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οὐ δεκόμενοι: this is too absolute (cf. Sourdille, R. p. 56). The Pharaohs were by title the ‘sons of Ra’, and stories of divine fatherhood occur on the monuments, e. g. Amenophis III is son of Amon at Luxor. H., in fact, contradicts his own statement elsewhere (cf. i. 182. 1 nn.). In Egyptian, πίρωμις = ‘the man’, here wrongly translated ‘the gentleman’. The mistake spoils the point of the priests' answer, viz. that mortal had been born of mortal, without a god coming in, for this long period. Whether the mistake be due to the interpreter's vanity, or to H.'s desire to outdo the family distinctions of Hecataeus, must remain uncertain.

‘Piromis,’ as a proper name, may have been familiar to H., for it occurs in an inscription from Halicarnassus, l. 17 (Newton's Essays, p. 427, l. 17).

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