sheep as his sacrificial animals. Now, Thebans and those who follow them in avoiding the use of sheep explain the establishment of this prohibition in the following way. They say that Heracles’ overriding desire was to see Zeus, but Zeus was refusing to let him do so. Eventually, as a result of Heracles’ pleading, Zeus came up with a plan. He skinned a ram and cut off its head, then he held the head in front of himself, wore the fleece, and showed himself to Heracles like that. That is why Egyptian statues of Zeus have a ram’s head. (Ammonian statues of Zeus are the same; the Ammonians learned the convention from Egypt, because they were originally emigrants from Egypt and Ethiopia, and their language is a hybrid of Egyptian and Ethiopian. It seems to me that we also have here the origin of the Ammonians’ name, because the Egyptians call Zeus ‘Amun’.) Anyway, that is why rams are sacred to the Thebans and they do not use them as sacrificial animals. However, there is just one day of the year—the day of the festival of Zeus—when they chop up a single ram, skin it, dress the statue of Zeus in it in the way just mentioned, and then bring a statue of Heracles up close to the statue of Zeus. Then everyone in and around the sanctuary mourns the death of the ram and finally they bury it in a sacred tomb.
[43] I was told that Heracles was one of the Twelve Gods, but I could not hear anything anywhere in Egypt about the other Heracles, the one familiar to the Greeks. Now, I could supply a great deal of evidence to support the idea that the Greeks got the name of Heracles from Egypt, rather than the other way round, and that then the Greeks applied the name Heracles to the son of Amphitryon. I have a great deal of evidence pointing in this direction. Here is just one item: both parents of the Greek Heracles, Amphitryon and Alcmene, trace their lineage back to Egypt. Moreover, the Egyptians claim not to know the names of Poseidon and the Dioscuri, and these gods are not to be found in their pantheon. But if the Egyptians had borrowed the name of any deity from the Greeks, Poseidon and the Dioscuri would not have been overlooked, but would have stuck in their minds more than any other Greek deity—if I am right in my view that even in those days the Egyptians were making sea voyages and so were some of the Greeks. From this it follows that the Egyptians would be more aware of the names of these gods than they would of Heracles. No, in fact Heracles is a very ancient Egyptian god; as they themselves say, it was seventeen thousand years before the reign of King Amasis when the Twelve Gods descended from the Eight Gods, and they regard Heracles as one of the Twelve.
[44] I wanted to understand these matters as clearly as I could, so I also sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia, since I had heard that there was a sanctuary sacred to Heracles there, and I found that the sanctuary there was very lavishly appointed with a large number of dedicatory offerings. In it were two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of emerald which gleamed brightly at night.† I talked to the priests of the god there and asked them how long ago the sanctuary was founded, and I discovered that they too disagreed with the Greek account, because according to them the sanctuary of the god was founded at the same time as Tyre, which was 2,300 years ago, they said. I also saw another sanctuary of Heracles in Tyre, which is called the sanctuary of Heracles the Thasian. I went to Thasos as well, and I found there a sanctuary of Heracles which had been founded by Phoenician explorers who had left their homeland in search of Europa and had colonized Thasos. And this happened as much as five generations before Heracles the son of Amphitryon was born in Greece. These enquiries of mine, then, clearly show that Heracles is an ancient god. So I think those Greeks did just right who established two kinds of cult for Heracles, in one of which they sacrifice to Heracles as an immortal god—Olympian Heracles, as he is known—while in the other they make offerings to him as a hero.
[45] The Greek account of Heracles’ birth is far from being the only thoughtless thing they say. Here is another silly story of theirs about Heracles. They say that when he came to Egypt, the Egyptians crowned him with garlands and led him in a procession with the intention of sacrificing him to Zeus. He did nothing for a while, and began to resist only when they were consecrating him at the altar, at which point he massacred them all. Now, in my opinion, this Greek tale displays complete ignorance of the Egyptian character and customs. For it is against their religion for Egyptians to sacrifice animals (except for sheep, ritually pure bulls and male calves, and geese), so how could they sacrifice human beings? And how could Heracles kill thousands and thousands of people when he was just one person, and (by their own admission) not yet a god either? Anyway, that is all I have to say about this matter; I trust the gods and heroes will look kindly on my words.
[46] The reason the Egyptians I mentioned do not sacrifice goats of either gender is as follows. The Mendesians count Pan as one of the Eight Gods, and according to them the Eight Gods precede the Twelve Gods. Pan’s portrait in Egypt, as represented by artists and sculptors, is the same as it is in Greece—that is, with a goat’s head and a he-goat’s legs. It is not that they think he looks like that; he is no different from any of the other gods, in their view. However, I should prefer not to explain why they depict him that way. Mendesians regard all goats as sacred—he-goats more than she-goats—and goatherds of male goats are held in particular respect. One he-goat is chosen to be an especial object of veneration, and when it dies the whole Mendesian province is given over to mourning. In the Egyptian language the word Mendes means ‘he-goat’ as well as ‘Pan’. A remarkable thing happened in this province in my time: a goat mated with a woman, for all to see. This happened in public view.
[47] Egyptians consider pigs to be unclean animals. In the first place, if someone just brushes against a pig, he goes to the river and immerses himself there, clothes and all. In the second place, swineherds are the only native Egyptians who never enter the grounds of any Egyptian sanctuary; moreover, no one will arrange a marriage between his daughter and a swineherd or marry the daughter of one himself, so swineherds marry only into the families of other swineherds. The only deities to whom the Egyptians are allowed to sacrifice pigs are Selene and Dionysus; both these rituals take place at the same time of the month, at the full moon, and they first sacrifice the animals and then eat the flesh. The Egyptians have a story to explain why although pigs are taboo at all other festivals, they are sacrificed on this one occasion; but although I know it, it is an inappropriate tale to tell. The way pigs are offered to Selene is that the sacrificer lumps together the tip of the tail, the spleen, and the omentum, covers them with all the fat he can get from the region of the creature’s belly, and then burns this mixture in the fire. The rest—that is, the flesh†—is eaten on the day of the performance of the ritual, the day of the full moon; on any other day, they would not eat it. The poorer members of society have the means only to make pigs out of dough, bake them, and use them as their sacrificial offerings.
[48] On the evening before the festival of Dionysus, everyone slaughters a pig on the threshold of his home and then gives it to the swineherd who sold it to him, and who now takes it away. The rest of the festival of Dionysus the Egyptians celebrate pretty much as the Greeks do, except that there are no choral dances. Instead of phalluses, however, they have other contraptions—figurines, about a cubit tall, which are moved by strings. Women take them around the villages, and each figurine has a penis which is almost as big as itself and which moves up and down. The procession is led by a pipe-player, and the women follow singing hymns to Dionysus. The Egyptians have a sacred story as to why these figurines have oversized genitals, and why this is the only part of the body that can move.
[49] Now, it seems to me that Melampus the son of Amytheon was not ignorant of this Egyptian ritual, but was well aware of it. In fact, Melampus was the one who introduced the Greeks not only to the name and worship of Dionysus, but also to the phallic procession. Strictly speaking, he did not combine all the elements and reveal the whole story: it was more fully revealed by later sages. But all the same, Melampus was the one who instituted the phallic procession in honour of Dionysus, and it was he who taught the Greeks to do what they do. What I am suggesting is that Melampus was a clever person who not only mastered the art of divination, but also introduced into Greece a number of things he learnt which came originally from Egypt, including the Dionysian rites, which he hardly changed at all. I mean, I will absolutely deny that the similarities between the Greek and Egyptian versions of the rites are coincidental; if there were no influence from Egypt, the Greek rites would be home-grown and would not have been just recently introduced. I will also deny that the Egyptians could have learnt either this or any other practice from the Greeks. The most likely scenario, in my opinion, is that Melampus learnt these Dionysian rites from Cadmus of Tyre and those who accompanied him on his journey from Phoenicia to the country now known as Boeotia.
[50] The names of almost all the gods also came to Greece from Egypt. My enquiries led me to discover that they are non-Greek in origin, but it is my belief that they came largely from Egypt. With the exception of Poseidon and the Dioscuri (as I have already mentioned), and also Hera, Hestia, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids, all the gods and their names have always been found in the country of Egypt. Here I am repeating what the Egyptians themselves say. As for the gods whose names they told me they do not recognize, I think that they were given their names by the Pelasgians—except for Poseidon, whom the Greeks learnt about from Libya. I say this because the Libyans are the only people to have possessed the name of Poseidon from the beginning, and his worship has been a constant there. The Egyptians do not have herocults, however.
[51] This is not the sum total of the customs which the Greeks have taken over from the Egyptians, as I shall explain. The Greek practice of making ithyphallic statues of Hermes, however, was not learnt from Egypt, but from the Pelasgians. The Athenians were the first Greeks to take over the practice, and then everyone else got it from them. The point is that the Pelasgians became fellow inhabitants of the land occupied by the Athenians at a time when the Athenians already counted as Greeks; this is how the Pelasgians too began to be regarded as Greeks. Anyone will know what I mean if he is an initiate of the mysteries of the Cabiri—rites which are celebrated on Samothrace and are Pelasgian in origin, since the Pelasgians who came to share land with the Athenians had previously lived on Samothrace and were the ones from whom the Samothracians learnt the rites. Anyway, the Athenians were the first Greeks to make ithyphallic statues of Hermes, and they learnt it from the Pelasgians. The Pelasgians told a sacred story about it, which is revealed during the mysteries in Samothrace.
[52] Originally, as I know from what I was told at Dodona, the Pelasgians used to pray to the gods during every sacrificial ritual they performed, but without giving any of them a name or epithet, because they had not yet heard of such things. They called them ‘gods’, because they had setall things in order and assigned everything its place.† Then a long time afterwards the gods acquired names imported from Egypt, and they learnt these in the case of all the gods except Dionysus, whom they learnt about much later. After a while they consulted the oracle at Dodona (which is the most ancient oracle established among the Greeks, and was at that time the only one in existence) about these names. The Pelasgians asked the oracle whether they should adopt these names of the gods which had come from abroad, and the oracle told them they should. So from then on they used the gods’ names while performing their rituals, and the Greeks inherited the practice from the Pelasgians.
[53] However, it was only yesterday or the day before, so to speak, that the Greeks came to know the provenance of each of the gods, and whether they have all existed for ever, and what they each look like. After all, I think that Hesiod and Homer lived no more than four hundred years before my time, and they were the ones who created the gods’ family trees for the Greek world, gave them their names, assigned them their honours and areas of expertise, and told us what they looked like. Any poets who are supposed to have lived before Homer and Hesiod actually came after them, in my opinion. Of the last two opinions, the first is the view of the priestesses at Dodona, but the second—the bit about Hesiod and Homer—is my own opinion.
[54] Here is a tale the Egyptians tell about the oracle in Greece and the one in Libya. According to the priests of Theban Zeus, two women—priestesses, in fact—were abducted from Thebes by some Phoenicians. The priests found out that one of the women had been sold in Libya and the other to Greeks, and they claimed that these women were the original founders of the two oracles in those two countries. When I asked how they could speak with such certainty, they replied that they had held an extensive search for these women, and that although they had failed to find them, they had subsequently discovered what they were telling me about them.
[55] That is what the priests at Thebes told me, but the Dodona oracle’s prophetesses say that two black doves took off from Thebes in Egypt, one of which flew to Libya, while the other came to them in Dodona. It perched on an oak-tree and spoke in a human voice, telling the people of Dodona that there ought to be an oracle of Zeus there. The people of Dodona realized that they were hearing a divine command, and they therefore did what the dove had told them to do. The story goes on to say that the dove which went to Libya told the Libyans to construct the oracle of Ammon—another oracle of Zeus. This is the story told by the priestesses of Dodona (who are, from oldest to youngest, Promeneia, Timarete, and Nicandra), and it is supported by what the other Dodonans connected with the shrine say too.
[56] I would suggest that this is what happened. If the priestesses really were abducted by Phoenicians and sold in Libya and Greece, it was the Thesprotians, in my opinion, who bought the one who came to what is now called Greece (though it is the same place that was in those days called Pelasgia). Since she was working as a slave for the Thesprotians, she built a shrine of Zeus under an oak-tree that was growing there, which is only what one would expect her to do: after all, she had served in the sanctuary of Zeus in Thebes, and one would expect her to think of Zeus when she came to her new home. Then she subsequently founded an oracle when she had learnt to speak Greek, and she told people about how the same Phoenicians who had sold her had also sold her sister in Libya.
[57] I think that the women were called doves by the people of Dodona because they were foreigners and when they spoke they sounded like birds. They say that after a while the dove spoke to them in a human voice, because that was when the woman could make herself understood by them. As long as she spoke a foreign language, however, they thought she sounded like a bird. After all, how could a dove speak in a human voice? When they say that the dove was black, they are indicating that the woman was Egyptian. It is in fact the case that the divinatory methods used in Egyptian Thebes and in Dodona are very similar to one another, and that the art of divination from entrails did reach Greece from Egypt.
[58] But anyway, the Egyptians were the first people in the world to hold general festive assemblies, and religious processions and parades, and the Greeks learnt from the Egyptians. My evidence for this suggestion is that these activities have obviously been going on in Egypt for a very long time, whereas they have only recently started in Greece.
[59] The Egyptians have a lot of public festivals a year, not just one. The one that they take the most trouble about is held in honour of Artemis in the city of Bubastis, and then the second most important one is celebrated in honour of Isis in the city of Busiris. Busiris, which is located in the middle of the Delta, has the largest sanctuary of Isis—or Demeter, to translate her name into Greek—in Egypt. They celebrate the third most important festival in honour of Athena in Saïs, and the fourth most important is held in Heliopolis in honour of the sun. After that, the fifth and sixth most important are the one in Buto in honour of Leto and the one in Papremis in honour of Ares.
