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Metadata
- Author: Herodotus
- Full Title: The Second Book, Entitled Euterpé
- Category: articles
- Summary: The Egyptians taught the Greeks many things about gods, temples, and symbols. They had unique customs, festivals, and respected their elders differently from the Greeks. Long ago, Egypt was ruled by god-kings before becoming the land shaped by the Nile river.
- URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/346652941
Highlights
Part 1
- Now the Egyptians, before the reign of their king Psammetichus, believed themselves to be the most ancient of mankind. (View Highlight)
- consideration of this circumstance the Egyptians yielded their claims, and admitted the greater antiquity of the Phrygians. (View Highlight)
- The Heliopolitans have the reputation of being the best skilled in history of all the Egyptians. (View Highlight)
- The Egyptians, they said, were the first to discover the solar year, and to portion out its course into twelve parts.. (View Highlight)
- The Egyptians, they went on to affirm, first brought into use the names of the twelve gods, which the Greeks adopted from them; and first erected altars, images, and tem- ples to the gods; and also first engraved upon stone the figures of animals. (View Highlight)
- In all these regions the land has been formed by rivers (View Highlight)
- they obtain the fruits of the field with less trouble than any other people in the world, the rest of the Egyptians included, since they have no need to break up the ground with the plough, nor to use the hoe, nor to do any of the work which the rest of mankind find necessary if they are to get a crop; but the husbandman waits till the river has of its own accord spread itself over the fields and withdrawn again to its bed, and then sows his plot of ground, and after sowing turns his swine into it —the swine tread in the corn — after which he has only to await the harvest. (View Highlight)
- Egypt was the entire tract of country which the Nile overspreads and irrigates, and the Egyptians were the peo- ple who lived below Elephantine, and drank the waters of that river. (View Highlight)
- I consider Egypt to be the whole country inhabited by the Egyp- tians, just as Cilicia is the tract occupied by the Cilicians, and Assyria that possessed by the As- syrians. (View Highlight)
- Arrived in Ethiopia, they placed them- selves at the disposal of the king. In return, he made them a present of a tract of land which belonged to certain Ethiopians with whom he was at feud, bidding them expel the inhabitants and take possession of their territory. (View Highlight)
- Concerning Egypt itself I shall extend my remarks to a great length, because there is no country that possesses so many wonders, nor any that has such a number of works which defy description. (View Highlight)
- They eat their food out of doors in the streets, but retire for private pur- poses to their houses, giving as a reason that what is unseemly, but necessary, ought to be done in secret, but what has nothing unseemly about it, should be done openly. (View Highlight)
- They practise circumcision for the sake of cleanliness, considering it better to be cleanly than comely. (View Highlight)
- terial. They bathe twice every day in cold wa- ter, and twice each night; (View Highlight)
- Fish they are not allowed to eat; and beans —which none of the Egyp- tians ever sow, or eat, if they come up of their own accord, either raw or boiled —the priests will not even endure to look on, since they con- sider it an unclean kind of pulse. (View Highlight)
- and the Egyptians, one and all, venerate cows much more highly than any other animal. (View Highlight)
- The pig is regarded among them as an un- clean animal, somuch so that if a man in passing accidentally touch a pig, he instantly hurries to the river, and plunges in with all his clothes on. (View Highlight)
- For how can it be conceived possible that a dove should really speak with the voice of a man? (View Highlight)
Part 2
- The Egyptians first made it a point of religion to have no converse with women in the sacred places, and not to enter them without washing, after such converse. (View Highlight)
- Egypt, though it borders upon Libya, is not a region abounding in wild animals. (View Highlight)
- A sharp fight with clubs ensues, in which heads are commonly broken on both sides. Many, I am convinced, die of the wounds that they receive, though the Egyptians insist that no one is ever killed. (View Highlight)
- The number of domestic animals in Egypt is very great, (View Highlight)
- If a cat dies in a private house by a natural death, all the inmates of the house shave their eyebrows; on the death of a dog they shave the head and the whole of the body. (View Highlight)
- Of all known animals this is the one which from the smallest size grows to be the greatest: (View Highlight)
- those who live in the corn country, devoting themselves, as they do, far more than any other people in the world, to the preservation of the memory of past actions, are the best skilled in history of any men that I have ever met. (View Highlight)
- they have a persuasion that every disease to which men are liable is occasioned by the substances whereon they feed. (View Highlight)
- Diseases almost always attack men when they are exposed to a change, and never more than during changes of the weather. (View Highlight)
- Medicine is practised among them on a plan of separation; each physician treats a single disorder, and no more: thus the country swarms with medical practitioners, (View Highlight)
- The Egyptians likewise discovered to which of the gods each month and day is sacred; and found out from the day of a man’s birth what he will meet with in the course of his life, and how he will end his days, and what sort of man he will be (View Highlight)
