Histories — Book 2 (Euterpe)

Herodotus · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

Upon Cyrus's death, Cambyses took over the kingship, being Cyrus's son by Cassandane, daughter of Pharnaspes; her death, which occurred earlier, had caused Cyrus himself deep grief, and he had commanded every one of his subjects to observe mourning for her too. So Cambyses, son of this woman and of Cyrus, treated the Ionians and Aeolians as slaves inherited from his father and launched a military expedition against Egypt,

taking along others of his subjects, and in particular the Greeks he ruled. Now the Egyptians, before Psammetichus became their king, believed that they themselves were the first of all people to come into being. But when Psammetichus, having become king, wished to know who had been first, from that time on they believed the Phrygians had come into being before themselves, and all other peoples after themselves. Psammetichus, since he was unable by inquiry to find any way

to discover who the first people had been, devised the following scheme. He gave two newborn children of ordinary parents to a herdsman to raise among his flocks, with instructions of a certain kind: no one was to utter any word in their presence; they were to be left lying by themselves in a lonely hut; at the proper time he was to bring goats to them, and having satisfied them with milk, tend to the rest of his business. Psammetichus did and ordered these things

because he wanted to hear, once the children were past their meaningless babbling, what word they would burst out with first. And this is exactly what happened. For after a span of two years had passed with the herdsman doing this, one day as he opened the door and went in, both children fell before him and said 'bekos,' stretching out their hands. The first time he heard this, the herdsman kept quiet about it, but since it kept happening again and again as he came and tended to them,

and this word was repeated so much, at last he reported it to his master and, at his command, brought the children into his presence. Psammetichus himself, having heard it, inquired who called anything 'bekos,' and inquiring further he discovered that the Phrygians call bread by that name. On these grounds the Egyptians conceded, having judged the matter by such evidence, that the Phrygians were older than themselves. That this is how it happened I heard from the priests of

Hephaestus in Memphis. The Greeks, however, tell many other foolish stories, among them that Psammetichus had the tongues of certain women cut out and had the children raised in that manner in the company of these women. So much did they tell me concerning the rearing of the children; but I heard other things too when I went to Memphis and spoke with the priests of Hephaestus. Indeed,

I turned aside to Thebes and to the City of the Sun for this same purpose, hoping to learn whether their reports would match what I had heard at Memphis; for the people of the City of the Sun have a reputation as the best-informed of all Egyptians. As for what they told me concerning divine matters, I have little wish to lay it all out, apart from just naming the gods, since I take it that everyone understands such things equally well; but as for

I do bring up any of it, I will only do so because my narrative leaves me no choice. When it comes to human affairs, though, this is what they said, and here their stories matched: the Egyptians were the very first people anywhere to work out the year, splitting it into twelve segments corresponding to the seasons. They claimed to have worked this out from observing the stars; and to my mind their method beats the Greek one, in that the Greeks add an extra month every third year to keep pace with the seasons, whereas the Egyptians

count the twelve months at thirty days apiece, then tack on five extra days each year beyond that total, so that for them the cycle of seasons returns to its starting point exactly. They also said the Egyptians were the very first to fix names for the twelve gods, which the Greeks then borrowed from them; that the Egyptians were the first to dedicate altars, statues, and temples to the gods, and the first to carve animal figures into stone. And regarding these matters,

most, in fact, they showed had really happened that way. They said that the first man to become king of Egypt was Min, and that in his time all of Egypt except the Thebaic district was marsh, and none of the land now lying below Lake Moeris existed above water, the voyage up the river to that place from the sea being seven days. And what they told me about the

land struck me, too, as sound; for it is obvious even without hearing it beforehand, to anyone with sense who simply looks — that the Egypt the Greeks sail to is territory the Egyptians gained and a present from the river, and this applies also to the region beyond this lake as far as a three-day sail, about which the priests told me nothing more of this sort, though the same holds true. For the character of the

land is this. First: while you are still approaching by ship, a full day's sail from shore, drop a sounding-line and you will pull up mud, finding yourself in eleven fathoms. This alone reveals just how far the silt deposits of the land extend outward. Next, the length of Egypt itself along the coastline runs sixty schoinoi, by our reckoning of Egypt stretching from the Plinthinete Gulf to Lake Serbonis, beside

which Mount Casius stretches; from this point, then, the sixty schoinoi are reckoned. Those peoples who are short of land measure their country in fathoms, those who have somewhat less shortage in stadia, those who have much land in parasangs, and those who have land to excess in schoinoi. A parasang is equal to thirty stadia, and the schoinos, an Egyptian measure, is equal to sixty stadia. So the coastline of Egypt

would be three thousand six hundred stadia. From there inland as far as Heliopolis, Egypt is wide, all of it flat, waterlogged, and muddy. The road from the sea up to Heliopolis is about the same length as the road from Athens, from the altar of the twelve gods, leading to Pisa

and to the temple of Olympian Zeus. One who calculated it would find the difference between these two roads to be small, not more than fifteen stadia in length; for the road from Athens to Pisa falls short of one thousand five hundred stadia by fifteen, while the road from the sea to Heliopolis comes to that exact number.

From Heliopolis upward, Egypt is narrow. On one side the mountain range of Arabia stretches, running from north to south and always further, up toward the sea called the Red Sea; in this range are the stone quarries from which the pyramids at Memphis were cut. There the range ends and bends back to where I have said; on the other side,

where it is at its very longest, as I learned by inquiry, it takes two months to travel from east to west, and its eastern extremities produce frankincense. Such, then, is this mountain range. On the Libyan side of Egypt another mountain range stretches, a rocky one, in which the pyramids are, covered over with sand, running in the same

manner as the part of the Arabian range that runs toward the south. Now from Heliopolis the land is no longer wide as Egypt goes, but for about fourteen days' sail up the river Egypt is narrow, the land between the mountain ranges mentioned being flat; and the stadia seemed to me to be, where it is narrowest, not more than two hundred, from the

Arabian mountains to the one called the Libyan. Beyond that, again, Egypt is wide. Such, then, is the nature of this land. From Heliopolis to Thebes is a voyage upstream of nine days, the distance being four thousand eight hundred sixty stadia, there being eighty-one schoinoi. Adding up these stadia of Egypt, the coastal part I have

already stated above at three thousand six hundred stades; and I will now note the distance from the sea inland as far as Thebes: it comes to six thousand one hundred twenty stades. From Thebes to the city called Elephantine measures one thousand eight hundred stades. Of this territory just described, the greater part, according to what the priests told me,

seemed to me too to be land acquired by the Egyptians. For the region between the mountain ranges mentioned, which lie above the city of Memphis, appeared to me once to have been a gulf of the sea, just as, to compare small things with great, the region around Ilium and Teuthrania and Ephesus and the plain of the Maeander are. For of the rivers that have silted up those regions,

the Nile, having five mouths, none of them can be matched in volume to even a single one of them. There are also other rivers, smaller than the Nile, that have nonetheless produced great effects: among them I can name several, not least the Achelous, which runs through Acarnania and, emptying into the sea, has already converted half the Echinades islands into dry land. There is,

also, within Arabian territory, a short distance from Egypt, an arm of the sea that reaches inland from what is called the Red Sea, remarkably long and narrow, as I shall describe: its length, measured from the innermost point out to the open sea, takes forty days by oar; its width, at the gulf's broadest point, spans half a day's sail. And within it the tide rises and falls

every single day. I think that Egypt too was once a gulf of just this kind, the one running in from the northern sea toward Ethiopia, and the other, the Arabian one which I am about to describe, running in from the southern sea toward Syria — their inner ends nearly boring through to meet each other, differing only slightly in position. If, then, the Nile

should wish to divert its course into this Arabian gulf, what is there to prevent it from being silted up by this river's flow within, say, twenty thousand years? For my part, I expect it could be silted up even within ten thousand years. If that is so, then in the time that has already elapsed before I was born, could not a gulf even much larger than this one have been silted up by so great and so hard-working a river?

Regarding Egypt, then, I am convinced those who make this claim are correct, and I myself am strongly of the same opinion, having observed that Egypt projects out beyond the surrounding land, that shells turn up on the mountains, and that a crust of salt forms on the surface strong enough to corrode even the pyramids, and that the only mountain in Egypt bearing sand is the one above Memphis; moreover, that its soil bears no resemblance to neighboring Arabia,

and Egypt bears no resemblance to Libya, nor to Syria either (since the coastal stretch of Arabia is settled by Syrians), but rather its earth is dark and fissured, being in fact mud and silt carried down from Ethiopia by the river. We know, by contrast, that Libyan soil runs redder and sandier, while Arabian and Syrian soil is more clay-like and stony.

This, too, the priests told me as a great proof concerning this land: that in the reign of King Moeris, whenever the river rose as little as eight cubits, it would irrigate the Egypt that lies below Memphis; and Moeris had not yet been dead nine hundred years when I heard this from the priests. But now, if the river does not rise at least sixteen or fifteen cubits,

it does not overflow onto the land. And it seems to me that the Egyptians who live below Lake Moeris, in the other regions and especially in the area called the Delta, if this land continues in due proportion to increase in height and grows correspondingly in extent, then, once the Nile no longer floods it, they will for all the rest of time suffer the very thing which they themselves once said the Greeks

would suffer. For having learned that the whole land of the Greeks is watered by rain and not by rivers as their own is, they said that the Greeks would one day be disappointed of a great hope and suffer badly from hunger. What this saying means to convey is that, if the god is unwilling to send them rain but instead afflicts them with drought, the Greeks will be overtaken by famine; for indeed

for them there is no other source of water apart from Zeus alone. This much has been fairly said by the Egyptians regarding the Greeks; but let me now lay out how things stand for the Egyptians themselves: if, as I noted earlier, the land below Memphis (which is the part still expanding) should continue to rise in elevation at the same rate as in the time gone by,

surely nothing else could happen but that the Egyptians who live there would go hungry, if their land gets no rain and the river is unable to overflow onto the fields. As it is now, certainly, these people harvest crops from the earth with less toil than anyone else in the world, including the rest of the Egyptians: they have no toil breaking open furrows with a plow, nor hoeing,

performing none of the labor other peoples put into raising a crop; instead, once the river rises on its own, floods the fields, and then withdraws again, each farmer sows his own plot and drives swine over it, and once the swine have trampled the seed into the soil, he simply waits for the harvest; then, after threshing the grain with the same swine, he brings it in.

Now if we wish to adopt the opinion of the Ionians about Egypt, who say that only the Delta is Egypt, reckoning its seaward part from the so-called Watchtower of Perseus all the way to the Salting-houses of Pelusium, a stretch of forty schoinoi, and saying that from the sea it extends inland as far as the city of Cercasorus, where the Nile splits and flows toward Pelusium

flowing on toward Canopus, and claiming that the remainder of what makes up Egypt belongs partly to Libya and partly to Arabia — by this reasoning we would be showing that the Egyptians once had no land of their own. Their Delta, as the Egyptians themselves claim and as I too believe, is ground built up by river deposit and has appeared, one might say, only in recent times. If, then, they had

no land of their own to begin with, why did they bother imagining themselves the first people ever to exist? Nor would they have needed to run their experiment on the infants, to discover which language the children would speak first. But I do not think the Egyptians came into existence at the same moment as the Delta the Ionians describe, nor that they have been around since humanity itself began; rather, as the land kept extending, some of them stayed put where they already were while others kept moving further down.

At any rate, in ancient times Thebes was called Egypt, and its circuit is six thousand one hundred and twenty stadia. If then we judge rightly about these matters, the Ionians are not thinking correctly about Egypt; but if the Ionians' opinion is correct, I demonstrate that the Greeks, the Ionians themselves included, do not know how to calculate, since they say the whole earth consists of three parts, Europe

and Asia and Libya. They would need to count a fourth region as well, the Delta of Egypt, if it belongs to neither Asia nor Libya; for by this reasoning the Nile can hardly be the river marking the border between Asia and Libya, since the Nile forks around the tip of this Delta, leaving the Delta positioned between Asia

and Libya. As for the Ionians' view, we set it aside, and instead we hold the following position: all the territory inhabited by Egyptians counts as Egypt, just as Cilicia is what the Cilicians inhabit and Assyria what the Assyrians inhabit, and we recognize no genuine boundary between Asia and Libya other than the frontiers of Egypt. But if

we adopt the usage current among the Greeks, we will treat all of Egypt as split in two starting from the Cataracts and the city of Elephantine, with each half claiming both names; part belongs to Libya, part to Asia. For the Nile, starting at the Cataracts, runs down through the center of Egypt, dividing it, all the way to the sea. Up to the city of Cercasorus it flows as one single channel,

but from that city it splits into three channels. One turns toward the east, and this is called the Pelusiac mouth; the second of the channels runs toward the west, and this is called the Canopic mouth. But the straight course of the Nile among these channels is this one: coming down from above, it reaches the point of the Delta, and from

from there splitting the Delta down the middle, it empties into the sea, carrying a share of water that is neither smallest nor least famous; this branch is called the Sebennytic mouth. Two further mouths branch off from the Sebennytic and also reach the sea; they bear the names Saitic for one and Mendesian for the other. The Bolbitine and Bucolic mouths are not natural

mouths but dug channels. Supporting my opinion that Egypt is as large as I show it to be by my account is also the oracle of Ammon, which I learned of after forming my own opinion about Egypt. For the people from the city of Marea and from Apis, who inhabit the parts of Egypt bordering on Libya, believing themselves to be Libyans and not Egyptians

and, resenting the religious restrictions on sacrifice, not wanting to be forbidden from eating female cattle, they sent word to Ammon claiming they had nothing whatsoever in common with the Egyptians; for they lived outside the Delta and shared no customs with them, and wished to be free to eat anything at all. The god, however, would not permit them to do this, declaring that this land was Egypt, the very land the Nile

waters as it comes over it, and that those were Egyptians who lived below the city of Elephantine and drank from this river. Thus was this oracle given to them. And when it is in flood, the Nile overflows not only the Delta but also, in places, parts of what is called the Libyan region and the Arabian, for a distance of two days' journey on each side, and sometimes more than this and sometimes less. As for the nature of the river,

I was unable to learn anything either from the priests or from anyone else. But I was eager to learn this much from them, why the Nile comes down in flood, beginning at the summer solstice, for a hundred days, and then, drawing near to the end of that number of days, recedes again, falling short in its stream, so that it remains low throughout the whole winter until

the summer solstice comes around once more. On none of these points was I able to get any answer from the Egyptians when I asked them what makes the Nile behave contrary to every other river; and hoping to understand what I have just described, I also asked why it alone among rivers gives off no breezes. Yet certain Greeks, eager to appear clever,

have put forward three different accounts concerning this water; two of these accounts I hardly think deserve mention, except to point them out in passing: one holds that the etesian winds cause the river to swell by blocking the Nile from draining into the sea. Yet the etesian winds have often failed to blow at all, and still the Nile behaves the same way. Furthermore,

if the etesian winds were the cause, then the other rivers too, all those that flow against the etesian winds, ought to be affected in the same way and to the same degree as the Nile, and all the more so as, being smaller, they have weaker currents. But there are many rivers in Syria and many in Libya which are affected by nothing of the sort that affects the Nile.