[60] When people travel to Bubastis for the festival, this is what they do. Every baris carrying them there overflows with people, a huge crowd of them, men and women together. Some of the women have clappers, while some of the men have pipes which they play throughout the voyage. The rest of the men and women sing and clap their hands. When in the course of their journey they reach a community—not the city of their destination, but somewhere else—they steer the bareis close to the bank. Some of the women carry on doing what I have already described them as doing, but others shout out scornful remarks to the women in the town, or dance, or stand and pull up their clothes to expose themselves. Every riverside community receives this treatment. When they reach Bubastis, they celebrate the festival, which involves sacrifices on a vast scale, and more wine is consumed during this festival than throughout the whole of the rest of the year. According to the local inhabitants, up to 700,000 men and women, excluding children, come together for the festival.
[61] That is what they do there, and I have already described how they celebrate the festival of Isis in Busiris. All the men and women, in their tens of thousands, express grief after the sacrifice, but it would be sacrilegious of me to say who it is that they are mourning. Any Carians resident in Egypt take the mourning to even further extremes and cut their foreheads with knives—which marks them clearly as foreigners and not Egyptians.
[62] As for the festival in Saïs, on a certain night all the people who have gathered there to worship burn lots of lamps in a circle outdoors around their houses. The lamps are saucers filled with salt and oil, with the wick floating on the top. They burn all night long, and the traditional name for the festival is the Lamplight festival. Even those Egyptians who do not actually attend the festival all wait for the night of the rites and burn lamps, so there are lamps alight throughout Egypt, not just in Saïs. There is a sacred story told to explain why this night receives light and honour.
[63] The festivals people go to at Heliopolis and Buto involve nothing more than sacrifices. In Papremis they perform the sacrifices and rites as elsewhere, but there is more besides. As the sun is going down, apart from those few priests who are busy with the cult statue, the majority of them stand in the entrance to the sanctuary carrying wooden clubs. They are confronted by a crowd of more than a thousand men, each of whom also has a stick, in fulfilment of a vow he has taken. Now, the day before, the priests removed the cult statue in a gilded miniature wooden shrine and took it to another sacred dwelling. The few priests who remain with the statue put the miniature temple, with the statue inside it, on to a four-wheeled cart and pull it to the sanctuary. The priests standing in the entrance try to stop them bringing the statue back in, while the votaries take the god’s side and wield their clubs against the priests who are defending the sanctuary. A fierce stick-fight ensues. Heads are broken and, I think, a lot of them die from their wounds. However, the Egyptians said that no one dies.
The locals say that this festival was established because Ares’ mother used to live in the sanctuary. Ares had been brought up somewhere else, and when he reached manhood he came to the sanctuary with the intention of getting together with his mother. His mother’s attendants had never laid eyes on him before, so they refused him entry. They successfully kept him out at first, but he brought reinforcements from another town, beat the attendants, and forced his way in to his mother. And that, the people of Papremis say, is why this confrontation is a traditional part of the festival.
[64] The Egyptians were the first to ban on religious grounds having sex with a woman within a sanctuary and entering a sanctuary after having sex without washing first. Almost everywhere else in the world, except in Egypt and Greece, people do both these things, since they do not differentiate between humans and other animals. They point out that we see animals and birds of all kinds mating in the temples and precincts of the gods, and they argue that this would not happen if the gods disapproved of it. Personally, I take a dim view of this kind of excuse. This is just one example of how extraordinarily scrupulous the Egyptians are in religious matters.
[65] Despite having Libya as a neighbour, Egypt does not have much wildlife. All the animals in Egypt are regarded as sacred. Some are domesticated, and others are not, but if I were to explain why some animals are allowed to roam free, as sacred creatures, my account would be bound to discuss issues pertaining to the gods, and I am doing my best to avoid relating such things. It is only when I have had no choice that I have touched on them already. However, one of their customs concerning animals is as follows. Each separate species of animal has been appointed a keeper who is in charge of looking after it; the keeper may be an Egyptian man or woman, and children inherit the post from their parents. In the cities people fulfil their vows by praying to the god whose sacred creature a given type of animal is, and shaving their child’s head (it might be the whole head, or a half, or a third) and weighing the hair in a pair of scales against some silver. This weight in silver is then given to the keeper of the animals. She cuts up as much fish as the silver buys and gives it as food to the animals. That is how the animals are fed. The deliberate killing of one of these animals is punishable by death, and anyone who kills one of them accidentally has to pay a fine whose amount is determined by the priests. However, the death of an ibis or hawk at someone’s hands, whether or not he intended to kill it, is inevitably a capital offence.
[66] Although there are plenty of domestic animals in Egypt, there would be many more if it were not for what happens to the cats. When female cats give birth, they stop having intercourse with the males. However much the toms want to mate with them, they are unable to do so. The toms have therefore come up with a clever solution. They sneak in and steal the kittens away from their mothers, and then kill them (but not for food). The females, deprived of their young, long to have some more, because the feline species is very fond of its young, and so they go to the males.
If a house catches fire, what happens to the cats is quite extraordinary. The Egyptians do not bother to try to put the fire out, but position themselves at intervals around the house and look out for the cats. The cats slip between them, however, and even jump over them, and dash into the fire. This plunges the Egyptians into deep grief. In households where a cat dies a natural death, all the people living there shave off their eyebrows—nothing more. In households where a dog dies, they shave their whole bodies, head and all.
[67] After their death, the cats are taken to sacred chambers in the city of Bubastis where they are mummified and buried. Dogs are buried by each householder in his own community in sanctified tombs, and mongooses receive the same form of burial as well. Shrews and hawks are taken to the city of Buto, and ibises to Hermepolis. Bears (which are rare) and wolves (which are not much larger than foxes) are buried wherever they are found lying.
[68] This is what crocodiles are like. They eat nothing during the four winter months. They are four-footed, and amphibious in the sense that they lay their eggs in the earth, hatch their young there, and spend most of the day on dry land, but spend the whole night in the river since the water is warmer than the clear, dew-laden air. As far as is known, there is no mortal creature which grows so big from such small beginnings. The eggs it lays are not much bigger than a goose’s eggs, and the size of a new-born crocodile corresponds to that of its egg, but a fully grown adult can be at least seventeen cubits long, and maybe more. It has eyes the size of a pig’s, but huge teeth and tusks. It is the only creature in the world without a tongue, and the only one which does not move its lower jaw but brings its upper jaw down to meet the lower one. It has strong claws and its back is covered with impenetrable scaly skin. It is blind in the water, but has excellent sight in the open air. Because it spends its life in the water, its mouth is filled with leeches. With the exception of the sandpiper, all other birds and animals run away from it. The sandpiper, however, is on good terms with it, because it is of use to the crocodile. When the crocodile climbs out of the water and on to land, it yawns widely (usually when facing west), and then the sandpiper slips into its mouth and swallows the leeches. This does the crocodile good and gives it pleasure, so it does not harm the sandpiper.
[69] Crocodiles are sacred to some Egyptians, but others treat them as enemies. They are especially sacred to the people who live in and around Thebes and the lake of Moeris. In each of these places the people look after one particular crocodile, which has been trained until it is tame. They put glass and gold jewellery in its ears and bangles on its front legs, they feed it with special food and with their sacrificial victims too, and generally pamper it for as long as it is alive. When it dies, they mummify it and bury it in a sanctified tomb. The people living in and around Elephantine, however, go so far as to eat crocodiles, which are not sacred animals in their view.
The Egyptian word is khampsa rather than ‘crocodile’. It was Ionians who called them ‘crocodiles’, since they thought they looked like the krokodeiloi or lizards which can be found on walls in Ionia.
[70] Crocodiles are hunted in all sorts of different ways, one of which strikes me as particularly remarkable and so I will write it down. The hunter baits a hook with the backbone of a pig and casts it out into the middle of the river; on the riverbank with him he has a live pig, which he hits. The crocodile hears the pig squealing. It sets off in the direction of the sound, encounters the backbone, and swallows it. Then they haul the creature in. Once they have got it ashore, the first thing the hunter does is smear mud over the creature’s eyes. This makes it easy for the crocodile to be overpowered, but it would be a struggle to do so otherwise.
[71] Hippopotamuses are sacred in the province of Papremis, but not elsewhere in Egypt. Here is what they look like. They are four-footed, cloven-hoofed (their hoofs are like an ox’s), and blunt-nosed; they have a horse’s mane, visible tusks, and the tail and voice of a horse; they are more or less as big as the biggest ox. Their hide is so thick that when it is dried people make spear-shafts out of it.
[72] Another river animal which is regarded as sacred is the otter. As for fish, they consider the species they call lepidotos and also eels to be sacred. These Nile fish are sacred, and the same goes, among birds, for the fox-goose.
[73] Another sacred bird is the one called the phoenix. Now, I have not actually seen a phoenix, except in a painting, because they are quite infrequent visitors to the country; in fact, I was told in Heliopolis that they appear only at 500-year intervals. They say that it is the death of a phoenix’s father which prompts its visit to Egypt. Anyway, if the painting was reliable, I can tell you something about the phoenix’s size and qualities, namely that its feathers are partly gold but mostly red, and that in appearance and size it is most like an eagle. There is a particular feat they say the phoenix performs; I do not believe it myself, but they say that the bird sets out from its homeland in Arabia on a journey to the sanctuary of the sun, bringing its father sealed in myrrh, and buries its father there. The method it uses for carrying its father is as follows. First it forms out of myrrh as big an egg as it can manage to carry, and then it makes a trial flight to make sure it can carry the egg. When this has been tested, it hollows out the egg and puts its father inside, and then seals up with more myrrh that part of the egg which it had hollowed out to hold its father. The egg now weighs the same, with its father lying inside, as it did before it was hollowed out. So when the phoenix has sealed the egg up again, it carries its father to the sanctuary of the sun in Egypt. That is what they say the bird does.
[74] In Thebes there are sacred snakes which never hurt a human being. They are small and have two horns growing from the tops of their heads. When they die, they are buried in the sanctuary of Zeus, since it is Zeus to whom they are sacred.
[75] I went to the part of Arabia fairly near the city of Buto to find out about winged snakes. When I got there, I saw countless snake bones and spines; there were heaps and heaps of spines there—large, medium-sized, and smaller ones. The place where all these backbones are scattered about on the ground is a narrow† pass linking hills to a great plain, which joins the Egyptian plain. The story goes that at the beginning of spring these winged snakes fly from Arabia towards Egypt, but birds—ibises—meet them there at the pass and do not allow them past, but kill them. It is because the ibis does this that the Egyptians value the bird so highly, according to the Arabians, and the Egyptians agree that this is why they value these birds.
[76] Here is a description of the ibis. It is pitch-black all over, and it has the legs of a crane and a very hooked beak. It is about the size of a corncrake. That is what the black ibises are like, which are the ones that fight the snakes, but there are two kinds of ibis and the other kind, which one is more likely to come across in places inhabited by human beings, is different. It has no feathers anywhere on its head and neck, and its plumage is completely white, except for its head, neck, the tips of its wings, and the very end of its tail, all of which are pitch-black. Its legs and beak are like those of the other kind.
The snakes are similar in shape to water-snakes. Rather than proper feathered wings they have winglike membranes, which are not too dissimilar from those of a bat. That completes my account of the sacred animals of Egypt.
[77] As for the actual people of Egypt, those who live in the cultivated part of the country make a particular practice of recording the history of all peoples, and are consequently by far the most learned people I have ever come across and questioned. Here are some aspects of their lifestyle. They purge themselves for three consecutive days of every month; they make emetics and douches their means of pursuing health, because they believe that all human illness is due to food causing colic.† In fact, the Egyptians are, after the Libyans, the most healthy people in the world, which in my opinion is due to the fact that the climate is very stable there. I mean, we generally get ill when things change—and by ‘things’ here I mean especially, but not exclusively, the seasons. The loaves they eat—which are called kyllestis in their language—are made out of emmer wheat. They have no vines in their country, so they drink an ale made out of barley. They eat raw sun-dried fish as well as salted fish. As for birds, they eat quail, duck, and raw salted young birds. In general, however, they first bake or boil any species of bird or fish their country provides, except for those which have been consecrated, before eating them.
[78] After the meal at a party of well-to-do Egyptians, a man carries round the room in a coffin a corpse made of wood, which has been painted and carved so as to be as lifelike as possible, and whose length is about a cubit or two.† The man shows the corpse to all the guests, one by one, while saying: ‘Look on this while you drink, for this will be your lot when you are dead.’ That is what happens at their parties.
[79] They perpetuate their traditional customs rather than acquiring new ones. They have a number of remarkable customs, and in particular a song, the ‘Linus’. Linus is also the subject of songs in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and elsewhere, but he has different names in different countries. Still, it seems as though the Egyptian song is about the same person who is called Linus in the Greek version of the song, and so one of the many puzzles about things in Egypt is where they got the ‘Linus’ from. One gets the impression that they have always sung the song. The Egyptian name for Linus is Maneros. The Egyptians said that Maneros was the only son of their first king, and that when he died at an early age they made up this dirge to honour him, which was not only the first Egyptian song, but at the time the only one.†
[80] There is another Egyptian custom which is similar to a Greek custom—or to be precise to a Lacedaemonian one. If a younger person meets an older person in the street, he defers to him by getting out of his way; young people also stand up when someone older approaches. Something else the Egyptians do, however, is not Greek at all: instead of greeting one another when they meet on the streets, they put their hands down on to their knees and bow down.
[81] They wear linen tunics, fringed at the bottom, which they call kalasiris and which come down over their legs. On top of these tunics they wear white woollen cloaks thrown over their shoulders. However, it is against religious law for them to take anything woollen into their sanctuaries or to be buried along with any woollen items. This custom of theirs accords with the Orphic and Bacchic rites, as they are called (though they are actually Egyptian and Pythagorean), because no initiate of these rites either is allowed to be buried in woollen clothing. There is a sacred story told on these matters.
