by Herodotus
103. Diodorus is more correct when he says that some only of the Egyptians abstained from beans, and it may be doubted if they grew in Egypt without being sown. The custom of forbidding beans to the priests was borrowed from Egypt by Pythagoras.
104. This is fully confirmed by the sculptures.
105. Epaphus, Herodotus says (in ch. 153), is the Greek name of Apis.
106. Perhaps we have here, as in vii, 213, a promise that is unfulfilled.
107. The sanction given for sacrificing a bull was by a papyrus band tied by the priest round the horns, which he stamped with his signet on sealing-clay. Documents sealed with fine clay and impressed with a signet are very common; but the exact symbols impressed on it by the priest on this occasion are not known.
108. Herodotus here evidently alludes to Isis, as he shows in chs. 59, 61, where he speaks of her fete at Busiris: but he afterwards confounds her with Athor (ch. 41). This is excusable in the historian, as the attributes of those two goddesses are often so closely connected that it is difficult to distinguish them in the sculptures, unless their names are specified.
109. The custom of filling the body with cakes and various things, and then burying it all, calls to mind the Jewish burnt offering (Levit. viii, 25 and 26).
110. In order to prevent the breed of cattle from being diminished: but some mysterious reason being assigned for it, the people were led to respect an ordinance which might not otherwise have been attended to. This was the general system, and the reason of many things being held sacred may be attributed to a necessary precaution.
111. The Egyptians considered all foreigners unclean, with whom they would not eat, and particularly the Greeks. ‘The Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination unto the Egyptians’ (Gen. xliii, 32).
112. The island was between the Canopic and Sebennytic branches, at the fork, and on the west side of the apex of the Delta. It was there that the Athenians, who came to assist the Egyptians against the Persians, were besieged, BC 460–458. (Thucydides i, 109).
113. Athor being the Aphrodite of Egypt, Atarbechis was translated Aphroditopolis.
114. Sheep are never represented on the altar, or slaughtered for the table, at Thebes, though they were kept there for their wool.
115. Though each city had its presiding deity, many others of neighbouring and of distant towns were also admitted to its temples as contemplar gods, and none were positively excluded except some local divinities, and certain animals, whose sanctity was confined to particular places.
116. The mounds of Ashmoun, on the canal leading to Menzaleh, mark the site of Mendes. The Greeks considered Pan to be both Mendes and Khem.
117. The god Noum (Nou, Noub, or Nef), with a ram’s head, answered to Zeus.
118. The Egyptian Heracles was the abstract idea of divine power, and it is not therefore surprising that Herodotus could learn nothing of the Greek Heracles, who was a hero unknown in Egypt.
119. Herodotus, who derived his knowledge of the Egyptian religion from the professional interpreters, seems to have regarded the word ‘Heracles’ as Egyptian. It is scarcely necessary to say that no Egyptian god has a name from which that of Heracles can by any possibility have been formed.
120. The tendency of the Greeks to claim an indigenous origin for the deities they borrowed from strangers, and to substitute physical for abstract beings, readily led them to invent the story of Heracles, and every dignus vindice nodus was cut by the interposition of his marvellous strength.
121. The temple of Heracles at Tyre was very ancient, and, according to Herodotus, as old as the city itself, or 2300 years before his time, i.e. about BC 2755. Heracles presided over it under the title of Melkarth or Melek-Kartha, ‘king’ (lord) of the city.
122. It was probably of glass, which is known to have been made in Egypt at least 3800 years ago, having been found bearing the name of a Pharaoh of the 18th dynasty.
123. Thasos, which still retains its name, is a small island off the Thracian coast.
124. Herodotus here denies, with reason, the possibility of a people with laws, and a character like those of the Egyptians, having human sacrifices. This very aptly refutes the idle tales of some ancient authors.
125. The pig is rarely represented in the sculptures of Thebes. The flesh was forbidden to the priests, and to all initiated in the mysteries, and it seems only to have been allowed to others once a year at the fête of the full moon, when it was sacrificed to the Moon. The reason of the meat not being eaten was its unwholesomeness, on which account it was forbidden to the Jews and Moslems; and the prejudice naturally extended from the animal to those who kept it.