The second explanation is less scientific than the one just mentioned, though more remarkable to tell: it holds that the Nile's behavior comes from its flowing out of the Ocean, a stream that circles the whole earth. The third of the explanations, though by far the most plausible, is nonetheless the most mistaken of all; for it too says nothing true, claiming that the Nile flows from melting snow — a river which flows from

through the middle of Libya, through the Ethiopians, and comes out into Egypt. How then could it flow from snow, given that its course runs mostly from the hottest regions toward cooler ones? For a man capable of reasoning about such things, it is not even plausible that it flows from snow, and the winds provide the first and greatest proof of this, blowing hot as they do from these regions; second,

that the country continues rainless and without frost, and after snow falls it is absolutely necessary that rain fall within five days, meaning that snowfall in those regions would necessarily bring rain there as well; and third, the people are black from the heat. Kites and swallows remain there the whole year and do not leave, while cranes, fleeing the winter that occurs in Scythia,

migrate to these regions to winter there. If then it snowed at all in this country through which the Nile flows and from which it begins its course, none of these things would happen, as necessity proves. As for the man who spoke of Ocean, having carried his account back into the realm of the unseen, he offers no proof: for I myself know of

no river called Ocean existing, but I think Homer, or one of the poets who came earlier, coined the name himself and worked it into his verse. If, having found fault with the opinions put forward, I must myself declare an opinion about these obscure matters, I will explain why I think the Nile rises in summer: in the winter season the sun, driven from its former course by the

storms, travels over the upper parts of Libya. To put it as briefly as possible, that is the whole matter: for whatever country this god is nearest to and directly over, it stands to reason that that country is most thirsty for water, and the local streams of its rivers shrink. But to explain it at greater length, this is how it is. As the sun passes over the upper parts of Libya,

it does this: since the air in those regions is clear at all times and the country is warm and the winds are cold, in passing over it does what it is accustomed to do in summer when passing through the middle of the sky: it draws the water to itself, and having drawn it, it pushes it away into the upper regions, and the

winds take it up and scatter it and it dissolves; and it makes sense that the winds blowing from that region, the south wind and the southwest wind, are by far the rainiest of all winds. And it seems to me that the sun does not send away all of the Nile's water year by year, but retains some of it as well. When the winter grows mild, the sun departs back to the middle of the sky,

and from then on it draws equally from all rivers alike. Meanwhile the other rivers, having much rainwater mixed in with them, since the land is rained upon and cut with ravines, flow in flood; but in summer, when the rains fail them and they are drawn upon by the sun, they run weak. The Nile, however, having no rain and being drawn upon by the sun,

alone of rivers at that time, naturally flows itself much lower than in summer: for then it shares its draw evenly among all the waters, yet in winter it bears the strain alone. Thus I have come to believe the sun is the cause of these things. This same sun, in my opinion, is also the cause of the air there being dry, since it scorches its own path; and so

summer holds the upper parts of Libya continually. But if the position of the seasons had been reversed, and where the north wind and winter now stand in the sky, there the south wind and the midday position had stood instead, and where the south wind now stands, there the north wind stood — if this were so, the sun, driven

from the middle of the sky by the winter storm and the north wind, would travel over the upper parts of Europe just as it now travels over Libya, and passing through the whole of Europe I expect it would do to the Danube what it now does to the Nile. As for the breeze, why it does not blow off the river, I hold this opinion: it is not plausible that any breeze

should blow off very hot regions at all; a breeze tends to blow from something cold. So let these matters stand as they are and as they were from the beginning. As for the sources of the Nile, no one — neither Egyptian, nor Libyan, nor any Greek that I have talked with — has claimed to know them, except in Egypt, in the city of Sais, the scribe in charge of the sacred treasures of

Athena. He, it seemed to me, was joking when he claimed to know for certain. This is what he said: there are two mountains with peaks rising to a sharp point, one lying near the city of Syene in the Thebaid, the other near Elephantine, and the mountains are named Crophi and Mophi; the sources of the Nile, being bottomless, flow from between these mountains,

and half the water flows toward Egypt and the north wind, while the other half flows toward Ethiopia and the south. As proof that the springs are bottomless, he said that Psammetichus, king of Egypt, once made trial of this: for he had a rope woven of many thousand fathoms and let it down there, and it did not reach bottom. So said the scribe,

if indeed he was describing things that actually occur — showing me, as far as I could understand, that there are certain strong eddies there and a backflow, so that, since the water strikes against the mountains, the sounding-line let down cannot reach bottom. From no one else was I able to learn anything at all. But this much further, the farthest extent, I learned: as far as the city of Elephantine I went myself and saw with my own eyes, and beyond that I inquired only

by hearsay. Going upward from the city of Elephantine the land rises steeply: there one must tie ropes to the boat on both sides and proceed as with an ox; and if the boat breaks loose, it is carried off by the force of the current. This region is a four days' voyage, and the Nile there winds like the Maeander; there are twelve schoinoi

which one must sail through in this manner. And then you will arrive at a smooth plain, in which the Nile flows around an island; its name is Tachompso. The land above Elephantine is now inhabited by Ethiopians, and half of the island as well, the other half by Egyptians. Adjoining the island is a great lake, around which nomadic Ethiopians graze their herds; sail on through it and you will reach the Nile's

channel, which flows into this lake. And then, disembarking, you will make a journey along the river of forty days: for sharp rocks project in the Nile and there are many reefs, through which it is not possible to sail. Having passed through this stretch in the forty days, you board another boat and sail for twelve days,

and then you will reach a large city named Meroe: people say this city serves as the capital of all the other Ethiopian peoples. The people there worship only Zeus and Dionysus among the gods, and honor these greatly, and Zeus has an oracle set up among them there; they go to war whenever this god commands them through oracles, and wherever he commands, there they go.

From this city, sailing on for an equal span of time again, you will arrive at the deserters, in the same time it took you to travel starting at Elephantine and ending at the Ethiopian capital. These deserters are called Asmach, which word, in the Greek tongue, means those who stand at the left hand of the king. These, twenty-four myriads of the fighting men of the Egyptians, deserted

to these Ethiopians for the following reason. In the reign of King Psammetichus, garrisons were stationed at Elephantine against the Ethiopians, another at Daphnae in the Pelusiac region against the Arabians and Assyrians, and another at Marea against Libya. The Persian garrisons still hold those same posts down to my own day, just as they did under Psammetichus: for indeed at

Elephantine the Persians keep guard, and at Daphnae as well. Now these Egyptians, having stood guard for three years, were relieved by no one from their duty; so they took counsel together, and by common agreement all revolted from Psammetichus and went off to Ethiopia. Psammetichus, on learning of it, pursued them; and when he overtook them, he begged them at length, urging them not to abandon their ancestral gods and their children and wives. To this

one of them is said to have pointed to his genitals and said that wherever that was, there they would have children and wives. These, when they arrived in Ethiopia, gave themselves over to the Ethiopian king, who repaid them in this way: there were certain men among the Ethiopians who had become disaffected toward him; these he bade the Egyptians drive out and settle in their land. Once these men had been settled among the Ethiopians, the Ethiopians became gentler,

having learned Egyptian customs. Now as far as a four months' voyage and journey the Nile is known, apart from the stretch of it within Egypt: for that many months are found, on reckoning, to be spent traveling from Elephantine to these deserters. It flows from the west and the setting sun. Beyond that point no one can say for certain: for that country is desolate

because of the heat. But I heard the following from men of Cyrene, who said that they had visited the shrine of Ammon and struck up conversation with Etearchus, king of the Ammonians, and that somehow, from other topics, they came to talk about the Nile, how no one knows its sources, and that Etearchus said that once some Nasamonian men had come to him. This tribe is

...to the Libyan sea, and they inhabit the Syrtis and the land east of the Syrtis for not a great distance. When the Nasamonians came and were asked whether they had anything further to report about the deserts of Libya, they said that among them there had once been sons of powerful men, insolent youths, who among other extravagant schemes, when they had grown to manhood, cast lots to choose five of their own number to go and see

the desert parts of Libya, and to see if they could learn anything beyond what those who had already gone farthest had witnessed. For as to Libya, the parts along the northern sea, beginning from Egypt and running all the way to the promontory of Soloeis, the point where Libya ends, are inhabited throughout by Libyans and many tribes of Libyans, except where Greeks and Phoenicians hold territory; but the parts above the sea and above the peoples who dwell along the sea,

the region further inland, is full of wild beasts; and beyond the beast-infested land there is sand, terribly waterless, and desert of everything. So the young men, sent off by their peers, well provisioned with water and food, went first through the inhabited country, and having passed through that they came to the beast-infested land, and from there they made their way through the desert,

directing their course toward the west wind. After passing through a great stretch of sandy country, after many days they saw trees growing in a plain, and when they approached and were picking the fruit that was on the trees, small men came upon them, smaller than men of ordinary stature, and seized them and led them away. The Nasamonians understood nothing of their language, nor

did the men leading them understand anything of the Nasamonians'. They led them through vast marshes, and once they had made their way across, they reached a city whose inhabitants all matched their captors in height and were black in complexion. Past the city flowed a great river, flowing from west to east, and crocodiles could be seen in it. So much, then, for the account of Etearchus of the Ammonians,

which I will leave off here, except to add that he said the Nasamonians returned home, as the Cyrenaeans told me, and that the people they had reached during their journey were, every one of them, sorcerers. As for this river flowing past the city, Etearchus supposed it to be the Nile, and indeed reason leads to that conclusion. For the Nile flows out of Libya and cuts through the middle of Libya, and,

as I conjecture, inferring the unknown from what is evident, it takes its rise at distances corresponding to those of the Ister. For the Ister river, beginning among the Celts and the city of Pyrene, flows through the middle of Europe, dividing it; the Celts live beyond the Pillars of Heracles, bordering on the Cynesians, who dwell furthest west of all the peoples settled in Europe; and the Ister ends

flowing into the sea at the Euxine Pontus, at the place where the Milesians' colonists inhabit Istria. Now the Ister, since it flows through inhabited country, is known to many; yet nobody is able to say anything about where the Nile begins, for the region of Libya that it crosses lies empty and uninhabited. Concerning its course, as far as

inquiry could take me, I have spoken; and it issues into Egypt. Egypt lies more or less opposite the mountainous part of Cilicia; from there to Sinope on the Euxine Pontus is a five days' journey in a straight line for a man traveling light; and Sinope lies opposite the Ister where it flows into the sea. So I think that the Nile, running through the whole of Libya, corresponds in length to the Ister.

Let this much, then, be said about the Nile. I now proceed to speak at length about Egypt, because it has more marvels than any other land and displays works beyond description compared with any other country; for these reasons more will be said about it. The Egyptians, along with having a climate peculiar to themselves and a river with a nature different from other rivers,

have established in most respects customs and practices the opposite of other men. Among them the women buy and sell in the marketplace, while the men stay at home and weave; and whereas other peoples weave pushing the woof upward, the Egyptians push it downward. Men carry burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. Women

urinate standing up, men sitting down. They relieve themselves indoors, but eat outside in the streets, explaining that what is shameful but necessary should be done in private, while what is not shameful should be done openly. No woman serves as priest to any god, male or female, but men serve all gods, both male and female. There is no compulsion on sons

to support their parents if they do not wish to, but daughters are under every compulsion to do so whether they wish it or not. Elsewhere priests of the gods wear their hair long, but in Egypt they shave it. Among other peoples the custom in mourning for those most closely affected is to cut the hair short, but the Egyptians, upon a death, let their hair grow long, both on the head and on the chin,

having previously kept it shaved. Among other peoples the way of life is kept separate from that of animals, but among the Egyptians their way of life is shared with animals. Other peoples live on wheat and barley, but for an Egyptian to make his living from these is the greatest disgrace; instead they make their bread from emmer wheat, which some call spelt. They knead dough with their feet, but clay with their hands,

and pick up dung with their hands as well. Other peoples, except those who have learned it from the Egyptians, leave their private parts as they were born, but the Egyptians circumcise. Each man has two garments, each woman one. Other peoples fasten the rings and ropes of their sails on the outside, but the Egyptians on the inside. In writing letters and reckoning with pebbles, the Greeks move the hand from

left to right, but the Egyptians from right to left; and doing this they themselves say they write to the right, and that the Greeks write to the left. They use two kinds of script, one called sacred, the other common. Being exceedingly religious beyond all other men, they observe practices such as these: they drink from bronze cups,

scouring them fresh every single day, not some but all of them. They wear linen garments always freshly washed, taking special care of this; they circumcise themselves for cleanliness' sake, valuing purity over a more attractive appearance. The priests shave their whole body every third day, so that no louse or any other foul thing may come upon them while they attend upon the gods. The priests

wear only linen clothing and sandals of papyrus; no other clothing or other sandals are permitted them. They bathe in cold water twice each day and twice each night, and they perform countless other rites, so to speak. Yet they also enjoy no small benefits: they spend nothing of their own property and are put to no expense, but sacred food

is baked for them, and a great quantity of beef and goose is given to each of them every day, and wine of the grape is given them as well; but they are not permitted to taste fish. Beans the Egyptians do not sow at all in their land, and those that grow wild they neither eat nor cook and eat; indeed the priests cannot even bear to look at them, considering the legume

unclean. Each god is served not by one priest but by many, of whom one is chief priest; and when one dies, his son succeeds him. They believe the male oxen belong to Epaphus, and for that reason they test them in this way: if the examiner finds even a single black hair on the animal, he judges it unclean. One of the priests appointed

to this task examines the animal both standing and lying on its back, pulling out its tongue to check whether it is clean of the prescribed marks, which I will describe in another account; he also examines the hairs of the tail to see whether they grow according to nature. If it is found clean in all these respects, he marks it by winding papyrus around its horns, then applying sealing clay

and pressing a signet ring into it, and so they lead it away. For sacrificing an unmarked animal the penalty is death. This, then, is how the animal is tested; here is how they carry out the sacrifice itself. Bringing the marked animal to the altar where they intend to sacrifice, they kindle a fire; then, pouring wine over the victim upon the altar and calling upon the god, they slaughter it, and having slaughtered it they cut off

the head. The body of the animal they flay, but upon the head they lay many curses and then carry it away: those who have a market and resident Greek merchants carry it to the market and sell it, while those who have no Greeks among them throw it into the river. They pronounce these curses upon the heads, saying that if any evil is about to befall

either those performing the sacrifice or Egypt as a whole, let it turn upon this head. Now regarding the heads of the sacrificed animals and the pouring of the wine, all Egyptians alike follow the same customs for all their sacrifices, and because of this custom no Egyptian will taste the head of any living creature. But the manner of removing

the entrails and burning them differs from temple to temple, according to each one's practice; but I will now speak of the one they hold to be the greatest deity, to whom they hold the greatest festival. When they have flayed the ox, having first prayed, they remove the whole belly, leaving the entrails in the body along with the fat, and they cut off the legs and the loin

the tip of it, and the shoulders and the neck. Having done this, they stuff the ox's remaining carcass with pure loaves, honey, raisins, figs, frankincense, myrrh, and other aromatic substances, and having filled it with these they burn it, pouring on abundant oil. Having fasted beforehand, they sacrifice, and while the offerings are burning, all of them beat their breasts; and when they have finished the beating, they set out as a feast the parts

that were left over from the offerings. Now all Egyptians sacrifice the male oxen and the calves that are pure, but they are not permitted to sacrifice the females, since these are sacred to Isis; for Isis's cult image shows a woman bearing cow horns, just as the Greeks depict Io, and the Egyptians all alike revere cows far more than any other cattle.