- When the Nile overflows, the country is converted into a sea, and nothing appears but the cities, which look like the islands in the Egean. (View Highlight)
- In this number of generations there were eighteen Ethiopian kings, and one queen who was a native; all the rest were kings and Egyptians. (View Highlight)
- My own conjectures were founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly hair, (View Highlight)
- the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations who have practised circumcision from the earliest times. (View Highlight)
- The pillars which Sesostris erected in the conquered countries have for the most part disappeared; but in the part of Syria called Palestine, I myself saw them still standing, (View Highlight)
- First, thou didst seduce the wife of thy own -host —then, not content therewith, thou must violently excite her mind, and steal her away from her husband. (View Highlight)
- It seems to me that Homer was ac- quainted with this story, and while discarding it, because he thought it less adapted for epic poetry (View Highlight)
- For surely neither Priam, nor his family, could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their chil- dren, and their city, merely that Alexander might possess Helen. (View Highlight)
- But the fact was that they had no Helen to deliver, and so they told the Greeks, but the Greeks would not believe what they said (View Highlight)
- They were also the first to broach the opinion that the soul of man is immortal, and that, when the body dies, it en- ters into the form of an animal which is born at the moment, thence passing on from one an- imal into another, until it has circled through the forms of all the creatures which tenant the earth, the water, and the air, after which it en- ters again into a human frame, and is born anew. The whole period of the transmigration is (they say) three thousand years. (View Highlight)
Part 3
- A hun- dred thousand men laboured constantly, and were relieved every three months by a fresh lot. It took ten years’ oppression of the people to make the causeway for the conveyance of the stones, a work not much inferior, in my judg- ment, to the pyramid itself. (View Highlight)
- the daughter of Mycerinus re- quested her father in her dying moments to al- low her once a year to see the sun. (View Highlight)
- When the Delphians, in obedience to the command of the oracle, made proclamation that if any one claimed compensation for the murder of /Esop he should receive it, the per- son who at last came forward was Iadmon, grandson of the former Iadmon, and he re- ceived the compensation. (View Highlight)
- “My father and uncle,” he said, “though they shut up the temples, took no thought of the gods, and destroyed multi- tudes of men, nevertheless enjoyed a long life; I, who am pious, am to die so soon!” (View Highlight)
- Naucratis seems somehow to be the place where such women are most attractive. (View Highlight)
- When an Egyptian was guilty of an offence, his plan was not to punish him with death: in- stead of so doing, he sentenced him, according to the nature of his crime, to raise the ground to a greater or a less extent in the neighbour- hood of the city to which he belonged. (View Highlight)
- Afterwards, therefore, when Sanacharib, king of the Arabians 1 and Assyrians, marched his vast army into Egypt, the warriors one and all refused to come to his aid. (View Highlight)
- pleted the series. When Hecataeus, in giving his genealogy, mentioned a god as his sixteenth ancestor, the priests opposed their genealogy to his, going through this list, and refusing to allow that any man was ever born of a god. (View Highlight)
- Pan is exceedingly ancient, and belongs to those whom they call “the eight gods,” who existed before the rest. Hercules is one of the gods of the second order, who are known as “the twelve”; and Bacchus belongs to the gods of the third order, whom the twelve produced. (View Highlight)
- Wonderful as is the Labyrinth, the work called the Lake of Mceris, which is close by the Labyrinth, is yet more astonishing. (View Highlight)
- From the date of the original set- tlement of these persons in Egypt, we Greeks, through our intercourse with them, have ac- quired an accurate knowledge of the several events in Egyptian history, from the reign of Psammetichus downwards; but before his time no foreigners had ever taken up their residence in that land. (View Highlight)
- A hun- dred and twenty thousand of the Egyptians, employed upon the work in the reign of Necos, lost their lives in making the excavation. (View Highlight)
- The Egyptians are divided into seven —these are, the priests, the war- distinct classes riors, the cowherds, the swineherds, the trades- men, the interpreters, and the boatmen. (View Highlight)
- At first his subjects looked down on him and held him in small esteem, because he had been a mere private person, and of a house of no great distinction; but after a time Amasis succeeded in reconciling them to his rule, not by severity, but by cleverness. (View Highlight)
- “Bowmen bend their bows when they wish to shoot; unbrace them when the shooting is over. Were they kept always strung they would break, and fail the archer in time of need. So it is with men. If they give themselves constantly to serious work, and never indulge awhile in pastime or sport, they lose their senses, and become mad or moody. (View Highlight)
- It was this king Amasis who established the law that every Egyptian should appear once a year before the governor of his canton, and show his means of living; or, failing to do so, and to prove that he got an honest livelihood, should be put to death. Solon the Athenian borrowed this law from the Egyptians, and imposed it on his countrymen, who have ob- served it ever since. It is indeed an excellent custom. (View Highlight)