126. The instrument used was probably the double-pipe.
127. There is no doubt that the Greeks borrowed sometimes the names, sometimes the attributes, of their deities from Egypt; but when Herodotus says the names of the Greek gods were always known in Egypt, it is evident that he does not mean they were the same as the Greek, since he gives in other places (chs. 42, 59, 138, 144 and 156) the Egyptian name to which those very gods agree, whom he mentions in Egypt.
128. cf. iv. 188.
129. No Egyptian god was supposed to have lived on earth as a mere man afterwards deified. The religion of the Egyptians was the worship of the deity in all his attributes and in those things which were thought to partake of his essence; but they did not transfer a mortal man to his place, though they allowed a king to pay divine honours to a deceased predecessor or even to himself, his human doing homage to his divine nature.
130. Herodotus expressly gives it as his opinion that nearly all the names of the gods were derived from Egypt, and shows that their ceremonies (chs. 81 and 82) and science come from the same source.
131. The Pelasgi here intended are the Tyrrhenian Pelasgi, who are mentioned again iv, 145 and vi, 138.
132. Nothing is known for certain respecting the Cabiri. Most authorities agree that they varied in number and that their worship, which was very ancient in Samothrace and in Phrygia, was carried to Greece from the former by the Pelasgi. They were also worshipped at an early time in Lemnos and Imbros.
133. The same derivation is given by Eustathius and by Clement of Alexandria; but the more general belief of the Greeks derived the word theos from thein, ‘to run’, because the gods first worshipped were the sun, moon and stars. Both these derivations are purely fanciful.
134. The date of Homer has been variously stated. It is plain from the expressions which Herodotus here uses that in his time the general belief assigned to Homer an earlier date than that which he considered the true one. His date would place the poet about BC 880–830, which is very nearly the mean between the earliest and the latest epochs that are assigned to him. The time of Hesiod is even more doubtful, if possible, than that of his brother-poet. He was made before Homer, after him, and contemporary with him. Internal evidence and the weight of authority are in favour of the view which assigns him a comparatively late date.
135. The ‘poets thought by some to be earlier than Homer and Hesiod’ are probably the mystic writers, Olen, Linus, Orpheus, Musaeus, Pamphos, Olympus, etc., who were generally accounted by the Greeks anterior to Homer, but seem really to have belonged to a later age.
136. This carrying off priestesses from Thebes is of course a fable.
137. The idea of women giving out oracles is Greek, not Egyptian.
138. The Temple of Dodona was destroyed BC 219 by Dorimachus when, being chosen general of the Aetolians, he ravaged Epirus (Polybius iv, 67). No remains of it now exist.
139. cf. Joel iii, 6, where the Tyrians are said to have sold Jewish children ‘to the Grecians.’
140. ‘Solemn assemblies’ were numerous in Egypt, and were of various kinds. The grand assemblies, or great panegyries, were held in the large halls of the principal temples, and the king pre
sided at them in person. There were inferior panegyries in honour of different deities every day during certain months.
141. Bubastis, or Pasht, corresponded to the Greek Artemis. Remains of the temple and city of Bubastis, the ‘Pibeseth’ (Pi-basth) of Ezekiel xxx, 17, are still seen at Tel Basta, ‘the mounds of Pasht’.
142. Herodotus (infra, ch. 166) supposes her the daughter of Dionysus (Osiris) and Isis, which is, of course, an error, as Osiris had no daughter.
143. The goddess mentioned at Bubastis should be Buto.
144. This is to be distinguished from beer, ‘barley-wine’, both of which were made in great quantities in Egypt.
145. There were several places called Busiris in Egypt. It signifies the burial place of Osiris. The Busiris mentioned by Herodotus stood [in the Delta] a little to the south of the modern Abusir, the Coptic Busiri, of which nothing now remains but some granite blocks.