For this reason no Egyptian man or woman would kiss a Greek man on the mouth, nor use a Greek man's knife, spits, or cauldron, nor taste the meat of a pure ox that has been cut up with a Greek knife. Here is how they dispose of oxen that die: the females get thrown into the river, while each community buries its males in its own suburbs, with the

one horn, or both, sticking up as a marker. And when it has rotted and the appointed time has come round, a barge arrives at each city from the island called Prosopitis. This island lies in the Delta, and its circumference is nine schoinoi. On this island of Prosopitis there are also many other cities, and it is from the one

from which the barges come to collect the bones of the oxen, called Atarbekhis, in which a holy shrine of Aphrodite is established. From this city many others set out for other cities, and having dug up the bones they carry them off and bury them all together in a single place. In the same way as they do with oxen, they also bury the other livestock when they die; for concerning these too they have

laid down the same law: they do not kill these either. As for those who have established a shrine of Zeus of Thebes, or belong to the Theban district, all these abstain from sheep and sacrifice goats instead. For not all Egyptians alike revere the same gods, except Isis and Osiris, who they say is Dionysus; these two all alike revere. But those who possess

a shrine of Mendes, or come from the district around that city, abstain from goats and sacrifice sheep instead. Now the Thebans, and those who abstain from sheep on their account, say that this law was established for them for the following reason: Heracles wished at all costs to see Zeus, and Zeus was unwilling to be seen by him; finally, when Heracles kept pressing him, Zeus contrived this device: he

flayed a ram, cut off its head, and holding the head in front of himself, put on the fleece, and thus showed himself to Heracles. From this the Egyptians make the image of Zeus with a ram's face, and from the Egyptians the Ammonians do likewise, being colonists of both the Egyptians and the Ethiopians and using a language that is a mixture of both. And it seems to me that the Ammonians took their very name from this: for the Egyptians call

Zeus Amoun. The Thebans hold rams sacred rather than sacrificing them, and that is the reason. Yet on one day of the year, at the festival of Zeus, they cut up a single ram, flay it, and dress the image of Zeus in its skin in the same way as before, and then they bring up another image, of Heracles, close to it. Having done this, all those about the shrine beat themselves in mourning for the ram, and

afterward they bury it in a sacred coffin. Concerning Heracles I have heard this account, that he is one of the twelve gods; as for the second Heracles, the one familiar to the Greeks, I could nowhere find anyone in Egypt able to tell me of him. And indeed that the Egyptians did not borrow the name Heracles from the Greeks — rather it was the Greeks who took it from the Egyptians, specifically those Greeks who gave Amphitryon's son the name Heracles —

of this I have many other proofs as well, and among them this one: that the parents of this Heracles, both Amphitryon and Alcmene, were, as it happens, descended originally from Egypt; and also that the Egyptians say they do not know the names of either Poseidon or the Dioscuri, nor are these gods reckoned among their other gods. And yet

if indeed they had taken the name of some deity from the Greeks, it is these above all others that they would have been likely to remember, if in fact they were then already using ships and if some of the Greeks were seafarers, as I both suppose and my own judgment inclines me to believe; so that the Egyptians would have come to know the names of these gods even more readily than that of Heracles. No, Heracles is an ancient god among the Egyptians:

as they themselves say, it is seventeen thousand years to the reign of Amasis, counting from when the twelve gods came into being out of the eight gods, of whom they reckon Heracles to be one. And wishing to know something certain about this matter, so far as it was possible, I sailed also to Tyre in Phoenicia, having learned that there was a holy shrine of Heracles there. And I saw it richly furnished with

many other offerings, and in it were two pillars, one of pure gold, the other of emerald stone that shone at night with great brilliance. I fell into conversation with the god's priests and asked them how long a time it had been since their shrine was founded. I found that they too did not agree with the Greeks; for they said that the shrine of the god was founded at the same time that Tyre

was founded, and that it is two thousand three hundred years since they have inhabited Tyre. I also saw in Tyre another shrine of Heracles, with the epithet Thasian; and I went as well to Thasos, where I found a shrine of Heracles established by the Phoenicians, who had sailed out in search of Europa and founded Thasos; and this too is five generations of men earlier than

Heracles the son of Amphitryon came to be in Greece. Now these researches of mine clearly show that Heracles is an ancient god, and it seems to me that those Greeks act most correctly who have established and maintain two cults of Heracles, sacrificing to the one as to an immortal, under the title Olympian, and offering rites to the other as to a hero. The Greeks say many other things carelessly, and

this tale too that they tell about Heracles is naive: that on his arrival in Egypt the Egyptians crowned him and led him out in procession as though about to sacrifice him to Zeus; and that he for a while kept still, but when they began the preliminary rites on him at the altar, he turned to force and slaughtered them all. To me it seems that in saying this the Greeks show themselves

utterly ignorant of how the Egyptians live and what they hold sacred; for these people, for whom it is not even lawful to sacrifice cattle except swine, and male oxen and calves that are pure, and geese, how could they sacrifice human beings? Moreover, Heracles being one person and, as they say, still a man, how could it be in his nature to slaughter many tens of thousands? Concerning these matters, may we have said thus much

and still find favor with both the gods and the heroes. Now the reason the Egyptians named do not sacrifice she-goats and he-goats is this: the Mendesians count Pan among the eight gods, and they claim these eight came before the twelve gods did. And the painters and sculptors

depict and carve the image of Pan just as the Greeks do, with the face of a goat and the legs of a goat, not because they think he is actually like this, but as being similar to the other gods; but for what reason they depict him thus, I would rather not say. The Mendesians hold every goat sacred, giving the males more honor than the females, and among these the goatherds hold greater honor; but of them one especially,

whichever one dies, has great mourning proclaimed for it throughout the whole Mendesian district. Both the he-goat and Pan are called Mendes in the Egyptian tongue. In this district, in my own time, this marvel occurred: a he-goat coupled with a woman, openly. This came to public notice. Now the Egyptians consider the pig a foul animal, and in this regard, if anyone in passing touches

a pig with his very clothes, he goes and dips himself, clothes and all, in the river. And swineherds, though native-born Egyptians, are the only people who enter no shrine anywhere in Egypt; nor will anyone give a daughter in marriage to them, nor take a wife from among them, but swineherds give and take wives only among themselves. As for other gods, the Egyptians consider it wrong to offer them pigs at all,

but to the Moon and Dionysus alone, and at the same time, at the same full moon, they sacrifice the pigs and eat of the meat. As for why they detest pigs at the other festivals but sacrifice them at this one, there is an account told about it by the Egyptians, which, though I know it, is not more fitting for me to tell. The sacrifice of pigs to the Moon is performed as follows:

when one has sacrificed, he puts together the tip of the tail, along with the spleen and caul, wrapping them together in fat taken from around the animal's belly, and then burns them in the fire; the rest of the meat they eat at the full moon on which they perform the sacrifices, but on any other day they would no longer taste it. The poor among them,

owing to scant means, mold pigs out of dough, bake them, and sacrifice these instead. For Dionysus, on the evening of his festival, each person slaughters a piglet before his doors and gives it to be carried off by the very swineherd from whom he bought it. The rest of the festival of Dionysus the Egyptians celebrate in almost the same way as the Greeks do, except for the dances; but instead of phalluses they have other

Now such devices have been invented as cubit-high puppets worked with strings, which women carry around through the villages, the phallus nodding and not much smaller than the rest of the body. A flute leads the way, and the women follow singing of Dionysus. As for why the phallus is oversized and it alone of the body moves, there is a sacred story told about it. Now it seems to me that Melampus son of

Amytheon was not unacquainted with this rite but well versed in it. For it is Melampus who introduced to the Greeks the name of Dionysus, the sacrifice, and the phallic procession. He did not, strictly speaking, grasp the whole matter and set it forth, but the wise men who came after him set it forth more fully. Still, it is Melampus who was the

one who introduced the phallus carried in procession for Dionysus, and it is from him that the Greeks learned to do what they do. I say, then, that Melampus, having become a wise man, acquired the art of divination for himself and, having learned from Egypt, introduced to the Greeks many other things as well as the matters concerning Dionysus, changing only a few details of them. For I will not say that what is done in Egypt for the god and what is done among the

Greeks happened to coincide by chance; for then they would be in keeping with Greek custom and not newly introduced. Nor indeed will I say that the Egyptians took this or any other custom from the Greeks. It seems to me most likely that Melampus learned about the matters of Dionysus from Cadmus of Tyre and those who came with him from Phoenicia to the land now called Boeotia.

And indeed the names of nearly all the gods have come to Greece from Egypt. That they have come from foreign lands I find to be so upon inquiry, and I think they have come chiefly from Egypt. For apart from Poseidon and the Dioscuri, as I have said before, and Hera and Hestia and Themis and the Graces and the Nereids,

the names of the rest of the gods have always existed in Egypt in that land. I say only what the Egyptians themselves say. As for the gods whose names they say they do not know, these, it seems to me, were named by the Pelasgians, except Poseidon: this god they learned of from the Libyans. For no one from the beginning has had the name of Poseidon except the Libyans, and they have always honored this

god. The Egyptians, then, do not worship heroes at all. These practices, then, and others besides, which I shall describe, the Greeks have adopted from the Egyptians; but making images of Hermes with an erect phallus was learned not from Egypt but rather from the Pelasgians — the Athenians were the first of all the Greeks to adopt it, and from them the rest. For at that time

Pelasgians had already become settlers among the Athenians, who by then were being reckoned as Greeks, and it is from that point that the Greeks began to be so reckoned. Whoever has been initiated into the rites of the Cabeiri, which the Samothracians carry out, taking them over from the Pelasgians — such a person understands what I am referring to; for the Pelasgians who once dwelt with the Athenians formerly inhabited Samothrace, and it is from them that the Samothracians received the rites. So then, having the

phallus of the images of Hermes erect, the Athenians were the first of the Greeks to learn this from the Pelasgians and to make it so; and the Pelasgians told a certain sacred story about it, one that the Samothracian mysteries reveal. Now the Pelasgians formerly, as I know from what I heard at Dodona, made all their offerings while praying to "the gods," but they gave none of them a title or a name, for they had not yet heard of such things. They called them

gods from the fact that, having set all things in order, they held all the divisions of the world in due arrangement. Then, after a great length of time had passed, they learned from Egypt the names of the other gods that had come from there, and much later still they learned the name of Dionysus. And after a time they put a question to the oracle at Dodona regarding these names, since that oracle is reckoned the oldest among the oracles found in Greece,

and it was then the only one in existence. So when the Pelasgians put to the Dodona oracle the question of whether they ought to accept the names that had reached them from foreign peoples, the oracle answered that they should use them. From that time on they employed the gods' names in their sacrifices, and it was from the Pelasgians that the Greeks later took them over. As to whence each of the gods arose, or whether they all existed

forever, and what they looked like in form, they did not know until, so to speak, only the day before yesterday. For I reckon that Hesiod and Homer lived some four centuries earlier than my own time, no more; and it is these who composed a theogony for the Greeks, giving the gods their titles, distributing honors and skills among them, and describing their forms. The

poets said to have lived before these men came, in my opinion, after them. Of these matters the first part is told by the priestesses of Dodona, and the later part, concerning Hesiod and Homer, I tell myself. Concerning the oracles, the one in Greece and the one in Libya, the Egyptians tell the following account. The priests of Zeus of Thebes said that two women,

priestesses, were carried off from Thebes by Phoenicians, and that they learned one of them was sold into Libya and the other to the Greeks; and these women, they said, were the ones who established the first oracles among the peoples named. When I asked how they knew this so precisely to tell it, they replied that they themselves had conducted an extensive search on the matter and had been unable to find

to find them, but that they later learned these things about them just as they had told them. This, then, is what I heard from the priests at Thebes; but the following is what the prophetesses of Dodona say: that two black doves flew up from Thebes in Egypt, and one of them came to Libya and the other to them, and that the one which came to them settled on an oak tree and spoke with a human voice, saying that

it was necessary that an oracle of Zeus be established there, and that they understood this to be a divine command laid upon them, and so they did it accordingly. As for the dove that went off to the Libyans, they say it told the Libyans to establish the oracle of Ammon — and this too is an oracle of Zeus. The priestesses of Dodona, the eldest of whom was named Promeneia, the next Timarete, and the

youngest Nicandra, told these things, and the rest of the Dodonaeans about the shrine agreed with them. Now I hold this opinion about these matters: if the Phoenicians really did carry off the sacred women, selling one into Libya and disposing of the other in Greece, then it seems to me that this woman was sold to the people of what is now Greece, formerly called Pelasgia, this

same land, sold to the Thesprotians; and there, while serving as a slave, she founded a shrine of Zeus beneath an oak tree growing on the spot, as was natural since she had been in service at the shrine of Zeus at Thebes, and there where she came she kept a memory of it; and from this she established the oracle, once she had learned the Greek tongue. And she said her sister had been sold off in Libya by those very same Phoenicians who had sold her. The women

seem to me to have been given the name of doves by the Dodonaeans for this reason: because they were foreigners and seemed to them to speak like birds. Then after a time they say the dove began speaking with a human voice, once the woman spoke intelligibly to them; but while she still spoke a foreign tongue, she seemed to them to speak like a bird — for how could a dove speak with a human voice? And in saying she was black,

they mean to indicate that the woman was Egyptian. And the manner of divination at Thebes in Egypt and at Dodona are in fact very similar to one another. Divination by means of sacrificial victims also has come from Egypt. Festivals, processions, and public assemblies were first established among men by the Egyptians, and from them the Greeks have learned. My

evidence of this is the following: the Egyptian festivals appear to have been held from a very long time back, while the Greek ones were established only recently. The Egyptians hold festivals not once a year but many times, most importantly and with the greatest devotion at the city of Bubastis in honor of Artemis, and second at the city of Busiris in honor of Isis — for in this city there is the greatest temple of Isis, and this

city is situated at the center of Egypt's Delta. Isis is, in the Greek tongue, Demeter. Third, they hold festival at the city of Sais in honor of Athena, fourth at the city of Heliopolis in honor of the Sun, fifth at the city of Buto in honor of Leto, and sixth at the city of Papremis in honor of Ares. Now when they travel to the city of Bubastis, they do the following.

Men and women sail together, and a great crowd of each in every boat: some of the women hold rattles and rattle them, some of the men play the flute the whole way, while the rest of the women and the men sing and clap their hands. Whenever, sailing along, they come near some other city, they bring the boat close to the shore and do the following:

some of the women do as I have described, while others shout out mocking taunts at the women of that city, some dance, and others stand up and lift their skirts. This they do at every city along the river; and when they arrive at Bubastis, they hold festival, offering great sacrifices, and more wine of the grape is consumed at this festival

than in the whole of the remaining year. And they gather there, men and women together apart from children, to the number of seven hundred thousand, as the local people say. This, then, is what is done there; and how they conduct the festival of Isis at the city of Busiris I have said before. There, after the sacrifice, all the men and women, very many tens of thousands of people, beat themselves in mourning; but the

they beat themselves, it is not right for me to say. But as for the Carians who live in Egypt, they do even more than this, in that they gash their foreheads with knives, and by this they show themselves to be foreigners and not Egyptians. When they have gathered at the city of Sais for the sacrifice, on the night of it they all burn many lamps in the open air around their houses

in a circle. The lamps are shallow bowls filled with salt and oil, and the wick floats on top; this burns all night, and the festival is called the Lamp-lighting. Those Egyptians who do not come to this gathering still keep the night of the sacrifice and all of them likewise light lamps, so that the lighting takes place not only at Sais

but throughout all Egypt. As for why this night has been given light and honor, there is a sacred story told about it. At Heliopolis and Buto they perform only the sacrifices, going there for that purpose. But at Papremis they perform sacrifices and rites just as elsewhere; but when the sun begins to go down, a few

of the priests busy themselves about the image, while most of them stand at the entrance of the temple holding wooden clubs, and others, performing vows, more than a thousand men, each likewise holding wooden clubs, stand massed on the other side. The image, which is in a small wooden gilded shrine, gets carried out one day earlier to a different sacred building. The few

who are left around the image drag a four-wheeled wagon carrying the shrine together with the statue housed within it; the others, standing in the forecourt, do not allow them to enter, and the men under vow, defending the god, strike them as they try to fend it off. There a fierce battle with clubs takes place, and heads are broken, and as I suppose many even die of their wounds, though

the Egyptians said that no one dies. The local people say the origin of this festival is as follows: Ares's mother dwells in this temple, and Ares, having been raised elsewhere, came, now grown to manhood, wishing to be with his mother; and the attendants of the mother, since they had never seen him before, did not allow him to pass but kept him off, and he,

having brought men from another city, roughly handled the attendants and went in to his mother. Because of this they say this blow-giving became customary for Ares at the festival. And the practice of not having intercourse with women in temples, and not entering temples unwashed after intercourse with a woman, these people were the first to observe as a religious rule. For nearly all other people, except the Egyptians and

the Greeks, have intercourse in temples and enter a temple unwashed after rising from a woman, holding that men are no different from the other animals; for they see that other animals, and the various kinds of birds, mate both in the temples of the gods and in their sacred precincts, and reason that the god could not be displeased by it, or the animals would not do it either. This is

the reasoning by which they justify what they do, but it does not please me. The Egyptians, however, are excessively scrupulous in matters of religion, in this as in other things. Egypt, though it borders on Libya, is not very rich in wild animals; but all the animals it does have are held sacred, some raised together with the people themselves, others not. As for the reasons

why these animals are dedicated as sacred, if I were to tell them, I would descend in my account into matters divine, which I most avoid recounting; what I have said of them I said only touching lightly on the subject, compelled by necessity. The custom concerning the animals is as follows: keepers have been appointed for the feeding of each kind separately, both men and women among the Egyptians, and the office passes from father to son.

