Direct Greek contacts with Egypt began in the Bronze Age, but overwhelmingly the experience on which Greeks drew in our surviving texts is the experience gained from the eighth century bc onwards (Froidefond 1971; Lloyd 1975). Only one passage in extant literature can be argued with some plausibility to have had a Bronze Age input, and that occurs in the only reference to Egypt in the Iliad (9.374-84). In this passage Achilles is responding to Odysseus’ attempts to get him back into the Trojan War, but Achilles refuses, whatever the reward on offer:
Not all the wealth that goes into Orchomenos, nor into Egyptian Thebes, where the greatest treasures lie in abodes, and there are a hundred gates, and through each two hundred warriors ride forth with horses and chariots.
Egyptian Thebes appears here as a symbol of colossal wealth and as a place which was enormously impressive in architectural terms: if the city walls were thought to have a hundred gates, then they must have been believed to be extremely extensive and would imply a very large city, though it is possible that the fact lurking behind the comment is the large number of temple gateways in the place which have been reinterpreted in transmission as city gates. The city is also associated with strong military resources. What, however, is the origin of these comments? Orchomenos was a major city of great wealth during the Bronze Age but not in the Archaic Period when the Iliad was composed. Therefore, the juxtaposition of Thebes with Orchomenos does raise at least the possibility that the reference to Thebes is also a reminiscence of the Bronze Age. However, even if this is a deduction too far, the Iliad retains its position as the earliest extant reflection of the Greek reception of Egypt.
There are many more references in the Odyssey (2.15ff.; 3.297ff.; 4.116ff.; 4.219ff.; 4.348ff.; 4.471ff.; 11.517ff.; 14.235ff.), and these passages have much to say: Egypt was a long way from Greece, and it was possible to get there by accident under pressure from wind and wave, but there is a clear recognition ofthe value ofthe prevailing north winds (the Etesians) in taking voyagers to Egypt. There is an implication that Greeks were frequent visitors, and the mention of a Greek called Aigyptios would suggest some familiarity with the country. The Nile, described with the standard river epithet as ‘‘heaven-fed,’’ features under the name of Aigyptos, but the comments on Pharos are very inaccurate, and it should be noted that Homer’s comments largely concern the Delta. The wealth of Egypt is much to the fore, including the riches of Egyptian agriculture, and, not surprisingly, it becomes a target for piratical raids by Greeks. The wisdom and technical skills of the Egyptians are highlighted on a number of occasions, and they are associated, in particular, with powerful drugs and great expertise in medicine. The use ofa different language marks out the Egyptians as foreigners, but Egypt is firmly locked into the Greek world. Not only is it drawn firmly into the orbit of the Trojan War, but genealogy is already being used to tie Egyptian culture into that of Greece (Paeon is the ancestor of Egyptian doctors!); Egyptians are given unequivocally Greek names without any qualms; the Egyptian city alleged to have been encountered by Odysseus is clearly conceived of in Greek terms, and its king thinks in Greek mode; the
Greek deity Proteus is converted into an Egyptian deity, though he shows a remarkable knowledge of Greek religious practice, and the names attached to other divinities are Greek. On the other hand, Egypt is associated with piety and with a recognition of obligations to the gods, whereas the Greeks get rather a bad press. Above all Egypt was a land of wonders.