146. This was Osiris.
147. The custom of cutting themselves was not Egyptian, and it is therefore evident that the command in Leviticus (xix, 28; xxi, 5) against making ‘any cuttings in their flesh’ was not directed against a custom derived from Egypt, but from Syria, where the worshippers of Baal ‘cut themselves after their manner with knives and lances’, I Kings xviii, 28.
148. The site of Saïs is marked by lofty mounds, enclosing a space of great extent.
149. The oil floated on water mixed with salt.
150. Papremis is not known in the sculptures as the name of the Egyptian Ares; and it may only have been that of the city, the capital of a nome (ch. 165) which stood between the modern Menzaleh and Damietta in the Delta. It was here that Inaros routed the Persians (see iii, 12); and it is remarkable that in this very island, formed by the old Mendesian and the modern Damietta branches, the Crusaders were defeated in 1220, and again in 1249, when Louis IX was taken prisoner.
151. This was thought to be extraordinary, because Africa abounded in wild animals (see iv, 191-2); but it was on the west and south, and not on the confines of Egypt, that they were numerous. Though Herodotus abstains from saying why the Egyptians held some animals sacred, he explains in some degree by observing that Egypt did not abound in animals. It was therefore found necessary to ensure the preservation of some, as in the case of cows and sheep - others were sacred in consequence of their being unwholesome food, as swine, and certain fish; and others from their utility in destroying noxious reptiles, as the cat, ichneumon, ibis, vulture and falcon tribe: or for some particular purpose, as the crocodile was sacred in places distant from the Nile, where the canals required keeping up.
152. Women were probably employed to give the food to many of the animals; but the curators appear to have been men of the sacerdotal class.
153. Though Egyptian men shaved their heads, boys had several tufts of hair left, as in modern Egypt and China. Princes also wore a long plaited lock, falling from near the top of the head, behind the ear, to the neck.
154. The law was, as Herodotus says, against a person killing them on purpose, but the prejudiced populace in after times did not always keep within the law.
155. Cats were embalmed and buried where they died, except perhaps in the neighbourhood of Bubastis, for we find their mummies at Thebes and other Egyptian towns, and the same may be said of hawks and ibises.
156. The viverra ichneumon is still very common in Egypt.
157. These birds were sacred to Thoth, the god of letters.
158. It is very evident that bears were not natives of Egypt; they are not represented among the animals of the country; and no instance occurs of a bear in the sculptures, except as a curiosity brought by foreigners.
159. Herodotus is quite correct in saying that wolves in Egypt were scarcely larger than foxes. It is singular that he omits all mention of the hyaena, which is so common in the country, and which is represented in the sculptures of Upper and Lower Egypt.
160. If the crocodile rarely comes out of the river in the cold weather, because it finds the water warmer than the external air at that season, there is no reason to believe it remains torpid all that time, though, like all the lizard tribe, it can exist a long time without eating, and I have known them live in a house for three months without food, sleeping most of the time. The story of the friendly offices of the trochilus appears to be verified from that bird uttering a shrill note as it flies away on the approach of man, and (quite unintentionally) warning the crocodile of danger.
161. The crocodile’s ears are merely small openings without any flesh projecting beyond the head.
162. By molten stone seems to be meant glass, which was well known to the Egyptians.
163. Krokodeilos was the term given by the Ionians to lizards, as the Portuguese al legato ‘the lizard’ is the origin of our alligator. The Ionians are here the descendants of the Ionian soldiers of Psammetichus.
164. This animal was formerly common in Egypt, but is now rarely seen as low as the second cataract. The description of the hippopotamus by Herodotus is far from correct.
165. The fish particularly sacred were the oxyrhinchus, the lepidotus and the phagrus or eel.
166. This goose of the Nile was an emblem of the God Seb, the father of Osiris; but it was not a sacred bird.
167. The horned snake, vipera cerastes, is common in Upper Egypt and throughout the deserts. It is very poisonous, and its habit of burying itself in the sand renders it particularly dangerous.
168. The bite of the cerastes or horned snake is deadly; but of the many serpents in Egypt, three only are poisonous – the cerastes, the asp or naia, and the common viper.