Those in the cities each fulfill the following vows: praying to the god whose animal it is, they shave the heads of their children, either the whole head or half or a third part of it, and weigh the hair against silver; whatever it weighs in silver, they give this to the woman who tends the animals, and she in return cuts up fish and gives it as food

to the animals. Such is the food that has been assigned to them. Whoever kills one of these animals, if deliberately, the penalty is death; if unintentionally, he pays whatever penalty the priests set. But whoever kills an ibis or a hawk, whether deliberately or unintentionally, must die. Although there are many animals that live together with people, they would

become far more numerous still, were it not for what happens to the cats: when the females give birth, they no longer go to the males, and the males, wanting to mate with them, cannot. So against this they devise the following scheme: they snatch the kittens away from the females and steal them and kill them, yet they refrain from eating them once killed; and the females, robbed of their young and hungry for more, thus come

to the males; for the animal is fond of its young. And when a fire breaks out, wondrous things happen to the cats: the Egyptians stand apart in a line, keeping watch over the cats, and, caring nothing about putting out the fire, the cats slip through or leap over the people and jump into the flames. When this happens, great grief seizes the Egyptians. In whatever house a cat dies

of its own accord, all who live there shave only their eyebrows, but where a dog dies, they shave the whole body and head. Dead cats are carried off to sacred buildings, where, after being embalmed, they are buried at the city of Bubastis; dogs are buried by each people in sacred coffins in their own city. Likewise the ichneumons are buried along with the dogs. The

shrew-mice and hawks they carry off to Buto, delivering the ibises instead to the city of Hermes. Bears, which are scarce, and wolves, which are not much larger than foxes, they bury wherever they are found lying. The nature of crocodiles is as follows: for the four coldest months it eats nothing at all, though it is a four-footed creature that lives both on land and in the marshes. It lays

its eggs on land and hatches them there, and spends most of the day on dry ground, but the whole night in the river, for the water is warmer than the open air and the dew. Of all mortal creatures that we know, this grows from the smallest beginning to the greatest size; for its eggs are not much larger than those of a goose,

and the hatchling is proportionate to the egg, but as it grows it reaches seventeen cubits and even more. It has eyes like a pig's, and large teeth and tusks in proportion to its body. Alone among animals it has no tongue, and it does not move its lower jaw, but, again alone among animals, brings its upper jaw down to meet the lower. It has

strong claws, and a scaly hide on its back that cannot be pierced. It is blind in the water, but extremely sharp-sighted in the open air. Since it makes its life in the water, its mouth inside is always full of leeches. All the other birds and animals flee from it, but the plover lives at peace with it, since it benefits from it: for when

the crocodile comes out of the water onto land and then opens its mouth wide (which it habitually does, generally facing the west wind), then the plover, slipping into its mouth, swallows the leeches; and the crocodile, benefiting from this, is pleased and does the plover no harm. To some of the Egyptians crocodiles are sacred, to others not, but rather

they treat them as enemies. Those who live around Thebes and Lake Moeris hold them to be very sacred indeed; each of the two groups raises one crocodile out of all, trained to be tame, putting ornaments of cast stone and gold in its ears and bands around its front feet, giving it appointed food and offerings, and treating it as well as possible while it lives;

and when it dies they embalm it and bury it in sacred coffins. Those settled near Elephantine, however, actually eat them, since they do not regard the creature as sacred there. They are not called crocodiles but champsae; the Ionians gave them the name crocodile, likening their appearance to the crocodiles that occur among them in their stone walls. There are many and various ways of hunting them; but the one that

seems to me most worth describing, I write down. When the hunter has baited a hook with the chine of a pig, he releases it out toward the river's center, and meanwhile stands on the bank beating a live piglet. Hearing its cry, the crocodile rushes toward the sound, and coming upon the chine, swallows it; then they haul it in. When it has been hauled out onto land, the first thing the hunter does

is plaster its eyes over with mud; having done this, he masters the rest of it quite easily, but if he does not do this, it is done only with difficulty. The river-horses are sacred in the Papremite district, but not sacred to the other Egyptians. Their nature and appearance are as follows: four legs, hooves split like a cow's, a snub nose, a horse-like mane, visible tusks, a tail

and voice like a horse's, and in size as large as the biggest ox; its hide is so thick that when it is dried, spear-shafts are made from it. There are also otters in the river, which they hold to be sacred. And they consider sacred also the fish called the scaly one, and the eel, holding these to be sacred to the Nile

...they say there is, and among the birds, the fox-geese. There is also another sacred bird, whose name is the phoenix. I myself have not seen it except in a painting, for indeed it visits them only rarely, every five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say; and they say it visits only when its father has died. If it resembles the painting, it is of this size and

kind: part of its plumage is gold, the rest a deep red; in outline and size it is most like an eagle. They say it contrives the following, though to me it is not credible: setting out from Arabia, it carries its father encased in myrrh to the temple of the Sun and there lays him to rest, carrying him in this manner. First,

it molds an egg of myrrh as large as it is able to carry, then tests itself by carrying it; and once it has proven able, it hollows out the egg and places its father inside, then plasters over with more myrrh the spot where it hollowed out the egg to insert its father. With the father lying inside, the weight remains the same. Having plastered it over, it carries it to Egypt, to the

temple of the Sun. This, they say, is what this bird does. Around Thebes there are sacred serpents, entirely harmless to human beings, which, though small in size, bear a pair of horns sprouting from the crown of the head; when these creatures die, they are buried in the temple of Zeus, for they say they are sacred to this god. There is a place in Arabia, situated

very close to the city of Buto, and I went to this place to inquire about the winged serpents. On arriving I saw bones of serpents and ribs in a quantity impossible to describe—there were heaps of ribs, some large, some smaller, and others smaller still, and these were numerous. This place, where the ribs lie piled up, is of the following sort: it is a pass from

narrow mountains into a great plain, and this plain adjoins the plain of Egypt. The story goes that at the start of spring winged serpents fly from Arabia toward Egypt, but the ibis birds, meeting them at the entrance to this land, do not let the serpents pass but kill them. And it is because of this deed, they say, that the ibis is honored

greatly by the Arabians as well as by the Egyptians; and the Egyptians too agree that this is why they honor these birds. The appearance of the ibis is as follows: it is entirely deep black, it has the legs of a crane, its face is extremely hooked, and its size is that of a corncrake. Such is the appearance of the black ibis that fights the serpents; but of those that move about more among people's feet, there are two kinds (

There are indeed ibises (with the head bare, and the whole neck, and white in feathers except for the head and neck and the tips of the wings and the tip of the rump—these parts I mentioned are all terribly black—while the legs and face resemble those of the other kind. The form of the snake it kills is like that of water-snakes, and it carries flying-membranes that are not feathered but

most closely resemble the wings of a bat. So much, then, let be said about the sacred animals. As for the Egyptians themselves, those who live around the sown land of Egypt, since they practice the preservation of memory more than any people, are by far the most learned of all with whom I have had experience, and they follow this manner of life: they purge themselves for three days running each month, hunting after health by means of vomits and enemas, believing

that all diseases come to men from the foods that nourish them. For indeed the Egyptians are, apart from this, the healthiest of all people after the Libyans, and it seems to me this owes to their climate, since the seasons there stay constant; it is precisely when things change that men are most struck by illness, whether in general or above all in the shifting of the seasons. They eat bread made from

emmer wheat, which they call kyllestis. They make use of wine made from barley, for they have no vines in their country. As for fish, they dry some in the sun and eat them raw, while others are cured in brine before eating. As for birds, quails, ducks, and the smaller species are eaten raw once they have first been salted. As for the other things

that belong to them, whether of birds or of fish, apart from those that have been set apart as sacred, the rest they eat roasted or boiled. At the banquets of those among them who are prosperous, when they have finished dining, a man carries around a corpse in a coffin made of wood, imitated as closely as possible both in painting and in workmanship, of a size about a cubit or two cubits, and showing it to each of the

drinking companions he says, 'Look upon this as you drink and enjoy yourself; for such you will be when you are dead.' This is what they do at their banquets. Following their ancestral customs, they adopt no others besides; among their other worthy customs there is one song in particular, called Linus, which is sung in Phoenicia too and in Cyprus and elsewhere, though it has a different name according to the nation,

but it turns out to be the very same song that the Greeks name and sing as Linus, so that among the many other things about Egypt that make me marvel, I marvel too at where they got this Linus song; for they clearly have been singing it from time immemorial. In the Egyptian tongue this Linus is called Maneros. The Egyptians said that he was the only son of the first king of Egypt,

and that he died young, and was honored by the Egyptians with these laments, and that this became their first and only song. The Egyptians also agree in this other custom with the Greeks, but only with the Lacedaemonians: their younger men, when they meet their elders, yield the road and step aside, and rise from their seats when the elders approach. But in this next custom they agree with no other Greeks at all: instead of greeting one another on the

roads with words, they bow down, lowering the hand to the knee. They wear linen tunics fringed about the legs, which they call kalasiris; over these they wear white woolen garments thrown over like a cloak. Wool, however, never gets carried into a temple, and it is likewise kept out of burials, for that is not sanctioned. In this they agree with the rites called Orphic and Bacchic, which are actually Egyptian, and with the Pythagoreans; for

it is not sanctioned either for one who partakes in these rites to be buried in woolen garments. There is a sacred account told concerning them. The Egyptians have also worked out other things besides: which deity presides over each month and over every single day, plus what fate a person born on a given day will run into, how he will die, and what sort of person he will be. The Greeks who have occupied themselves with poetry have made use of these discoveries.

More omens have been discovered among them than among all other peoples put together; whenever an omen occurs, they keep watch, writing down what results from it, and if at some later time something similar happens again, they expect the same outcome to follow. Their system of divination works like this: no human being holds the skill, only certain of the gods do; for an oracle of Heracles is found there, as well as one of Apollo, one of Athena, one of Artemis, and

of Ares, and of Zeus, and the one held in the greatest honor of all the oracles is that of Leto in the city of Buto. Their oracles, however, are not all conducted in the same way, but differ from one another. Their medicine is divided up as follows: each physician treats one disease and no more. The whole country is full of physicians: some are physicians

some for the eyes, some for the head, some for the teeth, some for ailments of the belly, and some for diseases that cannot be seen. Their mourning and burial customs run as follows: whenever a man of any standing dies in a household, every woman of that household smears mud on her head and on her face too,

after which they leave the body in the house and wander through the town striking themselves, robes girded up, breasts bared, joined by all the female kin; on the other side the men, girded in the same fashion, strike themselves too. Once this is finished, they carry the corpse off to be embalmed. Certain men are stationed there for that very purpose and make it their trade. When

a body is delivered to them, these men show whoever brought it painted wooden models of corpses, and they claim the finest of these represents someone whose name I regard it as improper to speak in such a context; they show a second model, lesser and cheaper than the first, and a third, cheapest of all; then, having described each, they ask which method the family wants used to prepare the body. The family,

having settled on a price, then depart, while the embalmers stay behind in their workshops and treat the finest grade of body this way: first, using a bent iron implement, they pull the brain out through the nostrils, removing part of it that way and dissolving the rest with drugs poured in; next, using a sharp Ethiopian stone, they slit the flank and remove everything inside the belly; after clearing it out and rinsing it with palm

wine, they rinse it again with ground spices; then, having filled the cavity with pure ground myrrh and cassia and other spices, except frankincense, they sew it back up again. Having done this, they embalm the body, covering it in natron for seventy days; more than this it is not allowed to embalm it. When the seventy days have passed, they wash the corpse and wrap the whole of its body in bandages cut from linen of fine byssus, smearing them with

gum, which the Egyptians generally use in place of glue. After this, the relatives take it back and have made a wooden case shaped like a human figure; having had it made, they enclose the corpse within it, and having sealed it up, they store it in a burial chamber, standing it upright against the wall. This is how they prepare the corpses of those who choose the most costly method; those who want the middle way, avoiding excessive expense, they prepare like this: when

they have filled their syringes with the oil made from cedar, they fill the belly of the corpse with it without cutting it open or removing the intestines, injecting it through the rectum and stopping up the fluid from flowing back out, and they embalm it for the prescribed number of days, and on the last day they let out from the belly the cedar oil that they had put in before. It has such power that

it pulls the belly and the now-dissolved internal organs out along with itself; natron dissolves the flesh as well, leaving in the end nothing of the corpse but skin and bone. Once this is finished, they hand the body back in that condition, without further treatment. There is a third method of embalming, used for those with less money to spend: they flush the belly with a purgative and preserve it

for the seventy days, and then give it back to be carried away. The wives of prominent men, when they die, are not given over for embalming right away, nor are those women who are especially beautiful and much spoken of; rather, only when they have been dead three or four days are they handed over to the embalmers. They do this for this reason, so that the embalmers may not have intercourse with the women:

for it is said that one was caught having intercourse with the fresh corpse of a woman, and his fellow craftsman informed on him. Whoever, whether an Egyptian himself or a foreigner, is seized by a crocodile or appears to have died by the river itself, the people of whatever city he is washed up near are under every obligation to embalm him and, having laid him out as beautifully as possible, to bury him in a sacred tomb; nor is anyone else allowed to touch him,

neither relative nor friend, but the priests of the Nile themselves, treating him with their own hands as something more than a human corpse, bury him. They avoid using Greek customs, and to put it altogether, the customs of any other people whatsoever. Now the rest of the Egyptians observe this so strictly, but there is a great city called Chemmis, in the Thebaic district, near New

City. In this city stands a square shrine of Perseus, son of Danae, ringed by palm trees. The temple's gateways are stone, and enormous; two great stone statues stand upon them. Inside this enclosure sits a shrine, and within it stands a statue of Perseus. The people of Chemmis claim that Perseus is often seen

walking about their land, and often within the shrine as well, and that a worn sandal of his turns up from time to time, two cubits in length, and whenever it appears, all of Egypt prospers. So they claim; and here is what they do in Perseus' honor, in Greek style: they hold a gymnastic contest covering every event, awarding livestock, cloaks, and hides as prizes. When I asked them why

Perseus is accustomed to appear only to them, and as a mark distinguishing them from the rest of the Egyptians, they hold gymnastic contests, and they said that Perseus was born from their own city. For Danaus and Lynceus, they said, being men of Chemmis, sailed off to Greece, and tracing their genealogy down from them they arrived at Perseus. And when he came to Egypt for the reason the Greeks too give, to fetch

the Gorgon's head from Libya, they said he came to them as well and recognized all his kinsmen; and that he had learned the name of Chemmis before he arrived in Egypt, having heard it from his mother. And it was at his own bidding that the gymnastic contest is held for him. All this is what the Egyptians who live above the marshes believe. But those settled in the marshes themselves follow

the same customs as the rest of the Egyptians, and in particular each of them lives with one wife, as the Greeks do; but for economy in food they have devised the following additional means. When the river becomes full and floods the plains like a sea, great numbers of lilies grow in the water, which the Egyptians call lotus; when they have plucked these they dry them in the sun, and

next, they take the part from the center of the lotus flower, which looks like a poppy head, pound it, and bake loaves from it over a fire. The root of this same lotus can also be eaten and has a fairly sweet taste; it is round, roughly apple-sized. Other lily-like blooms also grow in the river, resembling roses, and their fruit forms in a separate seed-pod that grows up

springing up from the root, most like in appearance to a wasps' nest; in this there are many edible seeds, about the size of an olive stone, and these are eaten both fresh and dried. As for the papyrus that grows each year, when they pull it up out of the marshes, they cut off the upper part and put it to other use, while the lower part that is left, about a cubit long, they eat and sell;

and those wanting the very best papyrus stalks steam them in a hot, glowing oven before eating them that way. Some among them live on nothing but fish, which they gut once caught, dry out in the sun, and then eat once dried. Schooling fish are not common in the rivers themselves, but raised in

the lakes they behave as follows. When the urge to spawn comes upon them, they swim out in schools to the sea; the males lead, scattering their milt, and the females, following behind, gulp it in and are thereby impregnated. When they have become full in the sea, they swim back up again, each to their own haunts, but no longer are the same fish in the lead; instead the females take over the leadership. Leading

the school, they do just what the males did before: they scatter a few of their eggs, the grains, at a time, and the males, following, swallow them. These grains are fish. From the grains that survive and are not swallowed, the fish that grow up are produced. Those of them caught swimming out to sea are found to be worn on the left side of the head, while those

those caught on the return swim show wear on the right instead. The reason is this: swimming down toward the sea they hug the land on their left, and coming back upstream they cling to that same side, pressing and brushing against it as closely as they can, so as not to lose their way against the current. Once the Nile starts to rise, the low-lying stretches of ground and the marshy hollows

along the river begin to fill first, as the water seeps through from the river; and at once these become full, and immediately they are all filled with small fish. From where it is likely that these come to be, I think I can work out: the previous year, when the Nile recedes, the fish, having laid their eggs in the mud, depart along with the last of the water; and when