[82] Here are some other Egyptian discoveries. Every month and every day is sacred to a particular deity, and the day of a person’s birth determines what will happen to him, how he will die, and what kind of person he will be. This is something Greek poets have made use of. They have discovered more omens than anyone else in the world. When one happens, they write it down and wait to see what the outcome is, and if anything similar ever happens again in the future, they think that the same result will follow.
[83] As for divination, they attribute this ability to some of the gods, but never to a human being. In fact, there are in Egypt oracles of Heracles, Apollo, Athena, Artemis, Ares, Zeus, and—the one which is held in the most honour of them all—of Leto, in the city of Buto. However, the methods of divination vary from place to place.
[84] Medicine is organized as follows. Each doctor specializes in a single illness rather than covering a range of illnesses. So there are doctors all over the place—eye doctors, for example, and others who tend heads, others for teeth or stomachs, and still others for illnesses whose provenance is obscure.
[85] Here is how they mourn and bury their dead. When a man of some standing departs from his house all the womenfolk of the household smear mud on their heads, or even their faces. Then they leave the corpse lying in the house while they and all their female relatives wander here and there in the city beating their breasts, with their clothing loosened and their breasts exposed. Elsewhere, the men are also beating their breasts, and they too have their clothing loosened. After this phase of mourning, they take the corpse to be mummified.
[86] There are professional embalmers who specialize in this work. When a corpse is brought to them, they show those who brought it sample corpses made out of wood, which are painted so as to be lifelike. The best embalming method, I am told, is sacred to the god whose name it would be sacrilegious of me to mention in this context. They also show samples of the second-best method, which is both inferior to and cheaper than the first one, and of the third-best method, which is the cheapest of them all. They explain the procedures and ask which method the relatives want used on the corpse, and then, once they have agreed on a price, the relatives leave, and the others stay behind in their shop and get right to work on the embalming.
Their first job, in the best embalming method, is to extract the brain by passing a hooked iron instrument through the nostrils; part of the brain is extracted in this way, and part of it by pouring in drugs. Next, they cut open the side of the corpse with a sharp Ethiopian stone knife and remove all the intestines. Then they clean out the cavity and rinse it first with palm wine and then with crushed spices. After this, they fill the corpse’s belly with crushed myrrh and cassia and other perfumed spices (but not with frankincense) and sew it back up. The next phase is to pack the corpse in natron and leave it to mummify for seventy days—but they are not supposed to leave it for longer. Once the seventy days are over, they wash the corpse and then wrap the whole of its body in bandages made out of fine linen cloth cut into strips. The bandages have gum (which is usually used in Egypt instead of glue) smeared on their underside. Then the relatives come and collect the corpse. They make a hollow casket in the shape of a man and enclose the corpse inside it. Once the corpse has been shut away inside the casket, they store it upright against the wall in a burial chamber.
[87] That is the most expensive procedure for preparing corpses, but if the next-best procedure is chosen to save money, they prepare the corpse as follows. They fill syringes with oil made from cedars and squirt it into the intestines of the corpse, until it is full. This procedure does not involve them cutting the corpse open or removing its guts; they insert the syringe into the anus and use a stopper to prevent any backflow from the douche. They preserve it for the prescribed number of days, and then on the last day they draw off from the entrails the cedar oil which they had injected in earlier. The effect of the oil has been to dissolve the guts and the intestines, with the result that they are all drawn off along with the oil. Meanwhile, the natron has dissolved the flesh, so that all that is left of the corpse is the skin and the bones. Then they return the corpse as it is, without putting any more work into it.
[88] The third embalming method is used to prepare the corpses of those who were less well off financially. The entrails are cleaned out with myrrh, the corpse is preserved as usual for the seventy days, and then it is returned to be taken away.
[89] When the wife of an eminent man dies, or any woman who was particularly beautiful or famous, the body is not handed over to the embalmers straight away. They wait three or four days before doing so. The reason for this is to stop the embalmers having sex with the women. They say that one of them was caught having sex with the fresh corpse of a woman, and was denounced by one of his colleagues.
[90] If anyone—it makes no difference whether he is a native Egyptian or a foreigner—has been carried off by a crocodile or has obviously been killed by the river, it is up to the people in the community where his body is washed ashore to embalm him, fit him out as handsomely as possible, and bury him in a sanctified tomb. Not even any of his relatives or friends is allowed to touch him: the corpse is something more than human, so only the actual priests of the Nile can lay hands on him and bury him.
[91] The Egyptians avoid using Greek customs or, by and large, those of any other people either. Everywhere else in Egypt, this rule is followed strictly, but in Chemmis (a large city in the Thebaïd province near Neapolis) there is a square sanctuary of Perseus the son of Danaë, with palm-trees growing around it. The entrance to the sanctuary is an enormous stone gateway, by which there are two tall stone statues. In the outer courtyard there is a temple, inside which is a statue of Perseus. According to the people of Chemmis, Perseus often appears in their country (and frequently inside the sanctuary), and people find one of his sandals, which is two cubits long. The appearance of the sandal signifies prosperity for the whole of Egypt.
This is what they say. They serve Perseus in the Greek fashion, in the sense that they hold an athletic contest covering the whole range of competitive sports, with cattle, cloaks, and hides as prizes. When I asked them why Perseus habitually appeared to them alone and why they were unique in Egypt in holding an athletic contest, they replied that since Danaus and Lynceus were Chemmitans who emigrated to Greece, and since they trace their lineage from Danaus and Lynceus down to Perseus, then Perseus originally came from their city. What brought Perseus to Egypt, according to the Chemmitans, is the same as in the Greek story: it was to collect the Gorgon’s head from Libya. But they said that he visited Chemmis and recognized his relatives, and that he had already learnt the name of Chemmis before he came to Egypt, because he had heard it from his mother. It was Perseus, they say, who told them to put on the games for him.
[92] All these customs have been those of the Egyptians living inland from the marshes. Life in the marshes is basically the same as elsewhere in Egypt—for instance, men and women live together in couples, as in Greece—but one difference is that they have found a cheap source of food. When the river is in spate and floods the plains, a large number of lilies grow in the water; the Egyptian name for this water-lily is lotos. They pick them, dry them in the sun, and then they crush the poppy-like middle part of the flower and make loaves out of it, which are baked in a fire. The root of the lotus, which is round and apple-sized, is also edible and tastes quite sweet. Another kind of lily, which looks like a rose, also grows in the river; in this one there is, in a separate pod which grows alongside the main one from the root, a fruit which closely resembles the honeycomb of a wasps’ nest. Inside the fruit are a great many edible seeds, each about the size of an olive stone, which can be eaten both fresh and dried. When they have pulled up from the marshes the annual crop of papyrus, they cut off the upper part of the plant (which they use for something else), while the remainder, about a cubit’s length from the bottom of the plant, they both eat and sell. Those who want to enjoy the papyrus at its very best bake it in a red-hot oven and then eat it. Some of these marsh-dwellers live entirely off fish, which they catch and gut, dry in the sun, and then eat dried.
[93] Fish that swim in shoals are never actually born in the rivers here; they grow to maturity in the lakes and then, when they are seized by the urge to be fertilized, they swim in shoals to the sea. The males lead, dribbling seed behind them, and the females follow, swallow it down, and conceive from it. So they become pregnant in the sea, but then each group makes its way back to its original location. However, this time they swim in a different order: it is the females who lead the shoal, but they behave in pretty much the same way as the males did, because they dribble eggs out a few at a time as tiny seeds, and the males following behind them swallow them down. These tiny seeds are actually fish, though, and from the ones that are not swallowed come the fish which grow to maturity. Any fish that are caught during the course of their journey to the sea display bruising on the left of their heads, whereas those that are caught during the return journey have bruising on the right. The reason is that as they swim down the river to the sea they keep close to the bank on their left, and during the return journey they again keep close to the same bank; they swim as close to it as they can, and even touch it, so that they do not lose their way through the river’s currents.
When the Nile begins to rise, all the low-lying land and the mud-pools next to the river start to fill with the water which trickles through from the river, and as soon as they are flooded they all begin to teem with tiny fish. I think I understand the probable reason for this. When the Nile recedes the year before, the fish lay eggs in the mud before leaving with the last of the water. In due course of time the water returns, and then the fish hatch straight away from these eggs. Anyway, that is what happens with regard to fish.
[94] The Egyptians who live near the marshes use oil made from the fruit of the castor-oil plant, which is called kiki by the Egyptians. They sow these plants on the riverbanks and beside the lakes. The plant grows wild in Greece, but when it is sown in Egypt it produces a plentiful, if foul-smelling crop. Once the fruit has been harvested, it can either be sliced and crushed, or roasted and boiled down. The end result is a thick liquid which they collect, and which is just as good as olive oil for lamps, except that it emits a heavy smell.
[95] Here is how they cope with the huge numbers of mosquitoes there. Those who live inland from the marshes have the advantage of sleeping up in tall buildings, which helps because the winds stop the mosquitoes flying high in the air. The marsh-dwellers, however, have come up with an alternative. Every man there has a net which he uses in the daytime for fishing, but at night he finds another use for it: he drapes it over the bed where he spends the night and then crawls in under it and goes to sleep. Mosquitoes can bite through any cover or linen blanket that a person might wrap himself up in when he is in bed, but they do not even try to bite through the net at all.
[96] Their cargo boats are made out of the wood of the acacia, which is very similar in appearance to Cyrenean lotus and weeps gum. The way they make these boats is to cut planks of this acacia wood, each about two cubits long, and put them together like bricks. They use long, thick pins to fix these two-cubit planks together, and once the hull has been built in this way, they next lay thwarts on top of it. Their boats have no ribbing, but instead they reinforce the fastenings on the inside of the boat with papyrus. They make a single steering-oar, which is plugged in and through the keel. They use a mast of acacia wood and sails of papyrus.
These boats are incapable of sailing upriver without a strong following wind; instead, they are towed along from the bank. Travelling downstream involves the use of a raft made out of tamarisk wood tied together with rush matting, and a stone, weighing about two talents, with a hole bored through it. The raft is let out on the rope which joins it to the boat so that it floats up in front, while the stone, which is held by another rope, is let out astern. Once the raft is taken by the current, it starts to move along rapidly and pull the baris behind it (baris is the Egyptian word for this kind of boat), while the stone is dragged behind the boat along the river bottom and so keeps the boat straight. There are lots of these boats on the river, and some of them can carry many thousands of talents of goods.
[97] When the Nile covers the land, only the towns are visible above the water, and they look like nothing so much as the Aegean islands. The rest of Egypt becomes open sea, with only the towns rising up out of it. So under these conditions people take ferries not just along the course of the river, but right across the plain! The journey by boat from Naucratis to Memphis becomes one that goes past the pyramids, instead of the normal route via the apex of the Delta and the city of Cercasorus. And sailing over the plain from Canobus on the coast to Naucratis you will pass the town of Anthylla and one named after Archander.
[98] Of these two towns, Anthylla is famous as the place from where the wife of every successive king of Egypt gets her shoes, since the town has been made over to her for that purpose. This has been happening ever since Egypt became part of the Persian empire. The other town is named, I think, after Danaus’ son-in-law, Archander the son of Phthius and grandson of Achaeus. It could also be another Archander, but it is certainly not an Egyptian name, at any rate.
[99] So far my account of Egypt has been dictated by my own observation, judgement, and investigation, but from now on I will be relating Egyptian accounts, supplemented by what I personally saw.
According to the priests, the first king of Egypt was Min. His achievements were, first, the construction of the dyke which protects Memphis. They say that the whole river used to flow past the sandy mountain range towards Libya, but that about a hundred stades upstream from Memphis Min created by means of a dam the southern bend in the river, causing the original bed to dry up and diverting the river through the middle of the mountains. (And even now this bend in the Nile is closely watched by the Persians, to make sure that the river keeps to its bed, and they strengthen the dam every year, because if the river decided to burst its banks and overflow at this point, Memphis would be in danger of being completely inundated.) Once the land separated off by this Min, the first king of Egypt, had dried out, his second achievement was to found there the city which is nowadays called Memphis (for Memphis is also located in the narrow part of Egypt). In the countryside outside the city he is said to have dug a lake, away from the river, to the north and west of the city, because the Nile itself skirts the city to the east. Then his third achievement was to build the sanctuary of Hephaestus in Memphis, which is huge and remarkable.
[100] The priests then read out from a papyrus roll the names of the 330 kings following Min. In all that time, 330 generations, there were eighteen Ethiopian kings and one native Egyptian queen, but all the rest were Egyptian men. The name of the queen was Nitocris—the same as that of the Babylonian queen. They said that she avenged her brother. Despite the fact that he was their king, the Egyptians killed him and then handed the kingdom over to her, but in order to avenge him she killed a lot of them by a trick. What she did was construct a massive underground chamber, and although in reality she had other plans, she claimed to want to hold an inauguration ceremony for it. She invited the Egyptians she knew to have been the ringleaders in her brother’s murder—and there were quite a few of them—to the reception; while they were in the middle of the meal she had the river flood in on them through a large secret passage. That is all the information I was given about Nitocris, except that afterwards she threw herself into a chamber full of ashes, to avoid retribution.
[101] The priests attributed no particularly outstanding achievements to any of the other kings, except for the last one, King Moeris. The monuments he constructed are the northern gateway in the sanctuary of Hephaestus, a lake, and some pyramids in the lake. I will later record how many stades the perimeter of the lake is, and at the same time how large the pyramids are. They said that these were Moeris’ achievements, but they had nothing to note for any of the rest.
