Book 2
Now three hundred generations are ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a hundred. And over and above the three hundred, the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years.
Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt .
Four times in this period (so they told me) the sun rose contrary to experience; twice he came up where he now goes down, and twice went down where he now comes up; yet Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt at these times underwent no change, either in the produce of the river and the land, or in the matter of sickness and death.
Hecataeus Hecataeus died soon after the Persian war. the historian was once at Thebes [32.666,25.683] (deserted settlement), Qina, Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa Thebes , where he made a genealogy for himself that had him descended from a god in the sixteenth generation. But the priests of Zeus did with him as they also did with me (who had not traced my own lineage).
They brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me wooden figures there which they counted to the total they had already given, for every high priest sets up a statue of himself there during his lifetime;
pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each succeeded his father; they went through the whole line of figures, back to the earliest from that of the man who had most recently died.
Thus, when Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, the priests too traced a line of descent according to the method of their counting; for they would not be persuaded by him that a man could be descended from a god; they traced descent through the whole line of three hundred and forty-five figures, not connecting it with any ancestral god or hero, but declaring each figure to be a “Piromis” the son of a “Piromis”; in Greek, one who is in all respects a good man.
Thus they showed that all those whose statues stood there had been good men, but quite unlike gods.
Before these men, they said, the rulers of Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt were gods, but none had been contemporary with the human priests. Of these gods one or another had in succession been supreme; the last of them to rule the country was Osiris' son Horus, whom the Greeks call Apollo; he deposed Typhon, Typhon is the Egyptian Set, the god of destruction. and was the last divine king of Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt . Osiris is, in the Greek language, Dionysus.
Among the Greeks, Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan are held to be the youngest of the gods. But in Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt , PanThe Egyptian Khem. is the most ancient of these and is one of the eight gods who are said to be the earliest of all; Heracles belongs to the second dynasty (that of the so-called twelve gods); and Dionysus to the third, which came after the twelve.
How many years there were between Heracles and the reign of Amasis, I have already shown; Pan is said to be earlier still; the years between Dionysus and Amasis are the fewest, and they are reckoned by the Egyptians at fifteen thousand.
The Egyptians claim to be sure of all this, since they have reckoned the years and chronicled them in writing.
Now the Dionysus who was called the son of Semele, daughter of Cadmus, was about sixteen hundred years before my time, and Heracles son of Alcmene about nine hundred years; and Pan the son of Penelope (for according to the Greeks Penelope and Hermes were the parents of Pan) was about eight hundred years before me, and thus of a later date than the Trojan war.
With regard to these two, Pan and Dionysus, one may follow whatever story one thinks most credible; but I give my own opinion concerning them here. Had Dionysus son of Semele and Pan son of Penelope appeared in Greece [22,39] (nation), Europe Hellas and lived there to old age, like Heracles the son of Amphitryon, it might have been said that they too (like Heracles) were but men, named after the older Pan and Dionysus, the gods of antiquity;
but as it is, the Greek story has it that no sooner was Dionysus born than Zeus sewed him up in his thigh and carried him away to +Nysa [28.1667,37.8667] (Perseus) Nysa in Ethiopia [39,8] (nation), Africa Ethiopia beyond Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt ; and as for Pan, the Greeks do not know what became of him after his birth. It is therefore plain to me that the Greeks learned the names of these two gods later than the names of all the others, and trace the birth of both to the time when they gained the knowledge.
So far I have recorded what the Egyptians themselves say. I shall now relate what is recorded alike by Egyptians and foreigners, and shall add something of what I myself have seen.
After the reign of the priest of Hephaestus the Egyptians were made free. But they could never live without a king, so they divided Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt into twelve districts and set up twelve kings.
These kings intermarried, and agreed to be close friends, no one deposing another or seeking to possess more than another.
The reason for this agreement, which they scrupulously kept, was this: no sooner were they established in their districts than an oracle was given them that whichever of them poured a libation from a bronze vessel in the temple of Hephaestus (where, as in all the temples, they used to assemble) would be king of all Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt .
Moreover, they decided to preserve the memory of their names by a common memorial, and so they made a labyrinthThis “labyrinth” was a horseshoe-shaped group of buildings, supposed to have been near the pyramid of Hawara [30.9,29.266] (ruins), Al-Fayyum, Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa Hawara (Sayce). a little way beyond Birkat Qarun [30.666,29.466] (salt lake), Egypt, Africa lake Moeris and near the place called the Kiman Faris [30.833,29.316] (deserted settlement), Al-Fayyum, Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa City of Crocodiles . I have seen it myself, and indeed words cannot describe it;I take ἤδη as = ἦ δή, with λόγου μέζω.
if one were to collect the walls and evidence of other efforts of the Greeks, the sum would not amount to the labor and cost of this labyrinth. And yet the temple at +Ephesus [27.316,37.916] (deserted settlement), Izmir Ili, Ege kiyilari, Turkey, Asia Ephesus and the one on Nisos Samos [26.8,37.75] (island), Samos, Aegean Islands, Greece, Europe Samos are noteworthy.