once the season comes back around and the water returns, these fish hatch instantly from those eggs. That is how matters stand with the fish. As for oil, the Egyptians who dwell around the marshes make theirs from the fruit of the sillikuprion plant, which Egyptians call kiki, and they produce it this way. Along the edges of the rivers and lakes

they sow these sillikuprion plants, which in Greece grow wild of their own accord; sown in Egypt they bear fruit in abundance, but foul-smelling; when they have gathered it, some pound it and press it out, others roast it first and then boil it down, and they collect what flows off from it. It is oily, and no less suited than olive oil for the lamp, but it gives off a heavy smell. Against

the mosquitoes, which are countless, this is what they have devised. Those who live above the marshes are helped by towers, into which they climb to sleep, for the mosquitoes are unable to fly high because of the winds. But for those living around the marshes other means have been devised instead of towers: every man of them has acquired a casting-net, with which by

day he catches fish, and at night he uses it as follows: around the bed on which he rests, he sets up the net, and then, crawling in beneath it, sleeps there. The mosquitoes, if he sleeps wrapped in a cloak or a sheet, bite through these, but they do not even try to get through the net at all. Their cargo boats are made of the

acacia tree, whose shape is very much like that of the Cyrenean lotus, and its gum is resin. From this acacia, then, they cut lengths of wood about two cubits long and lay them together like bricks, building the hull in the following manner: they thread the two-cubit lengths of wood around close-set, long dowels; and when they have built the hull in this way, they stretch cross-beams over the top of it; they use no ribs; on the inside

they seal the joints where the papyrus planking meets. They fit a single rudder, run through the keel itself. The mast is acacia wood, the sails papyrus. Boats of this kind cannot travel upriver unless a strong wind is blowing, and instead get towed from the bank; going downstream, though, they move like this: a raft built of tamarisk wood, stitched together

with a mat of reeds, and a stone bored through, about two talents in weight; of these, the raft, tied by a rope, is let go to float ahead of the boat, and the stone by another rope behind. The raft, as the current catches it, moves quickly and pulls along the baris (for that is the name given to these boats), while the stone, dragging behind and resting on

with a mat of reed, keeps the vessel's course steady. There are great numbers of these craft, and some haul cargo worth many thousands of talents. Once the Nile has spread across the countryside, only the cities show above the water, looking rather like the islands scattered in the Aegean Sea; everything else in Egypt turns to open water, with just the cities rising clear of it. So people travel by boat

this happens, people are ferried no longer along the channels of the river but across the middle of the plain. To Memphis, sailing up from Naucratis, the route runs right past the pyramids themselves; yet even this is not the direct way, but goes past the point of the Delta and by the city of Cercasorus; and sailing to Naucratis from the sea and Canobus across the plain, you will come by way of Anthylla

and the town called after Archandrus. Of these, Anthylla, a town of some note, is set aside specifically to provide sandals for the wife of whichever king rules Egypt at the time (a practice dating from when Egypt fell under Persian rule); the second town, it seems to me, takes its name from Archandrus, son-in-law of Danaus, himself son of Phthius, son of Achaeus — hence it is called the town of Archandrus.

There could be some other Archandrus too, but the name at any rate is not Egyptian. Up to this point it is my own sight and judgment and inquiry that speak in what has been said; from here on I set out to tell the accounts of the Egyptians according to what I heard, though something of my own sight will be added to them as well. Min, the first man to rule as king of Egypt, the priests said, first

walled off Memphis with a dam. For the whole river, they said, used to flow along the sandy mountain toward Libya, but Min, by damming up the bend to the south, about a hundred stadia above Memphis, dried up the old channel and diverted the river to flow through the middle of the mountains. And still even now this bend of the Nile, held

back as it is, is kept under close guard by the Persians, who shore it up every year; for if the river should choose to break through and overrun it at this point, there would be danger of all Memphis being flooded. And when the land shut off by this same Min, first to become king, had become dry, on it he founded the city that is now called Memphis; for Memphis too lies in the

narrow part of Egypt; and outside it he dug round a lake from the river to the north and to the west (for on the east side the Nile itself shuts it in), and he also established in it the temple of Hephaestus, which is great and most worthy of description. After him the priests recited from a papyrus roll the names of three hundred and thirty other kings. In

so many generations of men there were eighteen Ethiopians, one woman a native, and the rest men, Egyptians. The woman's name, the one who reigned, was, as it was also for the Babylonian woman, Nitocris; her they said avenged her brother, whom the Egyptians, while he was reigning over them, killed, and having killed him gave the kingship over to her in this way; and to avenge him she destroyed many of the Egyptians by a trick. For having had a chamber built

a long underground chamber—invented for the sake of the story, but in fact she had contrived something else. She knew, they said, that she would invite to a feast many of the Egyptians most responsible for the murder, and while they were dining she let the river burst in upon them through a great hidden channel. That is as much as they told me about her, except that when she had accomplished this she threw herself into a chamber full of ashes, so that she might escape retribution. Of the other kings

they told me of no achievement of works, and said there was nothing splendid about them, except for one, the last of them, Moeris. He, they said, left as memorials the gateway of the temple of Hephaestus that faces north, and dug a lake whose circumference in stadia I will state later, and built pyramids in it, of whose size I will speak together with the lake itself. This man's achievements were

achieved that much, while none of the rest accomplished anything at all. Setting these aside, then, I will turn to the king who ruled after them, named Sesostris. The priests told me that he first launched long ships from the Arabian gulf and conquered the peoples settled along the Red Sea coast, sailing onward until he reached waters no longer navigable on account of shallows. From there,

when he came back to Egypt, according to the priests' account, he took a great army of his men and marched through the mainland, subduing every nation that lay in his path. Whenever he encountered people who were valiant and fought fiercely for their freedom, he set up pillars in their lands with writing on them declaring his own name and that of his homeland, and how by his power

he had subdued them; but wherever he took the cities without a fight and easily, he inscribed on the pillars the same as for the nations that had shown themselves brave, and in addition he inscribed a woman's genitals, wishing to make plain that they were cowards. Doing this he passed through the mainland, until crossing from Asia into Europe he subdued

the Scythians and the Thracians as well. It seems to me that this is the farthest point the Egyptian army ever reached, since the pillars are still visible standing in their territory, but none appear beyond it. From there he turned around and headed back, and once he reached the river Phasis, I cannot state with certainty what took place next — whether King Sesostris himself broke off part of

a portion of his own army, left some of them behind as settlers of that land, or whether some of his soldiers, weary of his wandering, remained by the river Phasis. For it is plain that the Colchians are Egyptians—this I concluded myself before hearing it from others. But since it had become a matter of concern to me, I asked both peoples, and the Colchians remembered the Egyptians better than the Egyptians

remembered the Colchians. The Egyptians said they supposed the Colchians were descended from the army of Sesostris, and I myself guessed as much for this reason too, that they are dark-skinned and woolly-haired. That in itself proves nothing, since there are others like that too; but I rely more on the fact that alone of all people the Colchians and the Egyptians and the Ethiopians circumcise their genitals, and have done so from the beginning. The Phoenicians and

the Syrians of Palestine themselves admit that they learned it from the Egyptians, while the Syrians who live around the river Thermodon and the Parthenius, and the Macrones who are their neighbors, say they learned it recently from the Colchians. These are the only peoples who practice circumcision, and they are seen to do it in the same way as the Egyptians. As for the Egyptians and the Ethiopians themselves, I cannot say which of the two

learned it from the other, since it is clearly a very ancient custom. That it was through contact with Egypt that the others learned it seems to me strongly confirmed by this: those Phoenicians who have dealings with Greece no longer imitate the Egyptians in this matter, but no longer circumcise their children. Let me now say one more thing about the Colchians, showing how closely they resemble the Egyptians: they alone, they and the Egyptians,

work linen in the same way, and their whole manner of life and their language are alike. The Colchian linen is called by the Greeks Sardonian, while that which comes from Egypt is called Egyptian. As for the pillars that Sesostris, king of Egypt, set up in the various lands, most of them are no longer to be seen standing, but in Palestinian Syria I myself saw

still standing there, bearing the inscription mentioned earlier together with the figure of a woman's genitals. Near Ionia, too, are two carvings of this same man cut into rock faces, one on the road running from Ephesus to Phocaea, the other along the route linking Sardis and Smyrna. At each spot a man is carved, roughly seven feet tall, gripping a spear in his right hand and a bow in his left, and

the rest of his equipment likewise, for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian in style; and across his chest, from one shoulder to the other, run sacred Egyptian characters carved in relief, reading: 'I won this land for myself with my own shoulders.' Who he is and where he is from he does not make clear there, though he has shown it elsewhere. Some who have seen these figures have guessed that they are images of Memnon,

they take it to represent him, though this is far from accurate. This same Egyptian, Sesostris, was said by the priests to have been returning home with a great number of captives from the nations whose territory he had conquered when, arriving at Daphnae near Pelusium on the way back, his own brother — the one Sesostris had left in charge of Egypt — invited him to a banquet along with his sons, and stacked wood

around the house from the outside, and having piled it up, set it on fire. When Sesostris learned of this, he at once took counsel with his wife—for he had his wife with him—and she advised him that of their six sons he should lay two of them across the fire to make a bridge over the burning, and that they themselves should walk across on them to escape. Sesostris did this, and two of his

sons were burned to death in this way, but the rest escaped safely along with their father. When Sesostris returned to Egypt and had taken revenge on his brother, he put to use the multitude of people he had brought back from the lands he had subdued in the following way: it was they who dragged the huge stones brought to the temple of Hephaestus in this king's reign, stones enormous in size, and it was they

who, forced into the work, dug out every one of the canals now found across Egypt, and against their will turned Egypt — once entirely open to horses and wagons — into land unsuited for either. From that point on, Egypt, flat as it is throughout, has been impossible to cross by horse or wagon; the canals, numerous and running every which way, are to blame for this. The king carved up

the land for this reason: those of the Egyptians whose cities did not lie on the river but inland found themselves short of water when the river withdrew, and had to make do with brackish water drawn from wells. For this reason Egypt was cut up with canals. This king, they said, also divided the land among all the Egyptians, giving each an equal square plot,

and from this he derived his revenues, having imposed a tax to be paid annually. If the river took away part of anyone's plot, the man would come to him and report what had happened; the king would send men to inspect and measure how much smaller the land had become, so that in future the man would pay in proportion to the tax originally assessed. It seems to me that it was from this that geometry was discovered and came back to

Greece; for the sundial and the gnomon and the twelve divisions of the day the Greeks learned from the Babylonians. This king alone of the Egyptians ruled Ethiopia as well, and he left as memorials before the temple of Hephaestus stone statues, two of thirty cubits each, of himself and his wife, and of his four sons, each twenty cubits: for these

the priest of Hephaestus, quite some time later, refused to let Darius the Persian set up a statue in front of these, claiming Darius's deeds did not measure up to those of Sesostris the Egyptian: Sesostris, he said, had conquered just as many peoples as Darius, the Scythians included, whereas Darius had failed to subdue the Scythians. It would not be right, then, to place a statue before that man's dedications without first outdoing

him in deeds. Darius, they say, accepted this. When Sesostris died, they said, his son Pheros succeeded to the kingship. He undertook no military campaign, and it happened that he became blind, for the following reason. The river had risen to its greatest height ever, to eighteen cubits, and when it overflowed the fields, a wind arose and the river grew stormy with waves; and this

king, so the story goes, acted with reckless disregard, seizing a spear and hurling it into the swirling middle of the river, and shortly after, stricken in his eyes, he went blind. He remained blind for ten years, and in the eleventh an oracle reached him from the city of Buto declaring that his term of punishment had ended, and that his sight would return once he rinsed his eyes using the urine of a woman who had slept with

no man but her own husband and had never known another. He tested his own wife's urine first, and when his sight did not return, he went through every woman one after another; once his sight came back, he gathered together all the women he had tested, except the one whose urine had cured him, into a single town now called Red Clod, and having herded them there he burned every one of them along with the town itself;

but the woman whose urine had restored his sight he took himself as wife. Having escaped his affliction of the eyes, he dedicated offerings in all the notable temples, and among them, most worthy of mention, he dedicated remarkable works in the temple of the Sun: two stone obelisks, each made of a single block of stone, each in length

a hundred cubits, eight cubits across. This king, they said, was followed on the throne by a man from Memphis whose name, rendered in Greek, was Proteus. His sacred precinct still stands at Memphis today, a very handsome and well-kept one, situated south of the temple of Hephaestus. Tyrian Phoenicians live around this precinct, and the whole area together is called the Camp of the Tyrians.

Within the precinct of Proteus there is a shrine called that of the Foreign Aphrodite. I infer that this shrine belongs to Helen daughter of Tyndareus, both because I have heard the story that Helen dwelt with Proteus, and because it is named after the Foreign Aphrodite; for none of the other shrines of Aphrodite anywhere is called by the name 'Foreign.' The priests told me, when I inquired about

Helen came about as follows. Alexander, having snatched Helen away from Sparta, set sail for his own country; and once he reached the Aegean, contrary winds pushed him off his path into the Egyptian sea, and from there, since the gales never let up, he made his way to Egypt, arriving at what is now called the Canobic mouth of the Nile and then at the Salting-houses. On the shore stood

and there stands, to this day, a temple of Heracles; if a slave belonging to anyone at all takes refuge there and has the sacred brands placed on him, dedicating himself to the god, no one is allowed to touch him. This custom has held unchanged, from its founding right up to my own day; and so, when Alexander's servants learned of the rule governing the temple, they abandoned him and, sitting as suppliants of the god, brought charges against

Alexander, wishing to do him harm, telling the whole story of how things stood concerning Helen and the wrong done to Menelaus. They brought these charges before the priests and before the warden of this mouth of the river, whose name was Thonis. Hearing this, Thonis sent a message with all speed to Memphis, to Proteus, saying: 'A stranger has come, a Teucrian by birth, who has done

committed an unholy act in Greece: he tricked the wife of his own host, and now arrives bringing her along with an enormous amount of wealth, having been blown to this land by the winds. Should we let him sail off unpunished, then, or should we seize what he brought with him?' In response, Proteus sent back this message: 'As for this man, whoever he actually is, who has behaved so impiously toward his own

host — seize him and bring him to me, that I may know what he has to say.' Hearing this, Thonis seized Alexander and held his ships in port, and then brought him up to Memphis, along with Helen and the wealth, and also the suppliants. When all had been brought there, Proteus asked Alexander who he was

and from where he was sailing. Alexander told him his lineage and named his fatherland, and related the voyage, from where he was sailing. Then Proteus asked him where he had gotten Helen; and as Alexander wandered in his account and did not tell the truth, those who had become suppliants refuted him, recounting the whole story of the wrongdoing.