[102] Passing over them, then, I will mention the person who reigned after them, whose name was Sesostris. The priests told me that he first launched a naval expedition from the Arabian Gulf and subdued the inhabitants of the Red Sea coastline until he reached a part of the sea where shallows made it impossible for him to continue any further. According to the priests’ account, what he did next, on his return to Egypt, was raise a great army and march across the mainland, subduing every tribe he came across. Whenever he encountered a brave people who put up a fierce fight in defence of their autonomy, he erected pillars in their territory with an inscription recording his own name and country, and how he and his army had overcome them. However, whenever he took a place easily, without a fight, he had a message inscribed on the pillar in the same way as for the brave tribes, but he also added a picture of a woman’s genitalia, to indicate that they were cowards.
[103] Eventually this expedition of his across the mainland brought him from Asia over into Europe, where he defeated the Scythians and the Thracians. I think that this was as far as the Egyptian army came, because pillars erected by them can be seen there, but nowhere further on. So he turned back towards Egypt. When he reached the River Phasis, one of two things happened, but I am not in a position to say for certain which of the two alternatives is correct. Either King Sesostris himself detached a certain portion of his troops and left them there to settle the country, or some of his men had had enough of this circuitous journey of his and stayed behind at the Phasis River.
[104] For the fact is, as I first came to realize myself, and then heard from others later, that the Colchians are obviously Egyptian. When the notion occurred to me, I asked both the Colchians and the Egyptians about it, and found that the Colchians had better recall of the Egyptians than the Egyptians did of them. Some Egyptians said that they thought the Colchians originated with Sesostris’ army, but I myself had guessed their Egyptian origin not only because the Colchians are dark-skinned and curly-haired (which does not count for much by itself, because these features are common to others too), but more importantly because Colchians, Egyptians, and Ethiopians are the only peoples in the world who practise circumcision and have always done so. The Phoenicians and Palestinian Syrians are the first to admit that they learnt the practice from Egypt, and the Syrians who live in the land between the Thermodon and Parthenius rivers, and their neighbours the Macrones, say that in their case it is a recent import from Colchis. These are the only places in the world where circumcision is practised, and it is clear that the others do it in the same way it is done in Egypt. The obvious antiquity of the custom in Egypt and Ethiopia prevents me from saying whether the Egyptians learnt it from the Ethiopians or vice versa, but what convinces me that the other peoples learnt it as a result of their contact with Egypt is that any Phoenicians who have come into contact with Greece have stopped copying the Egyptians with respect to their genitalia,† and do not cut off their children’s foreskins.
[105] And let me mention one more way in which the Colchians resemble the Egyptians: these two peoples alone work linen, and they do so in the same way. In fact, their lifestyles in general and their languages are similar. The Greeks call Colchian linen Sardonian, while the linen which comes from Egypt is called Egyptian.
[106] Most of the pillars which King Sesostris of Egypt erected in these places no longer appear to be there, but I myself have seen them in Palestinian Syria with the inscriptions I mentioned and the female genitalia. In Ionia, there are also two figures of Sesostris carved in the rock, one on the route from Ephesus to Phocaea and the other between Sardis and Smyrna. In both places a man is carved, four cubits and a span high, with a spear in his right hand, a bow in his left, and the rest of his equipment to match—in fact, it is partly Egyptian and partly Ethiopian. From one shoulder right across his chest to the other shoulder runs a carved inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphs, saying: ‘I took this land with the power of my shoulders.’ He does not indicate in this inscription who he is and what country he is from, but it is clear from elsewhere. Some people who have seen these carvings guess that the figure is Memnon, but that does not really correspond to the facts.
[107] Now to return to Sesostris, the Egyptian king: the priests told me that he brought with him on his return from abroad a number of people from the tribes whose lands he had conquered. Arriving back in Pelusian Daphnae, he was invited to a banquet by his brother, to whom he had entrusted the kingdom during his absence. His sons were invited too. But when they came, his brother piled wood around the outside of the house and set fire to it. As soon as Sesostris realized what was going on, he turned to his wife, because he had brought her along with him too, and asked her advice. She suggested that he have two of his six sons lie down over the flames and act as a bridge across the fire, so that the rest of them could walk on them and escape. Sesostris did this, and although it resulted in two of his sons being burnt to death, this made it possible for their father and the others to escape.
[108] Once Sesostris was back in Egypt and had taken vengeance on his brother, he found a use for the horde of people he had brought with him, whose lands he had conquered. It was they who hauled the massive blocks of stone which were collected during his reign for the sanctuary of Hephaestus, and they were also forced to work digging all the canals which now exist in Egypt. As a result of all this, without meaning to, they made horses and carts disappear from Egypt, when there had previously been plenty of horses and the whole land had teemed with cart traffic. For ever since then, despite being a completely flat country, Egypt has been unfit for horses and carts, because of the number of canals and the way they criss-cross the country in all directions. Sesostris had these canals slice up the countryside because all the Egyptians in places which were not on the river but in the middle of the country were short of water when the river went down, and had to make do with rather brackish drinking-water drawn from wells.
[109] The priests also told me that Sesostris divided the country among all the Egyptians, giving each man the same amount of land in the form of a square plot. This was a source of income for him, because he ordered them to pay an annual tax. If any of a person’s plot was lost to the river, he would present himself at the king’s court and tell him what had happened; then the king sent inspectors to measure how much land he had lost, so that in the future the man had to pay proportionately less of the fixed tax. It seems to me that this was how geometry as a land-surveying technique came to be discovered and then imported into Greece. But the Greeks learned about the sundial, its pointer, and the twelve divisions of the day from the Babylonians.
[110] Sesostris was the only Egyptian king to rule over Ethiopia. The monuments he left to posterity stand in front of the temple of Hephaestus and consist of two stone statues thirty cubits in height of himself and his wife, and statues of his four sons too, each twenty cubits in height. Many years later the priest of Hephaestus refused to let Darius the Persian erect a statue of himself in front of this group of statues, arguing that his achievements did not match those of Sesostris the Egyptian. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘Sesostris defeated as many peoples as you, and the Scythians as well, whom you were unable to conquer. It would not be right, then, for you to stand out in front of Sesostris’ statues, since your achievements do not surpass those of Sesostris.’ They say that Darius conceded the point.
[111] The priests told me that after Sesostris’ death his son Pheros inherited the kingdom. Pheros has no military exploits to his credit, but it happened that the following event led to his blindness. Once, the volume of water coming down the river was greater than ever before; the river rose to eighteen cubits, and when it flooded the fields, a wind descended and the river became turbulent. The king, they say, committed sacrilege: he seized a spear and hurled it into the middle of the swirling river, and was immediately afterwards afflicted with an eye disease from which he became blind. Sometime in the eleventh year, after he had been blind for ten years, an oracle came to him from the city of Buto that the time of his punishment had come to an end and that he would regain his sight once he had washed his eyes in the urine of a woman who had slept only with her own husband and had never been with another man. He tested out his own wife first, but he still did not regain his sight, so then he tried all kinds of women one after another. When at last he did recover his sight, he had all the women he had tested, except the one whose urine he had washed in to regain his sight, assemble in a single town (the one which nowadays goes by the name of Erythrebolus), and once they were all gathered there he burnt the town down, with them inside it. As for the woman whose urine he had washed in to regain his sight, he made her his wife. To mark his deliverance from the eye disease, he dedicated a number of offerings throughout all the famous sanctuaries of Egypt, but the most noteworthy one consists of the remarkable structures he dedicated in the sanctuary of the sun—two monolithic stone obelisks, each a hundred cubits tall and eight cubits thick.
[112] The priests told me that after Pheros the kingdom passed to a man from Memphis whose name in Greek is Proteus. To this day there is in Memphis, south of the temple of Hephaestus, a particularly fine and well-appointed precinct which was his. The houses around this precinct are inhabited by Phoenicians from Tyre, and the whole district is called the Tyrian Camp. Inside Proteus’ precinct is a sanctuary sacred to ‘the Foreign Aphrodite’. I have come to the conclusion that the person it is sacred to is Helen the daughter of Tyndareus, not only because I am aware of the story that Helen spent some time in Egypt with Proteus, but also, and in particular, because the sanctuary is called the sanctuary of the Foreign Aphrodite; no other sanctuary of Aphrodite is called ‘foreign’.
[113] On the business concerning Helen, I asked the priests what they knew and this is what they told me. After Alexander had abducted Helen from Sparta, he set sail back to his native land, but while he was in the Aegean, violent winds pushed him off course and into the Egyptian Sea. The winds did not let up and so he ended up landing in Egypt—specifically, at what is nowadays called the Canobic mouth of the Nile and its fish-salting works. Now, there was then, as there still is, a sanctuary of Heracles on the shore there, and there is a custom (which has survived unchanged from its ancient origins right up to my own day), that any house-slave who takes refuge in the sanctuary and brands himself with sacred marks, to signify that he is giving himself to the god, cannot be touched, no matter whose slave he was. So when Alexander’s attendants heard about the custom connected to this sanctuary, they left him and installed themselves in the sanctuary as suppliants of the god. They wanted to hurt Alexander and so they made an accusation against him and told the whole story of his treatment of Helen and the wrong he had done Menelaus. They lodged this information not only with the priests, but also with the officer in charge of this mouth of the Nile, whose name was Thonis.
[114] When Thonis had heard what they had to say, he sent an urgent message to Proteus in Memphis, saying: ‘A stranger has arrived, a Teucrian, fresh from committing an unholy deed in Greece. He seduced the wife of his host and has been brought here by the winds to your kingdom with her and with a great many valuable goods as well. Shall we let him sail away unharmed, or shall we confiscate what he brought with him?’
The message Proteus sent in reply said: ‘It doesn’t matter who this man is: he has committed unholy deeds against his own host. Arrest him and bring him to me, so that I can see what he has to say for himself.’
[115] On receipt of this message Thonis arrested Alexander and impounded his ships. Then he took Alexander, along with Helen, the valuables, and the suppliants as well, to Memphis. When they were all there, Proteus asked Alexander who he was and where he had come from. Alexander gave him the details of his family and his native country, and also told him where he had been sailing from. Proteus next asked him where he had got Helen, but Alexander prevaricated and did not tell the truth, so the suppliants (as they now were) gave all the details of his crime and exposed his lies. When they had finished, Proteus declared: ‘You’re lucky that I think it important not to take the lives of visitors, especially those who have come to my kingdom after having been driven off course by winds. Otherwise, you scum, on behalf of the Greek I would make you pay for what you have done—for the terrible crime you have committed after accepting his hospitality. You made advances to the wife of your host. As if that were not enough, you gave her the wings to flee with you when you left. But you didn’t even leave it at that: you also plundered your host’s house before coming here. Well, it is true that I think it important not to take the lives of visitors, but I will certainly not let you leave with this woman and the valuables. I’ll look after them for your Greek host, until he decides to come here himself to fetch them. As for you and your companions, I hereby give you three days to leave my shores and find some other haven. If you fail to comply, I will treat you as enemies.’
[116] The priests told me that this was how Helen came to stay with Proteus. Now, I think that Homer had heard this story as well, because although he omitted it on the grounds that it was not as suitable for an epic poem as the other one (the one that he used), he still showed that he knew this alternative story too. He makes this clear, because he was drawing on this version† when he composed in the Iliad (and he never corrected himself) the section describing Alexander’s travels—how he was driven off course while bringing Helen home and how in the course of his wanderings he landed, among other places, at Sidon in Phoenicia. His mention of Alexander’s travels occurs in ‘The Prowess of Diomedes’ and goes like this:
There were the gorgeous robes, embroidered by women
Of Sidon, which godlike Alexander himself
Had carried from Sidon, sailing across the broad sea
On the journey when he brought back Helen of famous lineage.
†It is clear from these words that Homer knew of Alexander’s circuitous journey to Egypt, because Syria (where the Phoenicians, to whom Sidon belongs, live) is on Egypt’s borders.
[117] These words and this passage also make it absolutely clear, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that someone else, not Homer, is the author of the Cypria. In the Cypria it is said that Alexander reached Ilium with Helen three days after leaving Sparta, because he met with a favourable wind and a calm sea. In the Iliad, however, Hómer says that Alexander’s journey home with Helen was not direct. Anyway, that is enough about Homer and the Cypria.
[118] I asked the priests whether or not the Greek version of what happened at Ilium was completely ridiculous, and this is what they told me (adding that they were sure of the correctness of their information because they had asked Menelaus himself): after the abduction of Helen, a large Greek army came to Teucrian territory to help Menelaus. When they had disembarked and established a camp, they dispatched messengers to Ilium, and with them went Menelaus himself. Once the delegation was inside the city, they called for the return of Helen and of the goods which Alexander had stolen and carried off, and they also demanded recompense for the crimes that had been committed. The Teucrians said then what they consistently said later too, whether or not they were under oath: that they did not have Helen or the property in question, that both were in Egypt, and that it would hardly be fair for them to have to recompense the Greeks for things that King Proteus of Egypt had.† The Greeks thought the Teucrians were laughing at them and so they besieged the city and eventually took it. When the city was in their hands, however, Helen was nowhere to be found. All they got was the same information as before, but now the Greeks believed what the Teucrians had been telling them all along and so they sent Menelaus himself to Proteus.
[119] So Menelaus came to Egypt and sailed up the river to Memphis, where he told them exactly what had happened. The Egyptians looked after him magnificently, returned Helen to him completely unhurt, and gave him back all his property as well. Nevertheless, after all this good fortune, Menelaus treated the Egyptians unjustly. He was impatient to sail away, but adverse winds were holding him up; after this had been going on for a long time, he found a solution, but it was an abomination. He seized two children from local families and sacrificed them. When the Egyptians found out what he had done, they set sail in hatred after him, but he set a course straight for Libya with his ships, and then they lost his trail. My informants told me that they learnt this as a result of their enquiries, but that they were certain of the events that had happened in their own country.