A careful reading of this Homeric material against the background of later texts immediately reveals that it already shows many of the interests and attitudes which dominate the later image. Egypt clearly featured with particular prominence in the wider world, physical and conceptual, inhabited by Greeks of the Archaic Period. Its wealth is later a recurrent issue, and its status as a place where Greeks or Romans could get rich in a variety of ways was never lost in antiquity. The spectacular nature of its architecture, particularly its size, is a pervasive preoccupation, even though the emphasis on Thebes is much less in evidence as the decline of that once great city gathered pace. In the same order of things the place of Egypt as a land where exquisite and skillfully wrought objects could be obtained is never shaken. Its military strength and institutions continue to exercise later writers whilst the wisdom of the Egyptians and their arcane knowledge, particularly of medicine, are a constant theme. All this, combined with the conviction that Egypt was a place where strange and benign deities could be found and the projection of the benevolent and forgiving character of Odysseus’ fictitious king, prepared the way for Egypt to become a location for later literary utopias. The prominence of the Nile in Homeric tradition foreshadows the interest shown in later accounts, and the interest in the prevailing North Wind also does not disappear, though not all geographical information is sound, despite the fact that the Greeks were in an excellent position to get that right. The Proteus episode is taken over into later texts, though greatly expanded and with the conversion of Proteus from a god into an Egyptian king. The awareness of Egypt as a distant foreign country with remarkable geography and culture does not, however, prevent a process of assimilation to Greece from taking place whereby genealogy can be used to bring Egypt into the Greek orbit, and Greek names can be attributed to figures who are supposed to be Egyptian. This process was to lead, amongst other things, to the rampant hyperdiffusionism which we later find in Herodotos. All this leaves no doubt, given the central position held by Homer’s epics in defining the Greek world-picture, that he played a major role in determining what Greeks thought about Egypt and in orientating their focus to particular aspects of that culture.
The Ps-Homeric and Hesiodic corpus clearly had much to offer, but its sad state of preservation can only offer hints of riches lost. In the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos Egypt features alongside Cyprus and the Hyperboreans as a possible destination for the captive Dionysos (Crudden 2002: 78). The fact that Egypt features at all indicates that it was a destination which naturally came to mind, but the association with the other two locations is intriguing. Cyprus was, of course, well known whereas the Hyperboreans feature in Greek tradition as a mysterious and semi-mythical people at the limits of the known world (Bridgman 2004), which neither Cyprus nor Egypt could be said to be. It very much looks as though there is a gradation here where Egypt occupies the middle ground somewhere between the well known and the fabulous. The Nostoi or ‘‘Returns,’’ often attributed to Agias of Troezen, takes us to familiar Homeric ground when mention is made of the return of Menelaos from
Troy and his arrival in Egypt with five ships (West 2003: 155). Of particular interest, however, is the appearance of the Io and Danaos cycle of legends in the Aigimios and Catalogue of Women which created close links between Egypt and Argos in Greece. The surviving comments are extremely brief, but they are sufficient to show that this body of material with all its implications was already firmly established in Greek tradition during the early Archaic Period (Evelyn-White 1914: 166-7, 272-3: West 2003: 266-8).
The basics of the Danaos cycle, which had numerous variants, were that the Argive priestess Io, who had been one of the many objects of Zeus’ unremitting sexual appetite, was turned by him into a heifer. After much wandering she arrived in Egypt where she gave birth to Zeus’ son Epaphos. He was the ancestor of the Egyptian king Belos, the father of Aigyptos and Danaos who embarked on a bitter quarrel. This contretemps Aigyptos wanted to settle by marrying his fifty sons to the fifty daughters of Danaos. To avoid this Danaos and his daughters fled to Argos which was ruled at the time by a king called Pelasgos, but they were pursued by Aigyptos’ sons, and eventually Danaos consented to the marriage with disastrous results for the sons who were all killed by their wives at Danaos’ instigation with the exception of Lynkeus whom the daughter Hypermnestra refused to murder. In due course this pair became the founders of the Argive Danaan dynasty.