At last Proteus declared this judgment to them, saying: 'If I did not hold it a matter of great importance never to kill any stranger who has been driven by winds into my country, I would have taken vengeance on you on behalf of the Greek, since you, basest of men, having received hospitality, committed a most unholy deed: you went to the wife of your own host. And not only

did that not satisfy you, but you carried her off, stealing her away after unsettling her mind. And even that alone was not enough for you, but you have come here having also plundered your host's house. Now, then, since I hold it of great importance not to kill guests, I will not allow you to take away this woman and the wealth, but I will keep them for the Greek, your host, until such time as he himself comes and wishes

wishes. But you yourself, along with your fellow crewmen, I order to clear out of my land within three days and make for somewhere else; otherwise you will be dealt with as enemies.' This, the priests said, was how Helen came to Proteus. And it strikes me that Homer had also come across this account; but since it did not fit as gracefully into his epic as the other

version he used, he deliberately set it aside, while showing that he knew this story as well. This is clear from the way he composed, in the Iliad (and nowhere else did he retract himself), the wandering of Alexander — how he was carried off course bringing Helen, wandering to various places and how he came to Sidon in Phoenicia. He mentions this in the Prowess of Diomedes; the verses run thus:

'There were the robes, richly embroidered, the work of Sidonian women, whom godlike Alexander himself brought from Sidon, sailing over the wide sea, on that voyage on which he brought back high-born Helen.' (Homer, Iliad 6.289-292) He mentions it also in the Odyssey, in these verses: 'Such cunning drugs did the daughter of Zeus possess, good ones, which Polydamna gave her, wife of Thon, an Egyptian woman, for whom the grain-giving earth bears very many drugs,

many good mixed together, and many baneful.' (Homer, Odyssey 4.227-230) And these other lines Menelaus speaks to Telemachus: 'The gods still held me there, eager as I was to return to Egypt, since I had not offered them full hecatombs.' (Homer, Odyssey 4.351-352) In these verses he shows that he knew of Alexander's wandering to Egypt; for Syria borders on Egypt, and the Phoenicians, to whom

Sidon belongs, dwell in Syria. From these verses, and from this passage especially, it is made clear, not least but above all, that the Cypria is not the work of Homer but of someone else. For in the Cypria it is said that Alexander arrived at Ilion from Sparta on the third day, bringing Helen, having enjoyed a favorable wind and a smooth sea; whereas in

the Iliad he says that he wandered while bringing her. Let us leave Homer and the Cypria aside then. When I asked the priests whether the Greeks tell an idle tale about what happened at Ilion or not, they answered as follows, saying they knew it from inquiries made with Menelaus himself. They said that after the abduction of Helen a great army of Greeks

arrived in force to aid Menelaus, and once the army had landed and made camp, they sent envoys to Ilion, Menelaus himself going along with them; and when these men entered within the walls, they demanded the return of Helen and the wealth Alexander had made off with, and sought redress for the wrongs committed. The Trojans gave this same reply then and

later on as well, swearing it and stating it plainly without oath alike: that they did not have Helen nor the wealth being claimed, but that all of it was in Egypt, and that it would be unjust for them to answer for what Proteus, the Egyptian king, was holding. The Greeks, feeling mocked by this claim, laid siege until they captured the city; but once the wall had fallen and Helen was nowhere to be found, instead

they learned the same account as before, then indeed, believing the first account, the Greeks sent Menelaus himself to Proteus. Menelaus, having come to Egypt and sailed up the river to Memphis, gave a truthful account of what had happened, and was met with great hospitality, and received Helen back unharmed, and all his own wealth besides. Yet even after receiving

these things, Menelaus turned out to be an unjust man toward the Egyptians. For when he set out to sail away, contrary winds held him back; and when this went on for a long time, he devised an unholy scheme: taking two children of local men, he sacrificed them. Afterward, when it became known that he had done this, he was hated and pursued, and fled with his ships toward Libya; from there where

he went next the Egyptians could not say. Some of this, they said, they knew by inquiry, but what happened in their own country they said they knew for certain and could speak of accurately. This is what the Egyptian priests told me. And I myself agree with the account given about Helen, reasoning as follows: had Helen actually been inside Ilion, the Trojans would surely have handed her over to the Greeks, whether Alexander consented or not.

For Priam was not so mad, nor were the others close to him, that they were willing to risk their own persons, their children, and their city, so that Alexander might live with Helen. Even if they had thought this way in the earliest times, still, since many of the other Trojans were dying whenever they clashed with the Greeks, and of Priam's own

sons there was hardly a battle in which two or three or even more did not die, if one may say anything relying on the epic poets, given that such things were happening, I for my part believe that even if Priam himself had been living with Helen, he would still have surrendered her to the Achaeans, if by doing so he were to be freed from the troubles at hand. Nor indeed did the kingship devolve upon Alexander,

so that, Priam being an old man, affairs rested in his hands; rather Hector, who outranked him both in years and in manly standing, was to succeed to it upon Priam's death, and it was not fitting for him to indulge his brother in wrongdoing, especially when great troubles were befalling both himself personally and all the other Trojans on his account. But the truth was that they did not have Helen to give back, and though they spoke

the truth, the Greeks did not believe them — because, as I declare my own opinion, the divine was arranging things so that, by their utter destruction, they might make this plain to mankind: that for great wrongs there are also great punishments from the gods. This is what I think about the matter, and it is said. Proteus, they said, was succeeded in the kingship by Rhampsinitus, who left as memorials the propylaea toward the west

facing the temple of Hephaestus, and opposite the forecourt he set up two statues, twenty-five cubits tall, of which the Egyptians call the one standing toward the north Summer, and the one toward the south Winter; the one they call Summer they worship and treat well, but the one called Winter they treat in the opposite way. After this they told me

that this king went down alive into the place the Greeks believe to be Hades, and there played dice with Demeter, sometimes winning and sometimes being beaten by her, and that he came back up again bearing as a gift from her a golden napkin. From Rhampsinitus's descent, they said, when he came back up, the Egyptians instituted a festival, which I myself know

they still celebrate even to my own day, though I cannot say whether it is really on account of this that they hold the festival. On the very day of the festival the priests weave a cloak, and then bind the eyes of one of their own number with a fillet; leading him, with the cloak on, to a road leading to the sanctuary of Demeter, they themselves turn back. This priest, with his eyes bound, is said to be led by two wolves

to the sanctuary of Demeter, twenty stadia distant from the city, and afterward the wolves guide him back from the sanctuary to that very same spot. Let anyone to whom such things seem credible make use of what is told by the Egyptians; for my part, throughout this whole account my rule is that I write down what is said by each people as I have heard it. The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysus rule

over the world below. The Egyptians were also the first to advance the idea that a man's soul cannot die, and that once the body wastes away, it slips into whatever creature happens to be coming to birth at that moment; and once it has passed through every creature of land, sea, and air, it enters once more into the body of a man coming to birth; and this cycle takes it three thousand years to complete.

Some of the Greeks have adopted this doctrine, some earlier and some later, as though it were their own; I know their names, but I do not write them down. Up to the reign of King Rhampsinitus, they said, Egypt was under thoroughly good governance and prospered greatly, but after him Cheops, who became king over them, drove the country into every kind of misery. For he shut up all the temples,

and first stopped the Egyptians from performing their sacrifices, and then ordered them all to work for him. Some were assigned to haul stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountain range down to the Nile; a separate crew was posted on the far bank to take charge of the stones once boats had ferried them across the river, and to haul them on to what is called the Libyan mountain range. They worked in gangs of one hundred

thousand men, each gang for three months at a time. Ten years were spent by the people in this toil, wearing themselves out, on the road along which they hauled the stones — a work, in my opinion, not much less in magnitude than the pyramid itself. For its length is five stadia, its width ten fathoms, and its height, at its highest point, eight fathoms,

and it is made of polished stone with figures carved on it. This road took ten years, as did the underground chambers on the hill on which the pyramids stand, which he made as burial chambers for himself on an island, having brought in a channel from the Nile. The pyramid itself took twenty years to build; it is square, each face measuring eight

plethra, and the height is equal, and the stone is polished and fitted together as closely as possible; none of the stones is less than thirty feet long. This pyramid was built in the manner of steps, which some call tiers and others altars; when they had first made it in this stepped form, they raised the remaining stones by means of machines made of short timbers, lifting them from the ground onto the first tier of steps;

and when the stone had risen onto this, it was placed on another machine standing on the first tier, and from there hauled up to the second tier by another machine; for there were as many machines as there were tiers of steps — or else it was the same machine, being a single one and easy to move, which they shifted from tier to tier each time they

took out the stone; for I record it both ways, just as it is told. The topmost parts of it were finished first, and then they went on to finish the parts next below these, and last of all they finished the parts on the ground and lowest down. It is recorded in Egyptian writing on the pyramid how much was spent on radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen; and as I recall well,

the interpreter who read me the inscription said it came to sixteen hundred talents of silver. If this is indeed so, how much more must have been spent besides on the iron tools they worked with, and on food and clothing for the workmen, given that the time spent building the works was as stated, and there was, I think, additional time spent in cutting and

hauling the stones and constructing the underground excavation — no small amount of time. Cheops sank to such depths of wickedness that, when he was in need of money, he set his own daughter in a brothel and ordered her to charge a certain sum — how much, they did not tell me. She collected the sum set by her father, but also conceived a plan of her own, to leave behind a memorial for herself, and

asked of each man who came in to her that he give her one stone toward the works. From these stones, they said, the pyramid was built that stands in the middle of the three, in front of the great pyramid, each side of which measures a plethron and a half. The Egyptians said this Cheops was on the throne for fifty years, and when he died

his brother Chephren succeeded to the kingship. He too followed the same practice as the other in all respects, and built a pyramid too, though it does not reach the dimensions of his brother's — this we ourselves measured. It has no underground chambers, nor does any channel come from the Nile to it flowing in as into the other one; instead

through a built channel water flows around an island inside, on which they say Cheops himself lies. Chephren built the base course of red variegated Ethiopian stone, and, setting it back forty feet from the size of the other, built it adjoining the great pyramid. Both stand on the same hill, about a hundred feet high. Chephren, they said, reigned fifty-six years. This makes a total of one hundred and

six years reckoned, during which time the Egyptians suffered every kind of misery, and the temples, shut up for so long, were not opened. Out of hatred the Egyptians are very unwilling to name these kings, and instead they call the pyramids after the shepherd Philitis, who at that time grazed his flocks in that region. After him, they said, Mycerinus, son of Cheops, became king of Egypt; he

disapproved of his father's works, and he opened the temples and let the people, worn down to the last degree of misery, return to their work and their sacrifices, and he gave the most just judgments of all the kings in their disputes. In this respect he is praised more than any other king the Egyptians have ever had, for in general he judged well, and also

when someone was dissatisfied with a verdict, he would give them other gifts from his own purse to satisfy their feelings. Though Mycerinus was so mild toward his citizens and practiced these things, the first of his misfortunes was the death of his daughter, his only child in his household. Overwhelmed with grief at what had befallen him, and wishing to bury his daughter

in a manner more extraordinary than others, he had a hollow wooden cow made, and then, having gilded it, buried inside it this daughter of his who had died. This cow was not hidden in the ground, but was still visible even in my own time, standing in the city of Sais, kept in the palace in a richly furnished chamber; incense of all kinds is burned beside it every day,

and every night a lamp burns beside it all night long. In another chamber close by the cow stand statues of Mycerinus's concubines, according to the priests at Sais; there stand wooden colossal figures, about twenty in number, made naked. As to who they really are, I cannot say, except what is told. But some tell another story about

this cow and the colossal figures, saying that Mycerinus fell in love with his own daughter and then had intercourse with her against her will; afterward, they say, the girl hanged herself out of grief, and the cow became her burial place, while the hands of the attendants who had helped betray her to her own father were cut off by the girl's mother, and now

their images have suffered the same fate the living women suffered. But this, I think, is nonsense they tell, especially the part about the hands of the colossal figures; for we ourselves saw that they had lost their hands through age, which were still visible lying at their feet even in my own time. As for the cow, in most respects

it is covered over with a crimson cloth, but the neck and head are shown gilded with very thick gold; between the horns is a representation of the sun's disk, in gold. The cow is not standing upright but lying on its knees, and its size is that of a real full-grown cow. It is carried out of its chamber every year, at the time when the Egyptians beat themselves for the

— a god I will not name in connection with such a matter — and that at that time they bring the cow out into the light; for they say she asked her father Mycerinus, as she was dying, that once a year she might look upon the sun. After the misfortune of his daughter, the following happened next to this king: a message reached him from an oracle at Buto, warning that he had only six years left to live

and would die in the seventh. Taking this hard, he responded by sending the oracle a message of complaint against the god, protesting that his father and his uncle, though they had shut up the temples and paid no heed to the gods, but even destroyed men, had lived a long time, while he, who was pious, was going to die so soon. But a second message came to him from the oracle

saying that it was for this very reason that his life was being cut short: for he had not done what he ought to have done; Egypt was fated to suffer for a span of one hundred fifty years, and the two kings who ruled before him had grasped this, but he had not. When Mycerinus heard this, taking it that his fate was now sealed, he had many lamps made, and whenever night came,

he would light them and drink and enjoy himself, never letting up by day or by night, wandering through the marshes and the groves and wherever he learned the most pleasant places for revelry might be. He contrived all this because he wished to prove the oracle false, so that by turning the nights into days he might make twelve years out of the six. He left behind a pyramid much smaller than his father's, twenty feet

short of each side measuring three plethra, foursquare, and built halfway up of Ethiopian stone. Some of the Greeks say this pyramid belongs to the courtesan Rhodopis, but they are mistaken. Indeed, they seem to me not even to know who Rhodopis was when they say this — for otherwise they would never have credited her with building such a pyramid, on which countless thousands of talents were spent, so to speak. Besides,

Rhodopis flourished in the reign of Amasis, not this king. For it was very many years after these kings who left these pyramids that Rhodopis lived; she was Thracian by birth, and was a slave of Iadmon son of Hephaestopolis, a Samian, and a fellow-slave of Aesop the storyteller. For Aesop too belonged to Iadmon, as is shown by this above all: when

the Delphians, obeying an oracle, repeatedly proclaimed that whoever wished might claim compensation for the life of Aesop, no one else came forward, but a grandson of that Iadmon, another Iadmon, claimed it. So Aesop too belonged to Iadmon. Rhodopis reached Egypt in the company of Xanthes of Samos, who brought her there, and once there, to practice her trade, she was freed for a great sum of money by a man of Mytilene, Charaxus son of Scamandronymus, brother of Sappho

the poetess. Thus Rhodopis was freed, and she remained in Egypt, and being very charming she acquired great wealth — great, that is, for a Rhodopis, but not enough to reach the scale of such a pyramid. For a tenth of her wealth can still be seen today by anyone who wishes, so there is no need to attribute to her any great fortune. For Rhodopis desired

to leave a memorial of herself in Greece, by having made something that no one else had thought of and dedicated in a temple, and to set this up at Delphi as a remembrance of herself. So with a tenth of her wealth she had made many iron ox-roasting spits, as much as the tithe allowed, and sent them to Delphi; and even now they still lie stacked behind the altar the Chians set up there, opposite

the temple itself. Courtesans at Naucratis do somehow tend to become quite charming. This woman, of whom this story is told, grew so renowned that every Greek learned the name Rhodopis; and later, another woman, named Archidice, became celebrated throughout Greece, though less

talked about than the first. Charaxus, after he had ransomed Rhodopis, returned to Mytilene, and Sappho mocked him severely in a poem. So much for Rhodopis. After Mycerinus, the priests said, the king of Egypt was Asychis, who built for Hephaestus the propylaea facing the sunrise, which are by far the finest and largest; for while all the propylaea have carved figures

and other manifold architectural ornament, these surpass the rest by far. In this king's reign, they said, since money was in very short supply, a law was made among the Egyptians that a man could pledge his father's corpse as security and thereby borrow money; and to this law was added a further provision, that the lender should also gain power over the entire tomb of the borrower, and that

whoever offered this pledge and was unwilling to repay the debt should suffer this penalty: he himself, when he died, should not be entitled to burial, either in that ancestral tomb or in any other, nor should any of his own kin who died be allowed burial either. This king, wishing to surpass the earlier kings of Egypt before him, left as his memorial a pyramid built of bricks, on which is carved in

stone an inscription reading as follows: 'Do not think less of me next to these stone pyramids: I surpass them as much as Zeus surpasses the other gods. For men thrust a pole into a lake, and whatever mud clung to the pole they gathered up, and made bricks of it, and thus built me.' Such were this king's achievements. After him there reigned a blind man from the city of Anysis,

whose name was Anysis. During his reign, Ethiopians together with Sabacos, king of the Ethiopians, invaded Egypt with a great force. This blind man fled away into the marshes, and the Ethiopian ruled Egypt for fifty years, during which he did the following: whenever any Egyptian committed some offense, he was unwilling to put any of them to death; instead

he judged each according to the magnitude of the wrongdoing, sentencing the offender to build up mounds of earth near his own city, wherever he was from. And this is how the cities came to be raised even higher than before: they had first been raised by those who dug the canals in the reign of King Sesostris, and were raised a second time under the Ethiopian, becoming very high indeed. And among the other cities of

Egypt that were raised high, the one raised most, in my opinion, was the city of Bubastis, where there is also a temple of Bubastis most worthy of description. There are larger and more costly temples, but none more delightful to look at than this one. Bubastis, in the Greek tongue, is Artemis. Her temple is arranged like this: except for the entrance, the rest is an island; for from the