Though the pyramids beggar description and each one of them is a match for many great monuments built by Greeks, this maze surpasses even the pyramids.
It has twelve roofed courts with doors facing each other: six face north and six south, in two continuous lines, all within one outer wall. There are also double sets of chambers, three thousand altogether, fifteen hundred above and the same number under ground.
We ourselves viewed those that are above ground, and speak of what we have seen, but we learned through conversation about the underground chambers; the Egyptian caretakers would by no means show them, as they were, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles.
Thus we can only speak from hearsay of the lower chambers; the upper we saw for ourselves, and they are creations greater than human. The exits of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us as we passed from court to apartment and from apartment to colonnade, from colonnades again to more chambers and then into yet more courts.
Over all this is a roof, made of stone like the walls, and the walls are covered with cut figures, and every court is set around with pillars of white stone very precisely fitted together. Near the corner where the labyrinth ends stands a pyramid two hundred and forty feet high, on which great figures are cut. A passage to this has been made underground.
Such is this labyrinth; and still more marvellous is Birkat Qarun [30.666,29.466] (salt lake), Egypt, Africa lake Moeris , on which it stands. This lake has a circumference of four hundred and fifty miles, or sixty schoeni: as much as the whole seaboard of Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt . Its length is from north to south; the deepest part has a depth of fifty fathoms.
That it has been dug out and made by men's hands the lake shows for itself; for almost in the middle of it stand two pyramids, so built that fifty fathoms of each are below and fifty above the water; atop each is a colossal stone figure seated on a throne.
Thus these pyramids are a hundred fathoms high; and a hundred fathoms equal a furlong of six hundred feet, the fathom measuring six feet or four cubits, the foot four spans and the cubit six spans.
The water of the lake is not natural (for the country here is exceedingly arid) but brought by a channel from the Nahr an- Nil [31.1,30.166] (river), Africa Nile ; six months it flows into the lake, and six back into the river.
For the six months that it flows out of the lake, the daily take of fish brings a silver talent into the royal treasury, and twenty minae for each day of the flow into the lake.
Furthermore, the natives said that this lake drains underground into the Golfe de Gabes [10.417,34.000] (gulf), Tunis, Africa Libyan Syrtis , and extends under the mountains that are above Mit Rahina [31.25,29.85] (inhabited place), Giza, Upper Egypt, Egypt, Africa Memphis , having the inland country on its west.
When I could not see anywhere the earth taken from the digging of this lake, since this was curious to me, I asked those who live nearest the lake where the stuff was that had been dug out. They told me where it had been carried, and I readily believed them, for I had heard of a similar thing happening in the Assyrian city of Nineveh (deserted settlement), Ninawa, Iraq, Asia Ninus .
Sardanapallus king of Nineveh (deserted settlement), Ninawa, Iraq, Asia Ninus had great wealth, which he kept in an underground treasury. Some thieves plotted to carry it off; they surveyed their course and dug an underground way from their own house to the palace, carrying the earth taken out of the passage dug by night to the Tigris [47.416,31] (river), Asia Tigris , which runs past Nineveh (deserted settlement), Ninawa, Iraq, Asia Ninus , until at last they accomplished their end.
This, I was told, had happened when the Egyptian lake was dug, except that the work went on not by night but by day. The Egyptians bore the earth dug out by them to the Nahr an- Nil [31.1,30.166] (river), Africa Nile , to be caught and scattered (as was to be expected) by the river. Thus is this lake said to have been dug.
Now the twelve kings were just, and in time came to sacrifice in Hephaestus' temple. On the last day of the feast, as they were about to pour libations, the high priest brought out the golden vessels which they commonly used for this; but he counted wrongly and had only eleven for the twelve.
So the last in line, Psammetichus, as he had no vessel, took off his bronze helmet and held it out and poured the libation with it. All the kings were accustomed to wear helmets, and were then helmeted;
it was not in guile, then, that Psammetichus held out his headgear; but the rest perceived what Psammetichus had done, and remembered the oracle that promised the sovereignty of all Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt to whoever poured a libation from a vessel of bronze; therefore, though they considered Psammetichus not deserving of death (for they examined him and found that he had acted without intent), they decided to strip him of most of his power and to chase him away into the marshes, and that he was not to concern himself with the rest of Egypt [30,27] (nation), Africa Egypt .
This Psammetichus had formerly been in exile in +Syria [38,35] (nation), Asia Syria , where he had fled from Sabacos the Ethiopian, who killed his father Necos; then, when the Ethiopian departed because of what he saw in a dream, the Egyptians of the district of Saïs brought him back from +Syria [38,35] (nation), Asia Syria .
Psammetichus was king for the second time when he found himself driven away into the marshes by the eleven kings because of the helmet.