[120] That is what the Egyptian priests told me; personally, I accept their version of the Helen story, for the following reasons. If Helen had been in Ilium, she would have been returned to the Greeks with or without Alexander’s consent. It would have been completely insane for Priam and the rest of his family to choose to put themselves, their children, and their city in danger just so that Alexander could live with Helen. Even if they had chosen this course of action at first, yet in the face of heavy Trojan losses resulting from their encounters with the Greeks, and when (if one must speak using the evidence of epic poets) at least two or three of Priam’s own sons died every time battle was joined—under these circumstances, I expect that even if it had been Priam himself who was living with Helen, he would have given her back to the Achaeans in order to end the disasters they were faced with. Nor was Alexander even the heir to the kingdom, so it was not as if he was in charge now that Priam was elderly; no, Hector was not only older than Alexander, but he was more of a man than him. It was Hector who would inherit the kingdom on Priam’s death, and he was not the kind of man to let his brother get away with wrongdoing, especially when his brother was responsible not only for Hector’s own personal suffering, but for that of all the other Trojans as well. No, the fact is that they did not have Helen to give back; they were telling the truth, but the Greeks did not believe them. In my opinion, this was because the gods were arranging things so that in their annihilation the Trojans might make it completely clear to others that the severity of a crime is matched by the severity of the ensuing punishment at the gods’ hands. That is my view, at any rate.
[121] The priests told me that the kingdom passed from Proteus to Rhampsinitus. Rhampsinitus left as his memorial the western gateway of the sanctuary of Hephaestus; he erected two statues facing this gateway, each of which is twenty-five cubits in height. The Egyptians call the northern one ‘Summer’ and the southern one ‘Winter’, and they prostrate themselves in front of ‘Summer’ and treat it with respect, but do the opposite to ‘Winter’.
Now, they say that Rhampsinitus had a huge fortune in silver, more than any of his successors, none of whom even came close. He wanted to store his money in a safe place, so he built a stone chamber as an extension off one of the outside walls of his residence. The builder, however, came up with the following crafty scheme. He cleverly fitted one of the stones in such a way that it would easily be removable from its wall by two men or even one. Anyway, the chamber was finished and the king stored his money in it. Time passed. At the end of his life, the builder summoned his sons (there were two of them) and told them of the plan he had put into effect while building the king’s treasure-chamber, so that they would be comfortable for the rest of their lives. He explained precisely to them how to remove the stone and described its position in the wall. He told them that if they remembered his instructions, they would be the stewards of the king’s treasury!
He died, and his sons soon set to work. They went by night to the royal residence and found the stone in the building. It was easy for them to handle, and they carried off a lot of money. When the king happened to go into the chamber next, he was surprised to see that the caskets were missing some money, but the seals on the door were still intact and the chamber had been locked up, so he could not blame anyone. But the same thing happened the next couple of times he opened the door as well: his money was obviously dwindling all the time (for the thieves had not stopped their depredations). So the king had traps made, and set them around the caskets which held the money. The thieves came as usual and one of them sneaked into the chamber, but as soon as he approached a casket he was caught in the trap. As soon as he realized how desperate his situation was, he called out to his brother, explained the state of affairs, and told him to come into the chamber as quickly as possible and cut his head off. This was to stop him being seen and recognized and so bringing ruin down on his brother as well. His brother thought that this was sound advice, and he acted on the suggestion. Then he fitted the stone back in its place and went back home, taking his brother’s head with him.
The next morning, the story continues, the king went into his treasure-chamber. He was astonished at the sight of the thief’s headless body caught in a trap in an undamaged room without any way in or any way out. He did not know what to make of it, but this is what he did. He hung the thief’s body on the city wall, and posted guards around it with instructions to arrest and bring to him anyone they saw crying or grieving.
With the corpse hanging there, the mother was very upset, and she told the surviving son somehow to find a way to cut his brother’s body down and bring it back home. She warned him that if he did not give the matter his attention, she would go to the king and let him know that he had the money. The mother kept on scolding the surviving son and refusing to listen to all his arguments, and eventually he came up with a plan. He got some donkeys ready, loaded wineskins which he had filled with wine on to them, and then took them out on the road. When he reached the spot where the men were watching over the corpse hanging on the wall, he pulled on the necks of a couple of the wineskins and undid their fastenings. The wine poured out, and the man hit his head and shouted out in dismay, as if he did not know which of the donkeys to go to first.
When the guards saw the wine flooding out, they thought they had struck it lucky. They ran into the road with jars and caught the wine as it poured out, while the thief swore at them all and pretended to be angry. The guards tried to calm him down, however, and he eventually let them think they had succeeded and that he had forgiven them. He drove the donkeys off the road, settled their loads, and carried on talking with the guards. One of the guards even teased him and made him laugh, and he gave them a skin of wine. The guards immediately settled themselves there onthe ground and decided to have a drink. They included him and told him to stay and have a drink with them—and of course he was won over and stayed. As a result of their drinking, the guards warmed to the donkey-driver, and he gave them another skin. The huge quantity of wine they had consumed put the guards into a drunken stupor, and they lay down, overcome with sleep, right there on the spot where they had been drinking. The other man waited until the night was well advanced and then cut down his brother’s body. Also, in order to mock the guards, he shaved the right cheek of every one of them. Then he loaded the corpse on to the donkeys and drove them home. He had done what his mother had told him to do.
When news of the theft of the thief’s corpse reached the king, he was furious. There was nothing he wanted more than to catch whoever it was who had pulled the trick off. So what he did—so the story goes, but I find it unbelievable—was install his daughter in a room with instructions to accept all men indiscriminately; she was not to sleep with them, however, until she had got them to tell her the cleverest and the worst things they had ever done in their lives. As soon as the business with the thief came up in someone’s reply, she was to grab him and not let him go.
The king’s daughter obeyed her father’s instructions, but the thief heard what the king was up to. He wanted to prove himself even more cunning than the king, so he cut an arm off a fresh corpse at the shoulder and went along with the arm under his cloak. He went in to the king’s daughter and in reply to the question she was asking everyone, he told her that the worst thing he had done was decapitate his own brother when he was caught in a trap in the king’s treasure-chamber, and that the cleverest thing he had done was get the guards drunk and cut his brother’s corpse down from the city wall. Hearing this, she seized hold of him, but in the darkness the thief put the corpse’s arm in her way. She grabbed the arm and held on to it, thinking that she had the actual thief’s arm in her grip. But the thief left it in her grasp and ran out of the door.
When this too was reported to the king, he was impressed with the man’s resourcefulness and daring. Eventually, he sent heralds round all the settlements and offered the man immunity and a generous reward if he would present himself before him. The thief believed the offer and went to the king. Rhampsinitus was so taken with him that he gave him his daughter to marry, proclaiming him the most intelligent man in the world. For the king thought the Egyptians more outstanding than everyone else, and this man the most outstanding of the Egyptians.
[122] The next thing Rhampsinitus did, according to the priests, was go down into the place the Greeks know as Hades and play dice with Demeter there. He won some games and lost others, and then he came back up again with a golden scarf which she had given him. They said that the Egyptians celebrate a festival based on Rhampsinitus’ descent and subsequent return, and I know for a fact that they were still celebrating it in my time, although I cannot confirm that it takes place because of Rhampsinitus’ descent and return. On a single day, the priests weave a shawl. One of their number, with the shawl, then has a headband tied over his eyes. They take him out into the street which leads to the sanctuary of Demeter and then retrace their steps. They say that this blindfolded priest is escorted by two wolves to the sanctuary of Demeter, which is twenty stades away from the city, and later the wolves bring him back again to the very spot where they had joined him.
[123] Anyone who finds such things credible can make of these Egyptian stories what he wishes. My job, throughout this account, is simply to record whatever I am told by each of my sources. The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus are the rulers of the underworld kingdom. The Egyptians were also the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. They also say that when the soul has made the round of every creature on land, in the sea, and in the air, it once more clothes itself in the body of a human being just as it is being born, and that a complete cycle takes three thousand years. This theory has been adopted by certain Greeks too—some from a long time ago, some more recently—who presented it as if it were their own. I know their names, but I will not write them down.
[124] The priests said that up to the reign of King Rhampsinitus Egyptian society was stable and the country was very prosperous, but that under their next king, Cheops, it was reduced to a completely awful condition. He closed down all the sanctuaries, stopped people performing sacrifices, and also commanded all the Egyptians to work for him. Some had the job of hauling blocks of stone from the quarries in the Arabian mountain range as far as the Nile, where they were transported across the river in boats and then passed on to others, whom he assigned to haul them from there to the Libyan mountains. They worked in gangs of 100,000 men for three months at a time. They said that it took ten years† of hard labour for the people to construct the causeway along which they hauled the blocks of stone, which I would think involved not much less work than building the pyramid, since the road is five stades long, ten fathoms wide, and eight fathoms high at its highest point, and is made of polished stone, with figures carved on it. So they spent ten years over this road and the underground rooms which Cheops had constructed as his sepulchral chambers in the hill on which the pyramids stand, which he turned into an island by bringing water from the Nile there along a canal. The actual pyramid took twenty years to build. Each of its sides, which form a square, is eight plethra long and the pyramid is eight plethra high as well. It is made of polished blocks of stone, fitted together perfectly; none of the blocks is less than thirty feet long.
[125] The pyramid was built up like a flight of stairs (others use the image of staggered battlements or altar steps). When that first stage of the construction process was over, they used appliances made out of short pieces of wood to lift the remaining blocks of stone up the sides. First they would raise a block of stone from the ground on to the first tier, and when the stone had been raised up to that point, it was put on to a different device which was positioned on the first level, and from there it was hauled up to the second level on another device. Either there were the same number of devices as there were tiers, or alternatively, if the device was a single manageable unit, they transferred the same one from level to level once they had removed the stone from it. I have mentioned two alternative methods, because that is exactly how the information was given to me. Anyway, they finished off the topmost parts of the pyramid first, then the ones just under it, and ended with the ground levels and the lowest ones.
There is a notice in Egyptian script on the pyramid about how much was spent on radishes, onions, and garlic for the labourers, and if my memory serves me well, the translator reading the notice to me said that the total cost was sixteen hundred talents of silver. If that is so, how much more must have been spent, in all likelihood, on iron for the tools, and on food and clothing for the work-force, considering how much time, as I mentioned, was spent building the pyramid? And then, I suppose, there was also the not inconsiderable amount of time spent quarrying the stone and bringing it to the site and excavating the underground chambers.
[126] Cheops was such a bad man that when he was short of money he installed his own daughter in a room with instructions to charge a certain amount of money (I was not told exactly how much) for her favours. She did what her father had told her to do, but she also had the idea of leaving behind her own personal memorial, so she asked each of the men who came in to her to give her a single block of stone in the work-site.† I was told that the middle pyramid of the group of three was built from these blocks of stone—the one which stands in front of the large one and the sides of whose base are one and a half plethra long.
[127] The Egyptians said that after a reign of fifty years Cheops died and the kingdom passed to his brother Chephren. He carried on in the same manner as his brother, and not least in the sense that he too built a pyramid, although it did not reach the size of his brother’s. I know because in fact I measured them both myself. There are no underground chambers in Chephren’s pyramid, nor does a channel come flowing into it from the Nile, as in the case of the other one, where a conduit was built so that the Nile would encircle an island on which, they say, Cheops himself is buried. The bottom layer of Chephren’s pyramid was made out of patterned Ethiopian stone and the whole thing is the same size as the other pyramid, but forty feet less tall. Both of them stand on the same hill, which is about a hundred feet high. They said that Chephren’s reign lasted fifty-six years.
[128] So by their own reckoning, this terrible period in Egypt lasted 106 years, and the sanctuaries, locked for all these years, were never opened. The Egyptians loathe Chephren and Cheops so much that they really do not like to mention their names. Instead, they say the pyramids belonged to a shepherd called Philitis, who at this time used to graze his flocks on the same land.
[129] The priests said that the next king of Egypt was Mycerinus the son of Cheops, and that he disapproved of what his father had done. He not only reopened the sanctuaries and let the people, who had been ground down to a state of total misery, return to their work and their sacrifices, but he was also the fairest of all the kings in judging their legal cases. Because of this they speak more highly of Mycerinus than they do of any other Egyptian king. And it was not just that his judgements were sound, but also that if anyone complained after one of his decisions, he gave him from his own treasury whatever extra amount it took to satisfy him. But even though Mycerinus was kind to the people of Egypt and followed these practices, trouble still came his way. His daughter’s death marked the beginning of it. She was the only child in his household, and he was terribly upset at the calamity. He wanted to give her an outstanding tomb, so he made a hollow cow out of gilded wood and then he buried his dead daughter inside it.
[130] Now, this cow was not buried in the ground, but could still be seen in my day lying in a decorated room of the royal palace in Saïs. Every day perfumed spices of all kinds are burnt before it, and a lamp is kept alight all night and every night. In another room, near this cow, there are statues which the priests in Saïs identified as Mycerinus’ concubines. There are about twenty of these wooden figures, made to represent naked women. As to who these women are, I have nothing to go on except what I was told.
[131] There is also another story, however, about this cow and the figures. It is said that Mycerinus raped his own daughter because he was in love with her. Afterwards, they say, she hanged herself in grief, and he buried her in the cow. Her mother, however, cut off the hands of the serving-maids who had betrayed the daughter to her father, and the same thing has happened to the statues of these serving-maids as happened to their living originals. But this is all nonsense, in my opinion, and not least the part about the statues’ hands. I actually saw the statues, and it was obvious that the passage of time was responsible for the loss of their hands, because right up to my day they could still be seen lying on the ground at the statues’ feet.