It will be immediately obvious that a major element in the construction of this narrative is the use of eponymous ancestors, a widely used device in Greece, as elsewhere, for providing the origin of a particular social or national grouping. Pelasgos, therefore, functions as the founder of the Pelasgians who were regarded by the Greeks, erroneously, as their predecessors in Greece (Lloyd 1975-88: i. 232-4), whilst Danaos serves the same function for the Danaoi, i. e. Greeks, and Aigyptos for the Egyptians. The effect of this device is, in the first instance, to bind Egypt and Greece closely together by making the Argive royal family descendants of Egyptians, and the Catalogue (16) claims that the legacy went further by asserting that Danaos made Argos well watered whereas it had previously been waterless, i. e. an erstwhile inhabitant of Egypt has given Argos the benefit of his expertise in irrigation. The genealogical exercise also has the merit of explaining how the Pelasgians ceased to be Pelasgians and became Greeks. In both contexts there is an insistence that the Egyptians played a crucial role in the development of Greek culture, but it is impossible to suppress the question as to why this should have happened at all. Argos was not a big player in the resumption of contacts with Egypt in the eighth-seventh centuries bc, though neighboring Corinth and Aigina were. Some might wish to argue that there is a reminiscence of Bronze Age contacts of the area with Egypt which were undoubtedly considerable. This is certainly possible, and we have pointed out another plausible case of this in our discussion of Homer, but there is an easier and much more attractive explanation. Genealogizing was a means by which not only Greek social and political groupings but also major foreign peoples could be tied into a Greek ancestor (frequently Herakles whose wanderings made him an ideal candidate for the role), and this process became a major preoccupation of early Greek literature, the most conspicuous example being the Genealogies of Hekataios of Miletos, which regrettably survives only in fragments (Jacoby 1957). Even if there were no further motivation, Egypt would have been brought into this process, but its highly privileged position in the traditions still demands an explanation, and that must be located in the enormous prestige which Egyptian civilization had acquired in the Greek world, a prestige which, if anything, became ever greater with the passage of time. To establish the thesis that Greek culture descended from that of Egypt would be parallel to the impulse which drove Romans to insist on the origins of their greatest city in Troy through a Trojan refugee in the form of Aeneas and which impelled early British chroniclers to derive the ancestry of their nation from Brutus, another refugee from this iconic city. In all cases the impulse has its origin in the need to generate and maintain an enhanced self-perception based on the best possible ancestry.
The period during which these traditions were developed also saw reception functioning in other forms of artistic expression. The large-scale presence of Greeks in Egypt from the seventh century onwards exposed them to a material culture which they found both attractive, spectacular, and, above all, a stimulus to explore new cultural developments. In minor art forms, sculpture, and architecture this trend led to the appearance of Egyptian or Egyptianizing material throughout the Greek world. However, in the visual arts as in literature Greeks showed a consistent independence of thought which normally stopped well short of slavish copying. They took what they wanted in inspiration and techniques but adapted any borrowings to Greek taste and practice so that traces of any Egyptian ancestry were quickly eroded to vanishing point (Boardman 1999).
The sixth and fifth centuries saw the development of two new Greek literary genres, tragedy and prose literature, in which Egypt features prominently. In tragedy the earliest extant text is the Suppliants of Aischylos which formed part of a tetralogy of plays produced at Athens in the 460s consisting of a trilogy of tragedies also containing Egyptians and Danaids, supplemented by a satyr play (Amymone), all based on the Danaos cycle which we have already discussed (Garvie 1969; Johansen and Whittle 1980; Burian 1991; Sandin 2003). Since Suppliants is the only survivor of this group, it impossible to establish with certainty the conceptual drive of the trilogy as a whole, but the play still has much to offer for our purposes. Predictably the genealogical links between the Danaids and the Greek world are heavily emphasized throughout the play (15ff., 40ff., 