Nile two canals run in, not mixing with one another, but each reaching up to the temple entrance, curving around one side, then the other, each a hundred feet wide, shaded over with trees. The propylaea are ten fathoms high, adorned with figures six cubits tall, worthy of note. As the temple lies in the middle of the city, it is visible from every side to one walking around it; for since

the city has been raised up high while the temple stayed put where it was originally built, it can be seen clearly from without. Around it runs a wall carved with figures, and within is a grove of very tall trees planted around a great shrine, in which the statue itself stands; the width and length of the temple precinct are each a stade. Along the entrance runs a road paved with stone, extending

about three stades, running through the marketplace toward the east, about four plethra wide; and on either side of the road grow trees reaching to the sky. It leads to the temple of Hermes. So much for this temple. As for how the Ethiopian's departure came about, they said it happened like this: he had a vision in his sleep of the following sort, and thereafter fled away,

leaving. It seemed to him that a man stood over him and advised him to gather together all the priests in Egypt and cut them in half. Having seen this vision, he said that he took it as a sign that the gods were showing him this so that, by committing impiety concerning sacred matters, he might suffer some harm from gods or men; he would not do this, but rather, since the time had now run out

during which it had been foretold he would rule Egypt, he would withdraw. For while he had been in Ethiopia, oracles consulted by the Ethiopians themselves had declared that he must reign over Egypt for fifty years. As that span drew to a close and the vision from his dream began to disturb him, Sabacos withdrew from Egypt of his own accord. And when the Ethiopian had left Egypt, the blind man again ruled, coming from the

marshes, where for fifty years he had lived on an island he had built up with ash and earth. For whenever the Egyptians came bringing him food, as had been assigned to each of them, without the Ethiopian's knowledge, he would order them also to bring ash as part of the gift. This island no one before Amyrtaeus was able to discover, but for more than seven hundred years the earlier

kings before Amyrtaeus were unable to find it. This island goes by the name Elbo, and measures ten stades all the way around. After him, they said, there reigned the priest of Hephaestus, whose name was Sethos: he held in contempt and mistreated the warrior class of the Egyptians, acting as if he'd never need them again, and among other dishonors he did them, he took away their farmland; for under the earlier

kings each of them had been granted, as a special allotment, twelve arouras. After this, Sennacherib, king of the Arabians and Assyrians, marched a great army against Egypt; and the Egyptian warriors refused to come to the aid. The priest, driven into a helpless position, went into the inner sanctuary before the statue and lamented over what he was in danger of suffering. Overcome by his lament, he drifted into sleep, and a vision appeared to him

the god stood over him and told him to take courage, that he would suffer no harm in meeting the Arabian army, for he himself would send him helpers. Relying on this dream, he took with him the Egyptians who were willing to follow, and encamped at Pelusium, for that is where the entrance routes are, and none of the men who followed him were fighters, but shopkeepers and craftsmen and market people. When they arrived there,

field mice poured in upon their enemies by night and ate through their quivers and their bows, and besides these the handles of their shields, so that the next day, fleeing unarmed, many of them fell. And to this day this king stands in the temple of Hephaestus, made of stone, holding a mouse in his hand, and saying through an inscription, "Let whoever looks upon me be reverent."

So far the Egyptians and the priests told the story, showing that between the first king and this final priest-king of Hephaestus, three hundred forty-one human generations had passed, and in these there had been that many high priests and that many kings, each in their own right. Yet three hundred generations of men amount to ten thousand years, for three

generations of men make a hundred years; and the remaining forty-one generations, which came after the three hundred, make one thousand three hundred and forty years. So across a span of eleven thousand three hundred forty years, they said, no god had taken human form; nor indeed did they say anything of this sort had happened either earlier or later among the remaining kings of Egypt who arose.

In that time, then, they said the sun had four times risen out of its usual place: twice it rose where it now sets, and twice it set where it now rises. And nothing in Egypt was changed on account of this, neither what comes from the earth nor what comes from the river for them, nor anything concerning diseases or

deaths. Earlier, when Hecataeus the storyteller was in Thebes and traced his lineage, attaching his family line to a god in the sixteenth generation, the priests of Zeus did to him just what they also did to me, though I had not traced my own lineage. They led him into the great inner chamber and counted out, showing him, as many wooden colossal statues as they had said there were; for each high priest sets up there, during his own lifetime, an image

of himself. Counting and showing them, the priests demonstrated to me that each one was the son of his own father, going through them all starting from the statue of whichever had died most recently, until they had shown me the whole line. And to Hecataeus, when he traced his own lineage and attached it to a god in the sixteenth generation, they gave a counter-genealogy based on their reckoning, not accepting from him that a man could be born from a god; they gave this counter-genealogy in the following way, saying that each of the

statues was a piromis born from a piromis, until they had shown that all three hundred and forty-five statues were, each one, a piromis named after piromis, and they did not attach them to a god or a hero at all. Piromis, in the Greek tongue, means a good and noble man. Of those whose images these were, then, they showed that all of them were of this sort, quite removed from gods. But before the time of these men, they said, those ruling

in Egypt were gods, not existing alongside men, and of these always one held power; and the last of them to reign was Horus, son of Osiris, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he put an end to the rule of Typhon and reigned last over Egypt. Osiris, in the Greek tongue, is Dionysus. Among the Greeks, the youngest of the gods are held to be Heracles and Dionysus

and Pan, but among the Egyptians Pan is the most ancient, one of the first eight gods, as they are called, while Heracles belongs to the second group, the twelve so-called gods, and Dionysus to the third group, who were born from the twelve gods. As for Heracles, how many years the Egyptians themselves say there are down to king Amasis, I have already stated; and Pan is said to be still more ancient than these,

while Dionysus is the most recent of them, and even he is reckoned to be fifteen thousand years before king Amasis. And the Egyptians say they know this exactly, always reckoning and always recording the years. Now as for the Dionysus said to have been born from Semele, daughter of Cadmus, it is about one thousand six hundred years down to my own time; as for Heracles, born of Alcmene, it comes to roughly nine hundred years; and as for Pan,

son of Penelope (for by the Greeks it is said that Pan was born of her and Hermes), the years are fewer than those since the Trojan war, about eight hundred years down to my time. Anyone is free to make use of whichever of these two accounts seems more persuasive; as for me, I have already declared my own judgment about them. For if these figures too had become well known and had grown old in

Greece, just as Heracles born of Amphitryon did, and likewise Dionysus born of Semele and Pan born of Penelope, one might say that these were other men who had come to bear the names of those gods born earlier. But as it is, the Greeks say that Dionysus, as soon as he was born, was sewn into Zeus's thigh and carried off to Nysa,

which lies above Egypt in Ethiopia; and concerning Pan they cannot say where he went once he was born. It is clear to me that the Greeks learned the names of these two later than the names of the other gods; and from the time they learned of them, from that time they reckon their birth. This much, then, is what the Egyptians themselves say; but what the rest of

mankind, and the Egyptians in agreement with them, say happened in this land, this I will now relate; and something of my own observation will be added to it as well. The Egyptians, once freed after the reign of the priest of Hephaestus—for they were not able to live any length of time without a king—set up twelve kings, dividing the whole of Egypt into twelve portions. These men, having made marriage alliances with one another, ruled under the following customs,

neither to overthrow one another nor to seek to have more than one's fellow, but to be the very greatest of friends. They made these rules and kept to them strictly for the following reason: it had been prophesied to them at the very outset, when they first took up their rule, that whichever of them poured a libation from a bronze bowl in the temple of Hephaestus would rule all of Egypt; for indeed they used to gather together for all the sacred rites.

And they resolved to leave behind some common memorial, and having so resolved they built a labyrinth, situated a little above Lake Moeris, near the city called Crocodiles' City—which I myself have now seen, and it is beyond description. For if one were to reckon up the walls and the display of works made by the Greeks, they would appear to be of less labor and expense than this labyrinth.

And yet the temple at Ephesus is certainly remarkable, and so is the one at Samos. The pyramids too were beyond description, and each of them was a match for many great works of the Greeks; yet the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. For it has twelve covered courts, with gates facing one another, six facing north and six facing south,

all adjoining one another, with the same outer wall surrounding them all. The chambers within are double, some underground and others above ground upon them, three thousand in number, fifteen hundred of each kind. The chambers above ground we ourselves saw, going through them, and speak of them from our own viewing; the underground ones we learned of only by report, for the Egyptians in charge were entirely unwilling

to show them, saying that there were burial places there belonging both to the kings who first built this labyrinth and to the sacred crocodiles. So concerning the lower chambers we speak from what we heard by report, while the upper ones, greater than any human works, we ourselves saw; for the passageways through the covered halls and the winding paths through the courts, being most intricate, provided endless wonder as one passed from a court

into the chambers, and from the chambers into columned halls, and from the columned halls into other chambers, and into other courts from the chambers. The roof over all of these is of stone, just as the walls are, and the walls are full of carved figures, and each court is surrounded by columns of white stone fitted together most precisely. At the corner where the labyrinth ends there stands

a pyramid forty fathoms high, on which great figures are carved; and the way into it has been made underground. Such being this labyrinth, an even greater wonder is provided by the lake called Moeris, alongside which this labyrinth is built; its circumference measures three thousand six hundred stadia, sixty schoinoi, equal to the length of Egypt itself along the sea. It lies

long from north to south, and its depth, at its deepest point, is fifty fathoms. That it is man-made and dug out is shown by the lake itself; for two pyramids stand roughly at its center, rising fifty fathoms above the water, each, and an equal amount built below the water, and on top of both sits a stone colossus seated upon

a throne. Thus the pyramids stand a hundred fathoms high, and a hundred fathoms, measured out correctly, come to a stadion of six plethra, the fathom being reckoned at six feet and four cubits, with each foot equal to four palms and each cubit to six palms. The water in the lake is not native to it—the region there is terribly short of water—instead it has been channeled in from the Nile by

a canal, and for six months it flows into the lake, then reverses for six months, running back out to the Nile; and whenever it flows out, then during those six months the lake yields a talent of silver a day to the royal treasury from the fish, and whenever the water flows into it, twenty minas. The local people said

and that this lake drains underground into the Syrtis that lies toward Libya, turned toward the west into the interior, alongside the mountain range above Memphis. Since I could not see the spoil from this digging lying anywhere—for I was quite curious about it—I asked those who lived nearest the lake where the excavated earth had gone.

They told me where it had been carried off, and I found it easy to believe, since I knew by report that something similar had happened at Nineveh, the city of the Assyrians. The great wealth of Sardanapalus, king of Nineveh, was kept guarded in underground treasuries, and thieves plotted to carry it off. Starting from their own houses, the thieves tunneled underground, working their way toward the royal palace,

and the earth removed from the digging they carried off, whenever night fell, to the Tigris River flowing past Nineveh, until they had accomplished what they wanted. I heard that something similar happened also with the digging of the lake in Egypt, only there the work went on during daylight hours rather than at night: as the Egyptians dug, they carried the earth to the Nile,

and the river, receiving it, would disperse it. That, then, is how this lake is said to have been dug. Now the twelve kings, who dealt justly with one another, on one occasion, when they had made sacrifice in the temple of Hephaestus, on the last day of the festival, were about to pour libations, and the high priest brought out for them the golden bowls from which they were accustomed to pour, but miscounted, bringing out eleven for the twelve of them. Then, since he had no bowl,

Psammetichus, who stood last of them, took off his helmet, which was of bronze, held it out, and poured his libation with it. All the other kings likewise wore helmets, and happened to have them on at that moment. Psammetichus held out his helmet with no treacherous intent, but the others, taking note of what Psammetichus had done, and recalling the oracle that had been given them—that whichever of them poured a libation

from a bronze bowl would become sole king of Egypt—recalling this oracle, they did not see fit to kill Psammetichus, since on questioning him under torture they found he had acted with no forethought at all; but they resolved to drive him out into the marshes, stripped of most of his power, and that from the marshes he should have no dealings with the rest of Egypt. This Psammetichus had previously fled from the Ethiopian Sabacos, who

had killed his father Necho; he had then fled to Syria, and when the Ethiopian departed as a result of the vision seen in the dream, the Egyptians of the Saite district brought him back. Afterward, when he was king a second time, it was through the helmet that the eleven kings caused him to flee again into the marshes. Aware now that these men had treated him with such contempt, he set about taking revenge

on those who had driven him out. He sent to the city of Buto, to the oracle of Leto, where the Egyptians have their most truthful place of divination, and the oracle came back that vengeance would arrive from the sea, when men of bronze appeared. He found this very hard to believe—that men of bronze should come to his aid. But not much time passed before necessity drove Ionian and Carian men, out raiding,

to be carried off course to Egypt; and when they disembarked and, armed in bronze, one of the Egyptians who had come to the marshes reported to Psammetichus—since he had never before seen men armed in bronze—that men of bronze had arrived from the sea and were ravaging the countryside. Psammetichus, realizing that the oracle was being fulfilled, made friends with the Ionians and Carians, and by promising them great rewards persuaded them

to join him. Once he had persuaded them, backed by the Egyptians who wanted his cause to succeed as well as by these allies, he overthrew the kings. Having gained control of all Egypt, Psammetichus built for Hephaestus the forecourt at Memphis that faces the south wind, and a courtyard for Apis, in which Apis is kept whenever he appears, building it opposite the forecourt, the whole surrounded by columns

and filled with reliefs; in place of columns there stand colossal statues twelve cubits high supporting the courtyard. Apis, in the Greek tongue, is Epaphus. To the Ionians and Carians who had helped him accomplish this, Psammetichus gave lands to dwell in, opposite one another, with the Nile flowing between them; these were given the name Encampments. He gave them these lands and everything else

that he had promised, all of it. He also placed Egyptian boys with them to learn the Greek language, and from these, once they had learned the language, the interpreters now found in Egypt are descended. The Ionians and Carians dwelt in these lands for a long time; these lands lie by the coast a short way below Bubastis, on the mouth of the Nile called Pelusiac.

These men king Amasis later removed from there and resettled at Memphis, making them his own guard against the Egyptians. Since these people were settled in Egypt, the Greeks, by mingling with them, have come to know accurately everything that has happened concerning Egypt from the reign of king Psammetichus onward, including later events; for these were the first people of a foreign tongue to be settled in Egypt. From the places

from which they were removed, the beached hulls of their ships and the ruins of their dwellings remained down to my own time. This, then, is how Psammetichus gained control of Egypt. Of the oracle in Egypt I have already made mention many times, and I shall now give an account of it, since it deserves one. This oracle in Egypt is a sanctuary of Leto, situated in

a great city by the mouth of the Nile called the Sebennytic, as one sails up from the sea. This city, where the oracle stands, bears the name Buto, as I have already called it before. In this Buto there is a sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis, and the temple of Leto, in which the oracle is housed, is itself

quite large and has a forecourt ten fathoms high. But of the visible things there, I shall tell you what struck me as the greatest marvel: in this precinct there is a temple of Leto made from a single stone, equal in height and length, each wall of it forty cubits, each measurement the same; and as a roof-covering another stone is set on top,

with a cornice four cubits deep. This temple, then, is the most marvelous of the visible things around this sanctuary that I know of; and second is the island called Chemmis. It lies in a deep, wide lake beside the sanctuary at Buto, and the Egyptians say this island is a floating one. I myself

never saw it floating or moving, and I am amazed to hear it, if it is really a floating island. On it there stands a great temple of Apollo, and three altars are set up, and there grow on it many palm trees and other trees, both fruit-bearing and barren, in abundance. The Egyptians tell the following story to explain why it is a floating island: that on this island, which was not floating before,

Leto, one of the eight gods born at the very beginning, dwelling in the city of Buto, where indeed this oracle of hers is, received Apollo in trust from Isis and preserved him by hiding him on the island now called floating, at the time when Typhon came searching everywhere, wishing to find the child of Osiris. Apollo and Artemis, they say, are children

of Dionysus and Isis, and Leto became their nurse and savior. In the Egyptian tongue, Apollo is Horus, Demeter is Isis, and Artemis is Bubastis. It was from this story, and no other, that Aeschylus son of Euphorion took the idea I shall now mention—alone among the poets who came before—for he made Artemis the daughter of Demeter. And this, they say, is why the island became a floating one. This is

what they say. Psammetichus ruled Egypt for fifty-four years, twenty-nine of which he spent besieging the great Syrian city of Azotus, until he took it. This Azotus held out under siege longer than any other city we know of. Necho, son of Psammetichus, became king of Egypt after him, and he was the first to attempt the canal leading to the Red Sea,

which Darius the Persian later dug a second time. Its length is a four days' voyage, and it was dug wide enough for two triremes to be rowed abreast. The water for it is brought from the Nile, drawn from a point a little above the city of Bubastis, past Patumus, the Arabian city, and it empties into the Red Sea. It was dug first through the part of the Egyptian plain

that lies toward Arabia; and above this plain runs the mountain range extending toward Memphis, in which the stone quarries are; along the base of this mountain the canal was brought, running long from west to east, and then it extends into the gorges, running from the mountain toward the south and the south wind, down to the