[132] A red cloth has been draped over the whole of the cow, so that it is all hidden except for the neck and head, which are gilded over with a very thick layer of gold plate. Between its horns there is a golden circle representing the sun. The cow is resting on its knees, rather than standing up. Its size is that of a large living cow. It is carried out of the room every year on the occasion when the Egyptians mourn the death of the god whom I will not name in this context. Anyway, that is when they bring the cow into the light, because (so the story goes) the dying girl asked her father Mycerinus to let her see the sun once a year.
[133] After his daughter’s death a second disaster struck Mycerinus. He received an oracle from the city of Buto to the effect that he had only six more years to live and would die sometime within the seventh year. He thought this was dreadful, and he sent emissaries to the oracle with an indignant reproach for the god. He protested the fact that his father and uncle, both of whom had closed the sanctuaries, ignored the gods, and ruined men’s lives, had lived a good many years, while a god-fearing man like himself was going to die so soon. A second message came from the oracle, explaining that it was precisely because he was a god-fearing man that his life was being cut short—that he had not behaved as he should. Egypt was supposed to suffer for a hundred and fifty years, and his two predecessors had understood that, while he had not. When Mycerinus received this message and realized that his fate had already been sealed, he had plenty of lamps made, so that he could light them at nightfall, and drink and carouse without stopping all day and all night; he also used to roam through the marshes and groves, and anywhere else that he heard was a particularly good place to take pleasure. His plan was to prove the oracle wrong: by turning his nights into days, he hoped to convert his six years into twelve.
[134] He too left a pyramid as a memorial. His pyramid is much smaller than his father’s, each side of the square base being twenty feet short of three plethra, and the bottom half of it is made out of Ethiopian stone. There are Greek writers who say that it was built by Rhodopis, who was a courtesan, but they are wrong. It seems to me that this theory is based on complete ignorance about Rhodopis, otherwise its proponents would not have ascribed the building of a pyramid like this to her, when it is hardly going too far to say that countless thousands of talents must have been spent on it. Besides, Rhodopis was in her prime during the reign of King Amasis, not at the time of Mycerinus. In other words, Rhodopis was alive a great many years later than the pyramid-building kings. She was a Thracian by birth, and was the slave of a Samian called Iadmon the son of Hephaestopolis, another of whose slaves was the writer Aesop. That he too was a slave of Iadmon’s is proved above all by the fact that when the Delphians kept on proclaiming, on the advice of the oracle, that anyone who so wanted could claim compensation from them for Aesop’s life, no one came forward until Iadmon’s grandson, who was also called Iadmon, claimed it. This shows that Aesop belonged to Iadmon.
[135] Rhodopis was brought to Egypt by Xanthes of Samos, and then, so that she could ply her trade, her freedom was bought for a great deal of money by a man from Mytilene called Charaxus, who was the son of Scamandronymus and the brother of the poet Sappho. Once she had gained her freedom in this way, Rhodopis stayed in Egypt and was so alluring that she earned a fortune—a fortune for a Rhodopis, that is, but not enough to build that kind of pyramid. Since it is possible even today for anyone who so wants to see what a tenth of her fortune amounts to, there is no need for anyone to suggest that she was hugely wealthy. She wanted to leave a tribute to herself in Greece—something that no one else had thought of making and dedicating in a sanctuary—and to dedicate it in Delphi as her memorial. So with a tenth of her fortune she had a quantity of ox-sized iron spits made—as many as she could with that amount of money—and sent them to Delphi, and even today they are still lying in a pile behind the altar which the Chians dedicated and in front of the actual temple. (For some reason, courtesans in Naucratis are particularly beguiling. Not only was there the one we have been talking about, who became so famous that all Greeks are familiar with the name of Rhodopis, but there was also another one later, called Archidice, who became the subject of a popular Greek song, although she is less notorious than Rhodopis.) After he bought Rhodopis’ freedom, Charaxus returned to Mytilene, to be much ridiculed in Sappho’s poetry. That is all I have to say about Rhodopis.
[136] The priests told me that Asychis succeeded to the Egyptian kingdom after Mycerinus. He built the eastern gateway of the sanctuary of Hephaestus, which is the most magnificent and by far the largest. All the gateways have figures carved on them and countless other marvels of construction, but this eastern one easily outdoes the others. They said that during his reign there was a severe financial recession and so a law was passed that a person might use his father’s corpse as security to take out a loan. There was a rider to the law, however, to the effect that the lender also became the proprietor of the whole of the borrower’s burial-plot, so that if the mortgagee refused to pay back the loan, as a penalty neither he nor any other member of his family could have access on their deaths to burial in the family tomb (or indeed in any other tomb either). They say that Asychis wanted to outdo the Egyptian kings who came before him, so he built as his monument a pyramid made out of bricks, and had the following words chiselled in stone on it: ‘Do not compare me unfavourably with the pyramids of stone. I surpass the other pyramids as Zeus surpasses the other gods. For I was made out of bricks, which were formed out of mud, which was collected from a pole it had stuck to when the pole was plunged down into a lake.’ So much for Asychis’ achievements.
[137] The next king was a blind man from the city of Anysis, whose name was Anysis. During his reign Egypt was invaded by a strong force of Ethiopians under their king Sabacos. The blind Egyptian king withdrew into the marshes, and the Ethiopian ruled Egypt for fifty years. The following were the achievements of his reign. The death penalty was abolished, and instead he sentenced every Egyptian wrongdoer, according to the seriousness of his crime, to build a dyke near his native city. In this way, the cities were raised even higher above the water level than they already were. They had first been heaped up by the people who excavated the canals in the time of King Sesostris, and now it happened again during the Ethiopian’s reign, with the result that the cities became really quite elevated. Of all the Egyptian cities which were raised in this way, it was Bubastis, I should say, whose level was raised the most. This city also contains a truly remarkable sanctuary of Bubastis (or Artemis in Greek); it may not be the largest or most lavishly appointed sanctuary in Egypt, but is certainly the most beautiful.
[138] This is what the sanctuary of Bubastis is like. Only the entrance stops the whole thing being an island, because there are two canals drawing water from the Nile, one flowing around one side of the sanctuary, the other around the other side, and they both end just by the entrance, without joining. Each canal is a hundred feet wide and is shaded with trees. The gateway is ten fathoms high and has been embellished with remarkable figures, six cubits tall. Because the sanctuary is in the middle of the city, and because the rest of the city has been raised by earthworks, but the sanctuary has been left exactly as it was originally built, one can walk around it and look down into it from any direction. A stone wall, with figures carved on it, surrounds the sanctuary. Inside the wall there is a grove of enormous trees growing around the great temple that houses the cult statue. The whole sanctuary is a stade long and a stade wide as well. A road, which is four plethra wide and paved with stones, starts at the entrance to the sanctuary and runs for about three stades eastwards through the city square. Here and there along the side of the road, which ends at the sanctuary of Hermes, there are trees growing which seem to touch the sky. Anyway, that is what this sanctuary is like.
[139] The final departure of the Ethiopian king came about, they said, because he had a dream which caused him to flee. The dream was of a man standing over him and advising him to gather together all the priests in Egypt and cut them in half. His response to the dream was to say that, to his mind, the gods had shown him the dream as a kind of intimation, to make him commit sacrilege and suffer terrible consequences at the hands of gods or men. He refused to do it, he said, and in any case the period of his rule over Egypt, as foretold by the oracles, had come to an end and it was time for him to leave. For while he was in Ethiopia the oracles consulted by the Ethiopians had announced that he was to rule over Egypt for fifty years. Now, since his time was up and the dream had disturbed him, Sabacos voluntarily left Egypt.
[140] After the Ethiopian had left Egypt, the blind king returned from the marshes and resumed his reign. He had lived in the marshes for fifty years on an island built up from ashes and earth, because the Egyptians were under orders to bring him food without Sabacos’ knowledge, and every time one of them did so, the blind king told him to bring him ashes as well, as a gift. Until the time of King Amyrtaeus, no one knew the location of this island; for more than seven hundred years none of the kings before Amyrtaeus was able to find it. Its name is Elbo, and it has a diameter of ten stades.
[141] The next king, they said, was the priest of Hephaestus, whose name was Sethos. He had no respect or regard for the warrior class of Egyptians, because he thought he had no need of them, and one of the ways he insulted them was by depriving them of their plots of land—each of them having held as a special privilege, during the reigns of earlier kings, twelve arouras of land. Some time later, Egypt was invaded by a huge army of Arabians and Assyrians under their king Sennacherib, and the Egyptian warriors refused to help. In desperation, the priest went into the temple, approached the cult statue and protested about the danger he was facing. And in fact, after he had voiced his complaints, he fell asleep and dreamt he saw the god standing over him and telling him not to worry, since nothing terrible would happen to him if he went out to confront the Arabian army, because he would send him allies. Sethos put his trust in this dream. He enlisted any Egyptians who were prepared to follow him and established his position near Pelusium, because this is where the routes into Egypt are; his army consisted of no members of the warrior class, but only retailers, artisans, and traders. The opposing army arrived—but at night a swarm of field-mice gnawed through their quivers and their bows, and the handles of their shields as well, so that the next day, weaponless, all they could do was flee, and their losses were heavy. A stone statue of this king can still be seen today standing in the sanctuary of Hephaestus with a field-mouse in his hand, and on the statue is an inscription which reads: ‘Let all who look on me reverence the gods.’
[142] So far, my account has relied on what I was told by the Egyptians and their priests. They show in their records that there are 341 human generations between the first king of Egypt and this final one, the priest of Hephaestus, and they have a king and a high priest for each of these generations. Now, three hundred human generations make 10,000 years, because there are three generations in a hundred years, and the forty-one remaining generations, on top of the three hundred, make 1,340 years. So throughout these 11,340 years, they said, no god ever appeared in human form; furthermore, nothing like that happened either earlier or later during the reigns of the subsequent kings of Egypt. However, they did tell me that four times during the period in question, the sun changed its usual procedure for rising: twice it rose from the place where it currently sets, and twice it set in the direction where it currently rises. They told me that nothing in Egypt was altered at these times—nothing growing in the earth or living in the river was any different, and there was no change in the course of diseases or in the ways people died.
[143] Some time ago the writer Hecataeus was in Thebes. He had studied his own lineage and had traced his family history back to a divine ancestor in the sixteenth generation. So the priests of Zeus there did to him what they did to me too (not that I had looked into my family history): they took me into the temple, showed me the wooden figures there, and counted them for me, up to the number I have mentioned, since every high priest sets up his own statue in the temple while he is still alive. The priests started with the statue of the one who had died most recently and went through the whole lot, until they had shown them all, and while showing me the statues and counting them out, they demonstrated how in each generation the son succeeded his own father. In response to the fact that Hecataeus’ studies of his lineage had led him back to a divine ancestor in the sixteenth generation, they established an alternative genealogy on the basis of their counting of the statues, and they refused to accept his idea that a human being could be descended from a god. In constructing their alternative genealogy, they claimed that every one of the figures represented a piromis descended from a piromis (in Greek this would be a ‘man of rank’), and they made this claim for every one of the 345 statues they showed him. In other words, they did not connect any of them to either a god or a hero.
[144] They demonstrated, then, that all the people portrayed by these statues were mortal human beings, bearing no relation to gods. They claimed, however, that before these men gods had been the kings of Egypt—that they had lived alongside human beings and that at any given time one of them had been the supreme ruler. The last of these divine kings of Egypt, they said, had been Horus the son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo. He had deposed Typhon and become the last divine king of Egypt. In Greek, Osiris is Dionysus.
[145] In Greece the youngest gods are considered to be Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan, but in Egypt Pan is regarded as one of the Eight Primal Gods (as they are called), and therefore as the oldest of the three, because Heracles is thought to belong to the second group (called the Twelve) and Dionysus to the third group, who were descendants of the Twelve. I have stated earlier how many years there are, according to the Egyptians, from Heracles to the time of King Amasis; Pan is supposed to be even earlier, and although the interval between Dionysus and Amasis is the smallest of the three, they calculate it at fifteen thousand years. The Egyptians claim to have precise knowledge of all this, because they have always kept count of and continuously chronicled the passing years. Now, the Dionysus whose mother is said to have been Semele the daughter of Cadmus was born about sixteen hundred years before my time,† Heracles the son of Alcmene was born about nine hundred years ago, and Pan the son of Penelope (following the Greek account which makes Pan the son of Penelope and Hermes) was born after the Trojan War, or about eight hundred years before my time.
[146] Anyone can adopt whichever of these alternative stories he finds more plausible; in any case, I have stated my own opinion. The point is that if Pan, Heracles, and Dionysus had appeared on the earth and grown old in Greece (not just the Heracles who was the son of Amphitryon, but also the Dionysus who was the son of Semele, and the Pan who was the son of Penelope), one might have said that these others too were men who were named after the gods who came before them. In fact, however, the Greeks say that as soon as Dionysus was born, Zeus sewed him up in his thigh and carried him to Nysa (the one in Ethiopia, south of Egypt). As for Pan, they cannot say what became of him after his birth. So I think it is obvious that the Greeks heard the names of Pan and Dionysus later than they did those of the other gods; they take the time when they first heard about them as the date from which to trace their lineage.
[147] So far, then, my account has relied on what the Egyptians alone say, but now I will report views about this country shared by other people as well as by the Egyptians. This will be supplemented as well by what I personally saw.
The Egyptians found it impossible to live without a king, so no sooner had they won their freedom after the reign of the priest of Hephaestus than they divided the whole country into twelve regions and created a system of twelve kings. These twelve kings intermarried with one another’s families and made it a rule of their kingship that none of them should try to depose any of the others or attempt to gain more territory than any of the others, but that they should be firm friends and allies. The reason why they made this rule, and resolutely upheld it, is that an oracle had declared, at the very beginning of their reigns, that whichever one of them poured a libation in the sanctuary of Hephaestus from a bronze cup would become king of all Egypt. (They used to meet in all the sanctuaries.)