73ff., 77ff., 210, 274-6, 291ff., 328ff., 524ff., 854ff.), and this, of course, facilitates the identity switch at 1023-9 where the Danaids express their determination henceforth to regard themselves as Argives. On matters geographical the play is not entirely happy. While there is an awareness of peculiarities of Egyptian topography and meteorology (1ff., 70ff.), Aischylos evidently conceives of Egypt rather as he would Greece itself; for, when describing lo’s visit to Egypt, it is cities which are mentioned, and she is never said to go to the land of Egypt as such (311, cf. 388). In the treatment of the characters who stand for Egyptians (i. e. the Danaids, the sons of Aigyptos, and their associates) we encounter a strange amalgam of discordant features. On the one hand, the Egyptians are frequently presented as saying and doing things in Greek ways: the speech of the chorus at 1-175 is couched entirely in the language of Greek religion; the ships which were used by the sons of Aigyptos are clearly imagined as being of Greek design, or, at least, not distinctively Egyptian (134, 715 (trim of sails, sideguards, eyes at front); at 176ff. Danaos speaks in terms of Greek customs and attitudes and shows throughout a commendable knowledge of Greek mythology; and at 308 we find that an Egyptian can be regarded as using a Greek word. On the other hand, the perspective frequently swings to regarding the Egyptians as aliens. Danaos can be presented as speaking from a non-Greek point of view (220), and throughout the play differences between Egyptians and Greeks are highlighted: they are non-Greek in speech (117ff., 972-4); their clothing is strange (120ff., 234-7, 246, 719-20); their skin-color is different (154-5, 719-20, 745), as is their physical form (278ff., 496ff.); their food is mentioned with contempt (761, 953); their laws are at variance with those prevailing in Greece (387-8); they are brought into relation at one point with bizarre customs and disgusting activities (281ff.); and there is a recognition that, as foreigners, their position is precarious in Argos, and they must proceed with circumspection (917, 975ff.). The terminology used to denote these foreigners also insists on difference but from different perspectives: xenos and cognates are frequently used and seem to be employed when a positive view, i. e. a disposition to acceptance, is atissue. (195, 202, 277, 500, 701, 926-7); the rarer epelys (195,401,611), at least at 401, is negative; and karbanos (914, cf. 118) is applied to the herald of the sons of Aigyptos in a context which insists on separateness, and this squares well with the very negative portrayal of the sons of Aigyptos and their associates as hybristic and impious (741 and frequently thereafter), a view which contrasts sharply with the politically responsible and morally finely tuned attitude of Pelasgos (234ff., 911ff.). However, we should not regard the presentation of this particular group of Egyptians as reflecting a general Greek or Aischylean attitude to Egyptians as a whole; it is clearly a requirement of the narrative that this group should appear and behave in a reprehensible manner. Overall, the play is working with two of the major trends in the Greek reception of Egypt which we have already identified in the epic tradition: a concern with tying in Egypt closely to Greece through genealogy and a marked tendency to intermingle Greek and Egyptian elements when dealing with matters geographical and ethnographic. At the same time there is a strong awareness that the Egyptians are an alien people who are physically and, in many ways, culturally different, a perception which is also detectable in Homer.
The only other surviving Greek play with a dominant Egyptian focus is Euripides’ Helen, produced in 412 bc (Dale 1967; Burian 2007; Allan 2008). The plot is built around the famous palinode of the Sicilian poet Stesichoros (640-555 bc) which claimed that Helen had not been taken to Troy by Paris but had been replaced by a phantom (eidolon). Instead she was translated by Hermes to Egypt and deposited with Proteus, and there she is eventually encountered by Menelaos on his return from Troy. Much of this narrative is patently Homeric in origin, but Stesichoros and his successors have given it a bizarre twist which was designed to absolve Helen of all moral blame for the Trojan War. This version of the story has great dramatic potential which Euripides exploits to the full, but his focus in Helen is on the final phase where we are confronted with the attempt made by the infatuated Theoklymenos, son of Proteus, to try and retain Helen in Egypt, the rediscovery of Helen by Menelaos, and their subsequent escape.