169. The winged serpents of Herodotus have puzzled many persons from the time of Pausanias to the present day. Isaiah (xxx, 6) mentions the ‘fiery flying serpent’.
170. The great services the ibis rendered by destroying snakes and noxious insects were the cause of its being in such esteem in Egypt. The stork was honoured for the same reason in Thessaly. The ibis was sacred to Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes.
171. This is in contradistinction to the marsh-lands, and signifies Upper Egypt; but when he says they have no vines in the country and only drink beer, his statement is opposed to fact, and to the ordinary habits of the Egyptians. In the neighbourhood of Memphis, at Thebes, and the places between those two cities, as well as at Eileithyias, all corn-growing districts, they ate wheaten bread and cultivated the vine. Herodotus may, therefore, have had in view the corn-country, in the interior of the broad Delta, where the alluvial soil was not well suited to the vine. Wine was universally used by the rich throughout Egypt, and beer supplied its place at the tables of the poor, not because ‘they had no vines in their country’, but because it was cheaper. And that wine was known in Lower as well as Upper Egypt is shown by the Israelites mentioning the desert as a place which had ‘no figs, or vines, or pomegranates’ in contradistinction to Egypt (Gen. xl, 10; Numb. xx, 5).
172. Their health was attributable to their living in the dry atmosphere of the desert, where sickness is rarely known.
173. This is the oinos krithinos of Xenophon.
174. The custom of drying fish is frequently represented in the sculptures of Upper and Lower Egypt. Fishing was a favourite amusement of the Egyptians.
175. The figure introduced at supper was of a mummy in the usual form of Osiris, either standing, or lying on a bier, intended to warn the guests of their mortality.
176. This song had different names in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Cyprus, and other places. In Greece it was called linus, in Egypt maneros. The stories told of Linus, the inventor of melody, and of his death, are mere fables.
177. A similar respect is paid to age by the Chinese and Japanese, and even by the modern Egyptians. In this the Greeks, except the Lacedaemonians, were wanting. The Jews were commanded to ‘rise up before the hoary head and honour the face of the old man’ (Lev
it. xix, 32).
178. The Romans also made their twelve gods preside over the months; and the days of the week, when introduced in late times, received the names of the sun and moon and five planets, which have been retained to the present day.
179. Horoscopes were of very early use in Egypt, as well as the inter-pretation of dreams; and Cicero speaks of the Egyptians and Chaldees predicting future events, as well as a man’s destiny at his birth, by their observations of the stars.
180. Yet the Egyptians sought ‘to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that had familiar spirits, and to the wizards’ (Is. xix, 3). Herodotus probably means that none but oracles gave the real answer of the deity; and this would not prevent the ‘prophets’ and ‘magicians’ pretending to this art, like the manteis of Greece. To the Israelites it was particularly forbidden ‘to use divination’ to be an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.’
181. Not only was the study of medicine of very early date in Egypt, but medical men there were in such repute that they were sent for at various times from other countries. Their knowledge of medicine is celebrated by Homer (Odyssey iv, 229), who describes Polydamna, the wife of Thonis, as giving medicinal plants ‘to Helen, in Egypt, a country producing an infinite number of drugs . . . where each physician possesses knowledge above all other men.’ ‘O virgin daughter of Egypt,’ says Jeremiah (lxvi, 11), ‘in vain shalt thou use many medicines’. Cyrus and Darius both sent to Egypt for medical men (Herodotus iii, 1 and 132); and Pliny (xix, 5) says post-mortem examinations were made in order to discover the nature of maladies.
182. The medical profession being so divided (as is the custom in modern Europe), indicates a great advancement of civilisation, as well as of medicinal knowledge. The Egyptian doctors were of the sacerdotal order, like the embalmers, who are called (in Genesis l, 2) ‘physicians’, and were ‘commanded by Joseph to embalm his father’.
183. The custom of weeping, and throwing dust on their heads, is often represented in the monuments; when the men and women have their dresses fastened by a band round the waist, the breast being bare, as described by Herodotus. For seventy days (Gen. l, 3), or, according to some, seventy-two days, the family mourned at home, singing the funeral dirge.