[148] Now, they decided to build monuments together to leave for posterity, and having reached this decision they constructed a labyrinth just beyond the lake of Moeris, very close to the place called Crocodilopolis. I have personally seen it, and it defies description. If someone put together all the strongholds and public monuments of the Greeks, it would be obvious that less labour and money had been expended on them than on this labyrinth—and I say this despite the fact that the temples in Ephesus and Samos are remarkable structures. The pyramids, of course, beggar description and each of them is the equivalent of a number of sizeable Greek edifices, but the labyrinth outstrips even the pyramids. It has twelve roofed courtyards, six in a row to the north and six with their entrances directly opposite them in a row to the south. A single outside wall surrounds them all. The labyrinth has rooms on two levels—an underground level and an above-ground level on top of it—and there are three thousand rooms in all, with each level containing fifteen hundred. I myself went through the ground-level rooms and saw them, and so I speak from firsthand knowledge, but the underground ones were only described to me. The Egyptians who are in charge of the labyrinth absolutely refused to show the underground rooms, on the grounds that there lie the tombs of the kings who originally built the labyrinth and those of the sacred crocodiles as well. So as far as the underground rooms are concerned I can only pass on what I was told, but the upper rooms, which I personally saw, seem almost superhuman edifices. For instance, the corridors from chamber to chamber and the winding passages through the courtyards are so complicated that they were a source of endless amazement; we would pass from a courtyard to some rooms, and from the rooms to colonnades, from where we would move on to other chambers and then find ourselves back at a different set of courtyards. The roof of the whole complex is made out of stone, as are the walls; the walls are covered with carvings of figures; and every colonnaded courtyard is made out of blocks of fitted white stone. By the corner where the labyrinth ends there is a pyramid forty fathoms in height, with huge figures carved on its surface. The approach to the pyramid has been built underground.
[149] Even more astounding than this labyrinth is the lake known as the lake of Moeris, on whose shore the labyrinth stands. The perimeter of the lake is 3,600 stades, or sixty schoeni; in other words, it is as long as the coastline of Egypt itself. The lake is elongated along its north-south axis, and at its deepest point it is fifty fathoms deep. It is obvious that it is an artificial lake and was excavated, because right in the middle there are two pyramids, which rise out of the water to a height of fifty fathoms, with the same amount built underwater; each of them is crowned by a stone figure seated on a throne. So the total height of the pyramids is a hundred fathoms, which is equivalent to a stade of six plethra, since a fathom is six feet (or four cubits, because a foot is four palms and a cubit is six palms). The water in the lake has not come from natural springs (this is a terribly dry region), but has been brought through canals leading from the Nile. For six months of the year the water flows from the Nile into the lake, and for the other six months it flows back out of the lake and into the Nile. Every day, during the six months when the water is flowing out of the lake, the lake deposits a talent of silver into the royal treasury from its fish, but when the water is flowing into the lake, it deposits only twenty minae.
[150] The local inhabitants also said that this lake drains underground into the Gulf of Syrtis in Libya, since the western part of the lake stretches inland along the mountain range which runs south of Memphis. I did not see any earth heaped up anywhere from the excavation of the lake, and that bothered me, so I asked some people who lived right by the lake where the excavated earth was, and they told me where it had been taken. I found their explanation very plausible because I knew by report of something similar happening in the Assyrian city of Ninus. Sardanapallus the son of Ninus, who was the Assyrian king, had great wealth, which he kept in an underground chamber. Some thieves planned to steal the treasure, and they worked out how to tunnel through from their house to the palace. They proceeded to do so; every night they used to carry the earth which they dug out of the tunnel and dump it in the River Tigris on which Ninus stands, and they went on doing this until they had achieved their objective. Something similar, I was told, happened in the case of the soil from the Egyptian lake (except that it was done in the daytime rather than at night): the Egyptians took the earth they dug up and dumped it in the Nile, which would certainly carry it away and disperse it. Anyway, that is how this lake is said to have been excavated.
[151] The time came when the twelve kings (who had been dealing fairly with one another) performed the sacrificial rites in the sanctuary of Hephaestus. On the last day of the festival, when they were due to pour the libations, the high priest brought the usual golden libation cups out for them, but he miscounted and brought out eleven cups for the twelve kings. Since he was without a cup, the one standing at the end of the line—it was Psammetichus—took off his bronze helmet, held it out, and used it for the libation. Now, all the other kings were wearing helmets too and in fact had them on at the time; Psammetichus had held out his helmet without any ulterior motive. But the others noticed what he had done and remembered that the oracle had said that whichever of them used a bronze cup for pouring the libation would be the sole king of Egypt. They interrogated Psammetichus and found that he had acted without premeditation, so they decided that it would be wrong to kill him, but they resolved to strip him of most of his power, exile him to the marshes, and ban him from setting out from the marshes to have anything to do with the rest of Egypt.
[152] This was not the first time that Psammetichus had been in exile: he had once fled from Sabacos the Ethiopian, who had killed his father Necho. On that occasion he had gone to Syria, and he was brought back from there by the inhabitants of the Egyptian province of Saïs when the Ethiopian left as a result of his dream. And then, when he became king for the second time, the incident with the helmet led to his being forced into exile again, this time in the marshes, banished there by the eleven kings. Anyway, he was aware of how badly he had been treated by them, and he kept trying to think of a way to pay them back for driving him away. When he sent a query to the city of Buto, the home of the most reliable Egyptian oracle, he received in return a prophecy to the effect that his revenge would come in the form of bronze men appearing from the sea. The idea of bronze men coming to help him struck him as extremely implausible, but a short while later some Ionian and Carian raiders, who had left home in search of rich pickings, found that they could not avoid being driven on to the coast of Egypt, and disembarked in their bronze armour. An Egyptian who had never before seen men dressed in bronze armour went to the marshes and told Psammetichus that bronze men had come from the sea and were plundering the plain. Psammetichus realized that the oracle was coming true. He got on friendly terms with the Ionians and Carians and, with promises of generous rewards, persuaded them to support him. Then, with the help of his Egyptian partisans and these allies of his, he deposed the kings.
[153] So Psammetichus gained control of all Egypt. He built the southern gateway of the sanctuary of Hephaestus in Memphis, and opposite the gateway of the sanctuary of Apis he built the courtyard where Apis is looked after whenever he appears; this courtyard is surrounded by a colonnade (consisting of figures, twelve cubits high, rather than pillars) and covered with reliefs. The Greek name for Apis is Epaphus.
[154] As a reward to the Ionians and Carians who had helped him win, Psammetichus gave them each their own land to settle; the Ionians were on one side of the Nile, the Carians on the other; these places were called the Encampments. As well as this land, he also gave them everything else he had promised them. In addition, he arranged for some Egyptian children to live with them and learn Greek from them, and the translators who are currently to be found in Egypt are descended from these children with their knowledge of Greek. The Ionians and Carians stayed for quite a long time in the places they had been given, which are located close to the sea, on the Pelusian mouth of the Nile, with the city of Bubastis lying just inland. Later, King Amasis moved them from there and resettled them in Memphis, where they acted as his personal guards to protect him against the Egyptians. They were the first foreigners to live in Egypt, and it is thanks to their residence there that we Greeks have had some connection with the country, and that is how we have reliable information about Egyptian history from the reign of Psammetichus onwards. The slipways for their warships and their ruined houses could still be seen in my day in the places they originally occupied, before they were moved on. So that is how Psammetichus gained control of Egypt.
[155] I have already mentioned the Egyptian oracle a number of times, but I shall now give it the proper account it deserves. It is sacred to Leto and is located in a large city (called Buto, as I have already said) on the Sebennytic mouth of the Nile, on the right as one sails upriver from the sea.† Buto contains a sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis, and the temple of Leto, where the oracle is to be found, is quite big too; its gateway, for instance, is ten fathoms in height. I will mention the most amazing thing I saw there: it was a temple within this precinct of Leto which was made out of a single block of stone (at least, its sides were), with each wall forty cubits long and forty cubits high. Its roof was made out of another block of stone, with cornices measuring four cubits.
[156] So the temple was the most amazing thing I saw in this shrine, but the second most interesting thing was an island called Chemmis. The sanctuary in Buto is by a deep, wide lake, and the island is in this lake; it is said by the Egyptians to be a floating island. I myself never saw it floating or moving, and I wondered, when I was told that it was a floating island, whether it really was. Anyway, on this island is a huge temple of Apollo, and three altars have been set up there as well. There are also a large number of palm-trees growing there, and plenty of other kinds of trees too, both fruit-trees and other sorts. The Egyptians have a story to explain why it is a floating island. The story goes that once upon a time the island was not floating. Leto was one of the Eight Primal Gods and lived in Buto on the site of her oracle. Isis entrusted Apollo to her and when Typhon came, searching everywhere for the son of Osiris, she kept him safe by hiding him on this island, the one that is now supposed to float. They say that Dionysus and Isis are the parents of Apollo and Artemis, and that Leto became their nurse and protector. In Egyptian, Apollo is Horus, Demeter is Isis, and Artemis is Bubastis. It is from this Egyptian version of events—where else?—that Aeschylus the son of Euphorion stole an idea of his which is unique to him (none of the poets who preceded him came up with it): he made Artemis the daughter of Demeter. Anyway, this, according to the Egyptians, is how the island came to float.
[157] Psammetichus’ reign lasted fifty-four years. For twenty-nine of these years he maintained a siege of the great Syrian city of Azotus, until the city fell. Of all the cities we know of, none has ever held out against a siege for as long as Azotus did.
[158] Psammetichus’ son Necho was the next king of Egypt. It was Necho who made the original attempt to dig a canal through to the Red Sea; Darius of Persia, in a second attempt, completed it. The length of the canal is such that it takes four days to sail it, and it has been dug wide enough for two triremes to be rowed abreast along it. Its water is drawn from the Nile, and it runs from just upriver of Bubastis, past the Arabian town of Patumus, and issues into the Red Sea. The first stage of the excavations took place in the Arabian side of the Egyptian plain, just north of the mountain range by Memphis, where the quarries are. In other words, the canal runs at length from west to east past the foothills of this mountain range; it then passes through gorges until, once past the mountains, it heads south and into the Arabian Gulf. Now, the shortest and most direct route from the northern sea to the southern sea (or the Red Sea, as it is known) is from Mount Casius which is on the border between Egypt and Syria; from there it is exactly one thousand stades to the Arabian Gulf. Although this is the most direct route, the canal is considerably longer, because its course is quite crooked. During the excavation of the canal that was dug in King Necho’s time, 120,000 Egyptians died. Necho’s digging of the canal was halted by an adverse oracle to the effect that he was doing the barbarian’s work ahead of time. The Egyptians refer to anyone who does not speak the same language as them as a barbarian.
[159] After the halting of his work on the canal, Necho turned to military ventures. He had triremes constructed on the northern sea, and others in the Arabian Gulf by the Red Sea; the slipways are still visible. He used these ships as occasion demanded, and he also engaged the Syrians on land, won a battle at Magdolus, and then took the important Syrian city of Cadytis. He sent to Branchidae in Miletus the clothes which he happened to be wearing during this successful campaign against the Syrians, and dedicated them to Apollo. He died after a reign of sixteen years in all, and was succeeded by his son Psammis.
[160] During King Psammis’ reign, a delegation of Eleans came to Egypt to boast that the fairest and finest institution in the world was their own Olympic Games, and to claim that not even the Egyptians, for all their superlative wisdom, could come up with anything comparable. When they arrived in Egypt and stated the purpose of their visit, Psammis convened a meeting of all the Egyptians with the greatest reputation for wisdom, who then put questions to the Eleans on everything that pertained to their management of the games. After their thorough account, they said that they had come to Egypt to find out whether the Egyptians could come up with a fairer system than the current one. The Egyptians thought about the matter for a while and then asked the Eleans whether their own fellow citizens took part in the games. They replied that anyone who wanted to could take part in the games, whether he was from their city or anywhere else in Greece. The Egyptians pointed out that the system was therefore not entirely fair, since there was no provision to avoid bias in favour of one of their own citizens, which was unfair to competitors from elsewhere. They added that if the Eleans wanted to have a fair system and if that was really why they had come to Egypt, they should make the games open to competitors from elsewhere, but ban Eleans altogether. That was the Egyptians’ advice to the Eleans.
[161] Psammis’ reign lasted only six years; he died shortly after invading Ethiopia and was succeeded by his son Apries. Apart from his forebear Psammetichus, there was no earlier king who was more fortunate than Apries. He ruled for twenty-five years, and in the course of his reign he attacked Sidon and fought a sea-battle against the king of Tyre. However, he was destined to come to a bad end; I will describe the circumstances of this more fully when I come to my account of Libya, but for the moment here is the gist of it. Apries launched a major strike against Cyrene which was a disastrous failure. The Egyptians held him responsible for the disaster and rebelled against him; they believed that Apries had deliberately sent them to certain death, so that after their destruction, with fewer subjects left to rule over, his reign would be more secure. The survivors who returned home from Cyrene took this hard: they combined with the friends of those who had met their deaths and rose up in open rebellion.