Arabian Gulf. Now the shortest and most direct route to cross from the northern sea to the southern, which is also called the Red Sea, is from Mount Casius, which marks the boundary between Egypt and Syria: from there it is exactly a thousand stadia to the Arabian Gulf. That is the most direct route, but the canal is much longer, inasmuch as it is more winding;

in the digging of it under king Necho, one hundred twenty thousand Egyptians perished. Necho stopped digging partway through when an oracle intervened forbidding it, on the grounds that he was laboring in advance for the foreigner. The Egyptians call all people who do not share their language foreigners. Having ceased work on the canal, Necho turned to military campaigns, and triremes were built, some for the northern sea, others in the

the Arabian Gulf on the Red Sea, and the slipways for them are still visible today. Necho used these ships when he needed them, and he also fought the Syrians on land, defeating them at Magdolus, and after the battle he took Cadytis, a great city of Syria. The clothing he happened to be wearing when he accomplished these things he dedicated to Apollo, sending it to the Branchidae, the sanctuary of the Milesians. After this,

having ruled sixteen years in all, he died, handing over the kingdom to his son Psammis. It was during the reign of this Psammis over Egypt that messengers from Elis arrived, boasting that they administered the contest at Olympia more justly and more nobly than anyone else in the world, and supposing that not even the Egyptians, wise as they were reputed to be, could devise anything better in this matter. When the Eleans arrived in Egypt and explained the reason

for which they had come, the king summoned together those of the Egyptians said to be the wisest. The Egyptians, once assembled, questioned the Eleans, who told them everything that fell to them to do concerning the contest. Having recounted it all, they said they had come to learn whether the Egyptians could devise anything more just than this. The Egyptians deliberated and then asked the Eleans whether their own citizens competed in it. They

answered that both they themselves and the other Greeks alike were permitted to compete, whoever wished. The Egyptians said that in arranging things this way they had missed the mark of justice entirely, for there was no way they would fail to favor their own citizen when he competed, thereby wronging the foreigner. But if they truly wished to arrange it justly, and this was the reason they had come to Egypt, the Egyptians urged them instead to open the contest to foreign competitors only, and let no Elean

to be allowed to compete. This is the advice the Egyptians gave the Eleans. Psammis, after ruling Egypt only six years and campaigning against Ethiopia, died soon after, and Apries, son of Psammis, succeeded him. He, after his ancestor Psammetichus, was the most fortunate of the earlier kings, ruling twenty-five years, during which he sent an army against Sidon and fought a naval battle against the Tyrian.

But since it was fated that he come to a bad end, this happened from a cause which I will relate at greater length in my account of Libya, and more briefly here for now. Apries sent out an army against the Cyrenaeans and suffered a great defeat. The Egyptians blamed him for this and revolted against him, believing that Apries had deliberately sent them out to an obvious disaster, so that they would be destroyed and he

could rule the rest of the Egyptians more securely. Those who returned from the campaign, along with the friends of those who had perished, took this so hard that they revolted openly. When Apries learned of this, he sent Amasis to them to put a stop to it by persuasion. When Amasis arrived and found the Egyptians refusing to be dissuaded, one of the Egyptians, standing behind him as he spoke, placed a helmet on his head, and in doing so

declared that he was crowning him king. And this act was not at all unwelcome to Amasis, as he showed. For once those who had revolted had set him up as king of the Egyptians, he prepared to march against Apries. When Apries learned of this, he sent a man of standing among the Egyptians around him, named Patarbemis, ordering him to bring Amasis to him alive. When

Patarbemis arrived and summoned Amasis, Amasis, who happened to be sitting on his horse, raised himself up and broke wind, and told him to carry that back to Apries. Nevertheless Patarbemis insisted that he come to the king, since the king had sent for him. Amasis replied that he had long been preparing to do just that, and that Apries would have no complaint against him, for he himself would come, and would bring others with him too.

Patarbemis, from what was said, did not fail to grasp his intention, and seeing him making preparations, hurried away, wishing to inform the king as quickly as possible of what was happening. But when he came to Apries without bringing Amasis, the king, giving him no chance to speak, in his fury ordered that his ears and nose be cut off. The rest of the Egyptians, seeing

a man still loyal to the king so shamefully mutilated and disfigured, without any hesitation went over to the other side and gave themselves up to Amasis. When Apries learned of this too, he armed his mercenaries and marched against the Egyptians. He had around him thirty thousand Carian and Ionian mercenaries. His

palace was in the city of Sais, great and remarkable to behold. Those with Apries advanced against the Egyptians, and those with Amasis against the foreigners, and both sides came together at the city of Momemphis, where they were about to test each other. There are seven classes of Egyptians, and of these some are called priests, some warriors, some cowherds, some

swineherds, some merchants, some interpreters, and some pilots. That is the number of Egyptian classes, and their names are derived from their occupations. The warriors among them are called Calasiries and Hermotybies, and they come from the following districts, for all Egypt is divided into districts. These are the districts of the Hermotybies: Busiris, Sais, Chemmis, Papremis, and the island

called Prosopitis, and half of Natho. From these districts come the Hermotybies, who at their most numerous numbered a hundred and sixty thousand. None of these has learned any manual trade, but they are devoted entirely to the profession of arms. The following are the other districts of the Calasiries: Thebes, Bubastis, Aphthis, Tanis, Mendes, Sebennytus, Athribis, Pharbaethus, Thmuis, Onuphis, Anysis, and Myecphoris; this district lies on an island

opposite the city of Bubastis. The Calasiries occupy these districts, and at their most numerous they numbered two hundred and fifty thousand men. Nor are these permitted to practice any trade, but they practice only the arts of war, son succeeding father. Whether the Greeks have picked up this custom from the Egyptians too, I cannot say with confidence, seeing that the Thracians, Scythians,

Persians, Lydians, and nearly all barbarians hold those citizens who learn trades, and their descendants, in lower esteem than the rest, while those who have no dealings with manual crafts are considered noble, especially those devoted to war. All the Greeks have learned this practice, and the Lacedaemonians most of all. The Corinthians least of all despise craftsmen. Their privileges

were the following, granted to these Egyptians alone apart from the priests: twelve exempt arouras allotted to each man. The aroura is a hundred Egyptian cubits square in every direction, and the Egyptian cubit happens to be equal to the Samian cubit. These privileges were granted to all of them, but the following they enjoyed by rotation, never the same men twice: a thousand of the Calasiries and a thousand of the Hermotybies served each year as the king's bodyguard. These men

received, apart from their arouras, the following provisions each day: five minas' weight of baked grain, two minas of beef, and four aryballoi of wine each. This was given to those on guard duty at any given time. When Apries, leading his mercenaries, and Amasis, with all the Egyptians, came together at the city of Momemphis, they joined battle, and the foreigners fought well, but being

far fewer in number, they were defeated for that reason. It is said that Apries held the belief that not even a god could remove him from his kingship, so securely did he think himself established. And indeed, when he then joined battle he was defeated, and taken alive, he was led away to the city of Sais, to what had once been his own palace, but was now the palace of Amasis. There for a time he was kept

in the palace, and Amasis treated him well. But in the end, when the Egyptians complained that he was not acting justly in keeping alive a man who was an enemy to both them and himself, he handed Apries over to the Egyptians. They strangled him and then buried him in the tombs of his fathers, which are in the sanctuary of Athena, very near the shrine, on the left as one enters. The Saites

buried all the kings who came from this district within the sanctuary. For the tomb of Amasis, though it is farther from the shrine than that of Apries and his ancestors, is nevertheless also within the courtyard of the sanctuary, a great stone colonnade, adorned with columns carved in the likeness of palm trees, and with other lavish work.

Within the colonnade stand double doors, and within the doors is the burial chamber. There are also, in Sais, in the sanctuary of Athena, behind the temple, adjoining the whole wall of the temple, the burial place of one whose name I consider it not right to utter in connection with such a matter. And in the sacred precinct stand great stone obelisks, and there is a lake

nearby, bordered with a stone rim, well made and circular, and in size, as it seemed to me, about as large as the one in Delos called the Round Lake. There, on that lake, at night, they stage the events of his suffering in a rite the Egyptians call the mysteries. Concerning these things, though I know more precisely how each of them is done, let my lips be sealed. And concerning

the rite of Demeter, which the Greeks call the Thesmophoria, on this too let my lips be sealed, except so far as it is permitted to speak of it. It was the daughters of Danaus who carried this rite forth from Egypt and passed it on to the Pelasgian women; then, once the whole Peloponnese had been uprooted by the Dorians, the rite died out there, except that the Arcadians, the only Peloponnesians left behind and not driven out,

preserved it alone. With Apries thus overthrown, Amasis became king, being from the district of Sais, and from the city called Siuph. At first the Egyptians looked down on Amasis and gave him little respect, since he had previously been a commoner from an undistinguished family, but afterward Amasis won them over by cleverness, not by arrogance. There was

he had countless other fine things, and among them a golden footbath in which Amasis himself and all his dinner guests used to wash their feet on every occasion. This he broke up and had made into the statue of a god, and he set it up at the most suitable spot in the city; and the Egyptians kept coming to the statue and worshipping it devoutly. When Amasis learned what

the townspeople were doing, he called the Egyptians together and revealed the truth: the statue, he said, had been made from the footbath into which the Egyptians had once vomited and urinated and washed their feet, yet now they worshipped it devoutly. And so, he went on, the same thing had happened to him as to the footbath: he might once have been a commoner, but at present he was their king; and he ordered them to honor and respect

him. In this way he won the Egyptians over to accepting that it was right to serve him. As for how he ordered his affairs, it was like this: in the early morning, until the hour when the marketplace fills, he diligently transacted the business brought before him; but from then on he drank and cracked jokes at his drinking companions and was frivolous and playful. His friends, annoyed at this, admonished him, saying: "O

king, you do not conduct yourself rightly, dragging yourself down to such utter frivolity. You ought to sit in state on a stately throne and transact business all day long; then the Egyptians would know they are ruled by a great man, and you would have a better reputation. As it is, what you are doing is not at all kingly." But he answered them thus: "Those who own bows string them

when they need to use them; for if they were kept strung all the time, they would snap, and then their owners could not use them at need. So it is with a man's constitution: if he chose to be serious always and never gave himself his share of play, he would go mad or fall into a stupor before he knew it. Knowing this, I give each side its portion." That was

his answer to his friends. It is said of Amasis that even when he was a private man he was fond of drinking and joking and not at all a serious person; and whenever the means for drinking and good living ran out on him, he would go around stealing. Those who claimed he had their property, when he denied it, would haul him off to whatever oracle was in their district. Many times he was convicted

by the oracles, and many times he got off. When he became king, then, he did as follows: all the gods who had acquitted him of being a thief he took no care of, and gave nothing for the upkeep of their temples, nor did he visit them to sacrifice, since they were worth nothing and possessed lying oracles; but all who had convicted him of being a thief, these he cared for most of all, on the grounds that they were true gods

who delivered oracles that did not lie. First, at Sais he built for Athena a gateway that is a marvel, far surpassing everyone in its height and size and in the size and quality of its stones; then he dedicated great colossi and enormous man-sphinxes, and brought other stones of prodigious size for repairs. He brought

some of these from the quarries near Memphis, but the very largest from the city of Elephantine, a voyage of as much as twenty days from Sais. But what I marvel at not least but most of all is this: he brought a chamber of a single stone from the city of Elephantine, and the transport of it took three years, with two thousand men assigned to haul it, all of them

pilots. The outside length of this chamber is twenty-one cubits, its width fourteen, its height eight. Those are the outside measurements of the single-stone chamber; but inside, the length is eighteen cubits and a pygon, and the height is five cubits. It lies beside the entrance of the temple; for they say

it was not dragged inside the temple for this reason: while the chamber was being hauled, the master builder groaned aloud, worn out by the work and by how much time had passed, and Amasis took this to heart and would not let it be dragged any farther. Some, however, say that a man was crushed by it, one of those levering it along, and that for this reason it was not dragged inside. Amasis also dedicated

in all the other notable temples works remarkable for their size, and among them, at Memphis, the colossus lying flat before the entrance to the temple of Hephaestus, which is seventy-five feet long; and on the same base stand two colossi of the same stone, each twenty feet in size, one on this side

and one on that side of the great one. There is another stone figure of the same size at Sais, lying in the same fashion as the one at Memphis. And it was Amasis who built for Isis the temple at Memphis, which is large and very well worth seeing. Under king Amasis, it is said, Egypt enjoyed its greatest prosperity, both in what the river gave the land

and in what the land gave its people, and the inhabited cities in it then numbered in all twenty thousand. And it was Amasis who established for the Egyptians this law: that every Egyptian must declare to the governor of his district, every year, the source of his livelihood; and anyone who failed to do so, or could not show an honest living, was to be punished with death. Solon the Athenian took this

law from Egypt and enacted it for the Athenians; they observe it to this day, for it is a law beyond reproach. Amasis became a friend of the Greeks, and among other favors he showed to certain of them, he gave those who came to Egypt the city of Naucratis to live in; and to those who did not wish to settle but came there as traders by sea, he gave sites to set up altars and precincts for the gods. The greatest of these precincts,

and the most famous and most frequented, is called the Hellenium; these are the cities that founded it jointly: of the Ionians, Chios, Teos, Phocaea, and Clazomenae; of the Dorians, Rhodes, Cnidus, Halicarnassus, and Phaselis; and of the Aeolians, Mytilene alone. The precinct belongs to these cities, and it is they who supply the officers of the trading port; whatever

other cities claim a share in it claim what does not belong to them. Apart from these, the Aeginetans founded a precinct of Zeus on their own, the Samians another of Hera, and the Milesians one of Apollo. In old times Naucratis was the only trading port in Egypt and there was no other; if anyone arrived at any other mouth of the Nile, he had to swear he had not come there on purpose, and after so swearing sail with his ship

itself to the Canopic mouth; or, if contrary winds made that impossible, he had to carry his cargo in barges around the Delta until he reached Naucratis. Such was the honor Naucratis enjoyed. When the Amphictyons contracted for three hundred talents to build the temple that now stands at Delphi (for the one previously there had burned down of itself), it fell to the

Delphians to provide a quarter of the price. So the Delphians went about from city to city collecting gifts, and in doing this they brought back not the least from Egypt: Amasis gave them a thousand talents of alum, and the Greeks living in Egypt twenty minae. With the people of Cyrene Amasis concluded a pact of friendship and alliance, and he also decided to take a wife from there, whether from desire for a Greek

woman or otherwise out of friendship for the Cyrenaeans. He married, at any rate, a daughter, some say of Battus, others of Arcesilaus, others of Critobulus, a man of standing among the townspeople; her name was Ladice. Now whenever Amasis lay with her he was unable to have intercourse, though he could with his other women. When this had gone on a long while, Amasis said to this Ladice,

as she is called: "Woman, you have bewitched me, and there is no way you will escape dying the most miserable death of any woman alive." Ladice, when her denials did nothing to soften Amasis, made a vow in her heart to Aphrodite: if Amasis lay with her that very night — for that was the cure for her trouble — she would send a statue to the goddess in Cyrene.

Immediately after the vow, Amasis lay with her. And from then on, each time Amasis visited her, they came together again, and afterward his affection for her grew strong. Ladice paid her vow to the goddess: she had a statue made and sent it to Cyrene, and it was still safe in my own time, standing facing outward from the city of the Cyrenaeans. This Ladice, when

Cambyses conquered Egypt and learned from her who she was, he sent back unharmed to Cyrene. Amasis also dedicated offerings in Greece: first, at Cyrene, a gilded statue of Athena and a portrait of himself done in painting; then, to Athena at Lindus, two stone statues and a linen corselet well worth seeing; and to Hera at Samos, two

wooden images of himself, which stood in the great temple even to my own day, behind the doors. His dedication at Samos was made on account of the bond of hospitality he shared with Polycrates son of Aeaces; the one at Lindus owed nothing to any such tie, but rather to the fact that the temple of Athena at Lindus is said to have been established by the daughters of Danaus, who put in there when

they were fleeing the sons of Aegyptus. These were the dedications of Amasis. He was also the first of men to capture Cyprus and subject it to the payment of tribute.

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