When we turn to the analysis of the portrayal of Egyptians, we find virtually nothing Egyptian in the play. There are elements of Egyptian geography at 1ff. and 769, and there is a dramatic reference to the migration of cranes, a spectacular annual feature of the Egyptian skies (1479ff.). As for the portrayal of the Egyptians, this shows three features: positive, negative, and a consciousness that Greek customs may differ from those of Egypt. On the positive side we have a general association of Egypt with insight and knowledge, above all through the prophetess Theonoe: Proteus is presented in very favorable terms as the ‘‘most temperate of men’’ (47), and as a protector (60ff.), and, in general, Egyptians get a favorable press (314, 481). The negative dimension comes through very powerfully in the portrayal of king Theoklymenos whose arrogance, selfishness, and xenophobia are strongly marked (e. g. 60ff., 437-44, 921, 1171ff.). At 247 Egypt itself is said to be ‘‘an unhappy land,’’ and the frequent negative references to barbaroi reflect badly on Egyptians (e. g. 224-5, 274-6, 741-3, 863-4, 1593ff.). When the narrative requires it, we find a recognition that customs can be different (800, 1065-6, 1241, 1246, 1270), but the overwhelming impression is that, wherever we look for Egypt in this play, it is rarely to be found: we encounter the tomb of Proteus adjacent to the palace, a most unEgyptian location, and clearly conceptualized in Greek terms as a place of secure refuge for a suppliant (1ff., 64ff., 1165ff.); the names of the ‘‘Egyptians’’ are stridently Greek throughout; Theonoe, an Egyptian woman, is presented as a prophetess in the best Greek tradition (10ff., 144ff., 317ff., 515ff., 528ff., 819ff.) and speaks in a thoroughly Greek manner (e. g. 865ff., 998ff.); Theonoe and Theoklymenos show the knowledge of Greek mythology which one has learned to expect in the barbaroi of Greek tragedy (e. g. 998ff., 1220ff.); we have an inapposite intrusion of a Greek custom of supplication (831, 947, 1237), the acceptance of four-horse chariots as a possibility in Egypt, though they are quite out the question (1039ff.), and the appearance of an old woman (graus) as a door-keeper to the palace (437ff.) which could never have happened, and an Egyptian king offering to arrange a horse sacrifice (1258) which would be quite unparalleled.
The confrontation of these two presentations of Egyptians in tragedy yields intriguing results, not least in revealing that, whatever the terms of the perception of otherness, this perception is very partial. Whereas Aischylos shows a consciousness of the Egyptians as culturally different, Euripides does so only to a very limited extent. In Helen there is a lack of interest in the question, and the obvious explanation would be that Euripides’ primary concern in this play is exploring the dramatic potential of the Stesichoros version of Helen’s sojourn in Egypt and its possibilities for the dramatic poet. These he feels able to develop with a minimum of exotic local color; he quite simply does not need Egyptian Egyptians. We have, therefore, surely the situation which frequently arises in paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance, Baroque, and high Classical Periods where often a scene from Classical or Biblical sources is depicted in entirely contemporary dress except for the odd Roman helmet or boot, inserted as a semeion to fix the historical context, but nothing more. In Euripides’ play it is much more important to enhance the sense ofimmediacy than the sense of difference. Aischylos, on the other hand, saw his task in very different terms. This may be partly because of dramatic imperatives which are hidden from us by the loss of the other plays in the trilogy, but, even if that is true, there is a broader context to consider. There were excellent reasons why Aischylos and his contemporaries should have developed a heightened sense of ethnicity: recent ethnographic writing such as that of Hekataios of Miletos (Jacoby 1957: 2666-769) provided ample evidence of cultural disparities between Egypt and Greece, not to speak of other areas, and the on-going struggle with Persia, in which Egyptians were actively involved against Greeks, raised in an unnervingly stark and immediate manner the fact of ethnic difference and posed the critical questions: ‘‘What is it to be Greek?’’; ‘‘What is it to be non-Greek?.’’ In such an environment it is hardly surprising that Aischylos and his contemporaries should show a keen sensitivity to the specifics of what it was to be non-Greek, in general, and Egyptian, in particular.