[162] When news of the insurrection reached Apries, he sent Amasis to calm the rebels down by negotiating with them. Amasis went to the rebels and set about restraining them from their actions, but his speech was interrupted by one of the men standing behind him putting a helmet on to his head. The man said that he had put it on him as a sign of kingship. Amasis showed that this was not altogether displeasing to him by beginning to prepare a campaign against Apries, once the rebels had set him up as king of Egypt. When Apries found out what was going on, he sent as a herald to Amasis an eminent Egyptian who was loyal to him, whose name was Patarbemis, with instructions to escort Amasis back to him alive. Patarbemis approached Amasis and issued the king’s command, but Amasis, who happened to be on horseback at the time, lifted himself up in the saddle, farted, and told him to take that back to Apries. The story goes that Patarbemis persevered and insisted that he should obey the king’s summons and go to him; Amasis replied that he would not disappoint Apries—he had been getting ready to pay him a visit for a long time, and he would bring others with him when he came. Patarbemis had listened to Amasis’ words and seen the measures he was taking; he was left in little doubt as to his intentions, so he left in a hurry, since he was anxious to let the king know as soon as possible what was happening. When he returned without Amasis, however, Apries did not give him a chance to speak, but flew into a rage and ordered his men to cut off Patarbemis’ ears and nose. But when the rest of the Egyptians, who had so far remained loyal to Apries, saw the shocking brutality with which one of their number—and a particularly eminent person too—was being treated, they wasted no time in defecting to the other side and putting themselves at Amasis’ disposal.
[163] When Apries heard about this latest turn of events, he mobilized his mercenary troops and marched against the Egyptians. (He had a personal guard of thirty thousand Carian and Ionian mercenary forces, and a large and remarkable palace in Saïs.) So Apries’ troops were fighting Egyptians and Amasis’ troops were fighting foreigners. The two sides drew up at the town of Momemphis and prepared for combat.
[164] There are seven classes of people in Egyptian society; they are called priests, warriors, cowherds, swineherds, retailers, translators, and pilots. So each of the seven classes is named after a profession. The warrior class consists of subdivisions called the Calasiries and the Hermotybies, and each of these two subdivisions comes from different provinces (the whole of Egypt being divided into provinces).
[165] The Hermotybies come from the provinces of Busiris, Saïs, Chemmis, Papremis, Prosopitis Island, and half of Natho. When their numbers were greatest, there were 160,000 Hermotybies, all from these provinces. None of them has to learn any manual trade, so that they can dedicate themselves to warfare.
[166] The Calasiries come from the provinces of Thebes, Bubastis, Aphthis, Tanis, Mendes, Sebennys, Athribis, Pharbaethus, Thmouis, Onouphis, Anytis, and Myecphoris (which is situated on an island opposite Bubastis). When their numbers were greatest, there were 250,000 Calasiries, all from these provinces. They are not allowed to practise any trade either and are trained solely in military activities, with son succeeding father.
[167] I cannot say for certain whether or not this is another thing the Greeks learnt from Egypt, because I see that the Thracians, Scythians, Persians, Lydians, and almost every non-Greek people also regard those who learn a trade and their descendants as the lowest stratum of society, as opposed to those who have nothing to do with artisanship and especially those who concentrate on warfare. However that may be, all the Greeks have adopted this attitude, with artisans coming in for the most contempt in Lacedaemon, and the least in Corinth.
[168] The warrior class had certain special privileges, in common only with the priestly caste. Each of them was awarded twelve arouras of land, free of tax. An aroura is a measure of one hundred square Egyptian cubits (an Egyptian cubit being the same length as a Samian cubit). They all received this amount of land as a perquisite, but they farmed it in rotation: the same person never farmed the same piece of land year after year. A thousand Calasiries and another thousand Hermotybies made up the king’s personal guard each year. In addition to their plots of land, these guards were also given a daily ration of five minas in weight of cooked grain, two minas of beef, and four arysteres of wine. Every member of the king’s guard received this ration.
[169] So the two sides—Apries with his mercenaries and Amasis with all the Egyptians—met and fought at Momemphis. The mercenaries fought well, but the vastly superior numbers they were up against ensured their defeat. Apries is said to have believed that his reign was so securely established that not even a god could depose him. And so when he came to fight this battle, he was defeated, captured, and taken to Saïs, to what had formerly been his own house, but was now the palace of Amasis. For a while Amasis let him stay in the palace and treated him well, but eventually the Egyptians complained that it was wrong of Amasis to look after someone who had been such a bitter enemy of theirs and of his. So Amasis handed Apries over to the Egyptians, who strangled him and buried him in his family tomb. This tomb can be found right next to the temple in the sanctuary of Athena, on the left-hand side as you enter. The people of Saïs buried all the kings who came from this province in this sanctuary. In fact, although Amasis’ tomb is further from the temple than the tombs of Apries and his ancestors, it too is still within the courtyard of the sanctuary; his tomb is a huge stone colonnade, lavishly decorated with, for instance, columns made to look like palm-trees. There are two doorways set into this colonnade, and behind these doors is the actual tomb.
[170] Saïs also holds the tomb of the god whose name it would be sacrilegious of me to mention in this context; it is in the sanctuary of Athena, behind the temple, along the entire length of one of the walls of the sanctuary. The precinct contains some tall stone obelisks as well, near which is a pond which has been embellished with a stone border and is well shaped into a circle; the size of the pond, I should say, is the same as the so-called Round Pond on Delos.
[171] It is on this pond that the Egyptians put on, by night, a performance of the god’s sufferings, which the Egyptians call the mystery-rites. Although I am familiar with the details of this performance and how each part of it goes, I will keep silence. And as for the rites sacred to Demeter, which the Greeks call the Thesmophoria, I will again keep silence, except for what it is acceptable to say. It was the daughters of Danaus who brought this rite from Egypt and taught it to the Pelasgian women. Then the rite was lost in the aftermath of the general exodus from the Peloponnese as a result of the Dorian invasion, and its preservation is due entirely to the Arcadians, who were the only Peloponnesians to remain where they were without being driven from their homes.
[172] Following the downfall of Apries, Amasis became king. He came from the province of Saïs, from a town called Siouph. At first the Egyptians despised Amasis and did not rate him very highly, because he had previously been a commoner and from an undistinguished house. But this did not make Amasis vengeful, and eventually he found a clever way to earn their esteem. He had countless possessions, and among them was a golden foot-bath, in which Amasis himself and all his dinner guests used on occasion to wash their feet. He scrapped this foot-bath and had a statue of a god made from it, which he erected in an ideal location, where the Egyptians used to come up and treat it with great reverence. When Amasis found out about their behaviour, he summoned the Egyptians to a meeting. He let them know that the statue had been made out of a foot-bath, in which they had previously vomited and urinated and washed their feet as well, but which they now greatly venerated. He went on to say that he and this foot-bath had had very similar experiences, in the sense that even if he had previously been a commoner, yet now he was their king, and so they should treat him with respect and honour. That was how he convinced the Egyptians that it was reasonable to accept him as their master.
[173] He used to order his affairs as follows. From early until mid-morning he devoted himself to the business matters which were brought to his attention, and then after that he used to drink and joke with his drinking-companions, loaf around, and play games. Some of his friends did not approve of this behaviour and told him off. ‘My lord,’ they said, ‘this frittering away of your time is not the way to order your life. You should spend your days seated in majesty on your high throne, attending to business. Then the Egyptians would know what a great man they had for a ruler, and your reputation would improve as well. But at the moment you’re not behaving like a king at all.’
His response was as follows: ‘People with bows string them when they need to use them and unstring them when they’ve finished with them. If they kept them strung all the time, the bows would break, and then they wouldn’t be able to use them when they needed them. It is no different with people’s temperaments. Anyone who is serious all the time and never allows himself a fair measure of relaxation will imperceptibly slide into madness or at least have a stroke. I am well aware of this, and that’s why I divide my time between the two.’ That was his reply to his friends’ criticism.
[174] It is said that even when Amasis was an ordinary citizen he was fond of a drink and a joke, and not at all serious, to the point that he would even go around stealing if he ran out of supplies of drink and whatever else he needed to have a good time. The people who claimed he had their property would take him, protesting his innocence, to an oracle, wherever there happened to be one; often the oracles convicted him and often he got off. Now, when he became king, he ignored the sanctuaries of the deities who had acquitted him of theft; he refused to give them anything for their upkeep or to go there to perform the sacrificial rites, on the grounds that these deities were worthless and had deceitful oracles. However, he lavished attention on the gods who had convicted him of theft, on the grounds that they were authentic gods and vouchsafed men true oracles.
[175] He built, in the first place, such a wonderful gateway to the sanctuary of Athena in Saïs that he outdid everyone else by far, considering its height and dimensions, and the quantity and quality of its stone. Then he also erected some huge statues and massive man-headed sphinx figures, and contributed to the repair of the sanctuary by having further blocks of stone taken there, some from the quarries in Memphis, but others, extraordinarily huge in size, from Elephantine, which is as much as twenty days’ sailing from Saïs. But by far the most remarkable of his building works, to my mind, is a chamber hewn from a single block of stone that he brought from Elephantine. Transporting it took three years, and two thousand men (all from the pilot class) were assigned to the task. The external dimensions of this chamber are twenty-one cubits in length, fourteen cubits in width, and eight cubits in height; inside the single block of stone (as opposed to its external measurements) it is eighteen cubits and one pygon long, twelve cubits wide, and five cubits high. This chamber is situated outside the sanctuary, next to the entrance. They say that they did not drag it inside the sanctuary because during the process of hauling it inside the foreman let out a groan at how much time had gone into the project and how weary he was, and Amasis took it to heart† and would not allow the stone to be dragged further. However, there is also an alternative version of the story, according to which one of the workmen was crushed to death under the chapel as he was operating one of the levers, and that is why it was not hauled inside.
[176] Amasis erected remarkably large pieces at all the other notable sanctuaries in Egypt as well. They include the 75-foot figure which is lying on its back in front of the sanctuary of Hephaestus in Memphis. On the same base stand two figures made out of the same stone,† each of which is twenty feet in height and which stand one to either side of the huge figure. There is also another stone figure the same size in Saïs, which is lying just like the one in Memphis. Amasis built the enormous and remarkable sanctuary of Isis in Memphis as well.
[177] Amasis’ reign is said to have marked a high point in Egypt’s fortunes in terms of what the river gave to the land and what the land gave to the people; there are also said to have been, in all, twenty thousand inhabited cities in Egypt in his time. Moreover, it was Amasis who ordained that every year every Egyptian should divulge how he made a living to the governor of his province, and decreed the death penalty for anyone who failed to do this or who could not show that he made a living in an honest fashion. Solon of Athens took this law over from Egypt and made it part of the legal system in Athens, where they should let it remain in force for ever, because it is an excellent law.
[178] Amasis became a philhellene and one of the ways he showed this, among the various favours he did Greeks, was to give them the city of Naucratis as a place where any Greeks who came to stay in Egypt could live. Moreover, any Greeks who made voyages to the country without wishing to settle were given plots of land where they could set up altars and precincts to their gods. The largest of these precincts, as well as being the most famous and popular, is called the Hellenium, whose foundation was a joint venture undertaken by a number of Greek communities. The Ionian places involved were Chios, Teos, Phocaea, and Clazomenae; the Dorian communities involved were Rhodes, Cnidos, Halicarnassus, and Phaselis; and the only Aeolian town involved was Mytilene. These are the cities to which the precinct belongs (they also supply the officers who are in charge of the trading-centre), and any other communities which lay claim to it are making a claim to something they have no share in. However, precincts sacred to Zeus, Hera, and Apollo were built separately by Aegina, Samos, and Miletus respectively.
[179] Originally, there was no other trading-centre in Egypt apart from Naucratis. If someone fetched up at any of the other mouths of the Nile, he had to swear that he had not done so deliberately, and then after making this statement under oath bring his ship round to the Canobic mouth. Alternatively, if contrary winds made it impossible for him to take his ship round, he had to transport his goods around the Delta by baris and get to Naucratis that way. That is how important Naucratis was.
[180] When the Amphictyons contracted to build the present temple at Delphi, after the earlier one had accidentally burnt down, the Delphians undertook to provide a quarter of the funds. Delphian delegations travelled from place to place on a fund-raising tour, and the most generous response to this appeal of theirs came from Egypt. Amasis gave them a thousand talents of alum, and the Greek community in Egypt gave them twenty minas of alum.
[181] Amasis also entered into a treaty of friendship and alliance with the Cyreneans. He decided to marry someone from there as well, either because he wanted a Greek wife or generally to confirm his good relations with the people of Cyrene. Anyway, the woman he married was called Ladice, and she was the daughter (depending on which account one follows) either of Battus the son of Arcesilaus or of an eminent Cyrenean called Critobulus. Now, whenever Amasis came to her bed, he found himself incapable of having intercourse, although he could do it with his other wives. After this had been going on for a while, Amasis said to Ladice, ‘Woman, you have bewitched me. There is no way now for you not to die the most horrible death a woman has ever suffered.’
Ladice denied the charge, but she could not calm Amasis down, so she mentally prayed to Aphrodite and vowed that if Amasis had sex with her then and there, that very night, which would solve the problem, she would send a statue of the goddess to Cyrene. No sooner had she finished her prayer than Amasis had sex with her, and from then on, whenever he came to her, he had sex with her; in fact, he was particularly fond of her after this. Meanwhile, Ladice kept her promise to the goddess. She had a statue made and sent it to Cyrene, and it was still intact in my day at its location outside the town. Another thing that happened to Ladice was that when Cambyses conquered Egypt and found out from her who she was, he sent her back to Cyrene without doing her any harm.
[182] Amasis also dedicated votive offerings in Greece—first, in Cyrene, a statue of Athena overlaid with gold and a painted portrait of himself; second, for Athena in Lindos, two stone statues and a remarkable linen breastplate; third, for Hera in Samos, two wooden statues of himself, which could still be found in my day behind the doors in the great temple. It was because of his guest-friendship with Polycrates the son of Aeaces that he presented these items to Samos, but the gifts to Lindos were not due to any such relationship, but because the sanctuary of Athena in Lindos is supposed to have been founded by the daughters of Danaus when they landed there during their flight from the sons of Aegyptus. These were Amasis’ votive offerings. He was also the first person to conquer Cyprus and to make it a tribute-paying subject state.