The prose writings of the Ionian enlightenment of the seventh-fifth centuries inaugurated a long tradition of comment on Egypt which consolidated existing trends, whilst opening up new ground. Anaximandros and Hekataios of Miletos established that continent theory, geology, meteorology, ethnography, botany, and zoology were all topics in discussions of Egypt (Lloyd 1975: 84ff.) whilst periplous texts comparable to the much later periplous of Ps-Scylax (Peretti 1979) or Pomponius Mela’s De Situ Orbis (c. middle of the first century ad, Romer 1998) were also current, including that of the sixth-century voyager Euthymenes of Massalia who is known to have commented on the problem of the sources of the Nile. However, important though the role of these pioneers may have been, they are all overshadowed by the great fifth-century figure of Herodotos of Halikarnassos.
The History of Herodotos, who was born sometime about 484 bc, provides one of the two fullest surviving literary engagements with Ancient Egyptian civilization from any period in classical antiquity (in general Hartog 1988; Gould 1989; Thomas 2000; Bakker, de Jong, and van Wees (eds.), 2002; Diodoros’ account in Book 1 can claim to be the other). He wrote within essentially the same time-frame as Aischylos and Euripides, but his work introduces another change of genre and a corresponding shift in agenda. His purpose was to preserve an account of the great conflict between the Greek world and the Persian Empire in the sixth and fifth centuries bc, but, fortunately for us, he took a very broad view of this task and worked on the basis that a careful characterization of the main protagonists was essential for the understanding of the conflict as a whole whilst, at the same time, showing the gradual move westwards of the Persian menace and the formidable resources of which it disposed. Since Egypt was one of the major provinces of the Persian Empire, it inevitably qualified for a detailed discussion, and this it gets in the great excursus which covers the whole of Book 2 and the early part of Book 3, though there are numerous references to Pharaonic Egypt elsewhere.
Even a cursory reading of the Egyptian section reveals that fundamentally Herodotos is in many respects developing strands in the reception of Egypt which had been established long since. We have already insisted at several points on the marked tendency of Greek writers to close the cultural gap between Greeks and Egyptians, even to the point where the latter are given Greek names and Greek ancestors. Herodotos’ account of Egyptian history provides a conspicuous example of this phenomenon. In dealing with this narrative it is crucially important to grasp that Herodotos’ History as a whole is dominated and orientated by a clearly defined conceptual agenda which was part and parcel of the mentality of his age and of which Homer, yet again, was a major determinant. Very briefly this amounted to the conviction that the world was dominated by a moral and physical order (dike) which was definitive, at least in the sense that it could not be improved, and this order was supported and maintained by the gods, above all by Zeus. The most important factor leading to infringements was hybris, an overweening
Ambition which refused to accept the boundaries inherent to that order and wilfully transgressed them. The way to avoid that was to recognize and accept such limits, i. e. to act as a dikaios; the phenomenon which most often led to transgression was a high degree of success which could lead people to forget what and who they were and to transgress the limits which were set for human beings. To Herodotos the history of the Persian Empire perfectly exemplified this moral syndrome, and such thinking informs the whole of his narrative of Persian imperial progress and disasters, but the syndrome also applied to many other figures in his narrative, and the discussion of Egyptian history is no exception (Lloyd 1988).
The historical narrative is the longest ingredient in Herodotos’ survey of Egypt, and there can be no reasonable doubt that it was essentially his creation, despite the demonstrable presence of older ingredients. It would be impossible to overemphasize the role which it played in presenting an image of Egyptian history to the classical world, a status which ensured that it was much quarried by later authors, most obviously by Diodoros Sikeliotes, but his influence is easily detected as late as the fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (History 22.15). Its earlier section is of little historical merit, although its value to historiography is very great, and it is often seriously inaccurate, above all in the wildly erroneous chronological displacement of the pyramid builders of the Old Kingdom and the inclusion of vintage Homeric elements in the form of Proteus, transmuted into a human king, and the lengthy treatment of the associated Helen episode. However, the section 2.147ff., which focuses on the history of the Saite Dynasty (664-525 bc), is much more accurate, though its coverage is undoubtedly skewed in favor of subject matter involving Greeks and in which Greeks would naturally have a particular interest, but we should not lose sight of the fact that, throughout the historical narrative, the actions and fates of kings are presented in a manner which makes them conform to precisely the same moral imperatives as any figure in Greek history, i. e. they inhabit the same moral world as Lydians, Persians, or Greek tyrants, and their portrayal shows no insight into a specifically Egyptian world view.
A Homeric pedigree is also evident in Herodotos’ statement of intent in embarking on his lengthy disquisition on Egypt which he formulates in the following terms:
I am going to speak at some length of Egypt because beyond all lands it possesses
Far more wonders (thoimasia) than any other land and works which surpass all power
To describe. (2.35.1)
Herodotos, however, goes much further than his illustrious predecessor in presenting ‘‘wonders’’ as the major driver in his choice of subject matter, and the text bears out this point of emphasis in many different areas of comment: Egyptian customs are the reverse of those of everyone else; religious practices are very much at variance with those of the Greeks; the extraordinary regime of the Nile and the Egyptian climate are markedly different; the size of Egyptian monuments, in particular, is a recurrent source of interest - again an Homeric strand; the sheer size of Egypt is astonishing, and personalities and their activities also qualify as ‘‘wonders’’ or ‘‘wonderful’’; customs such as mummification have no Hellenic parallel, and the fauna are also startling, e. g. the crocodile, hippopotamus, and even the domestic cat (an exotic to
Greeks at this period) and its reported antics, as well as the flora, e. g. lotuses and the papyrus plant.
Not the least of the marvels of Egypt was the enormous antiquity of its civilization compared with that of Greece, and Egypt’s antiquity greatly facilitated the application of another of Herodotos’ mental traits: the taste for post hoc ergo propter hoc, i. e. if a is earlier than b, then b MUST be the result of a, a principle which was destined to a brilliant, if malign, future well beyond the temporal confines of Classical history. This conviction enabled Herodotos to claim that Egypt had been the inventor of a series of cultural phenomena, exemplifying the concern with the prOtos heuretls or ‘‘first discoverer’’ which became a major theme of Greek cultural theorizing (Kleingunther 1933) and locates Herodotos very firmly in the hyperdiffusionist camp of cultural historians. The wide application of this principle amongst Greek writers meant that a long series of Greek illuminati were taken on fictitious trips to Egypt to acquire the beginnings of their achievements, including Homer, Solon, Pythagoras, and Plato, to name only a few (Lloyd 1975: 49-60), though an all-inclusive scepticism on these traditions would be ill-advised. In Herodotos’ case the most wrong-headed result of its application was the claim that virtually all Greek religion and Greek gods had an Egyptian origin, but other alleged, and equally erroneous, legacies are the influence of the organization of the Egyptian warrior class (Machimoi) on the development of the Spartan military system and Solon’s supposed borrowing of his unemployment law which Herodotos claims was introduced in Egypt by the Pharaoh Amasis.
What is our assessment of Herodotos’ portrayal of Egypt? The account of Egypt is embedded in an historical narrative written for a fifth-century Greek audience. It, therefore, reflects Greek interests and Greek preoccupations of that period. There is no genuine understanding of the ethos of Egyptian civilization or of the mentality of the Ancient Egyptians. Where the subject matter is a matter of observation Herodotos can often provide good information, but it is not always sound, and his information on such issues should always be treated with caution. However, it should never be dismissed out of hand. Whatever its deficiencies, the Herodotean narrative is the first consecutive account we have from any source of Egyptian civilization, and it is written by a European largely uninfluenced by Egyptian attitudes, above all by Egyptian royal propaganda. Herodotos is an outsider looking in, and his perspective on that civilization is invaluable, particularly since he saw Pharaonic civilization when it was still a going concern.
World History
