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H.'s account of Egypt, cc. 35-98. This is the most valuable part of Bk. II (cf. App. IX, § 4). It opens with the famous paradox that everything in Egypt is the reverse of what it is elsewhere (§ 2). This point is borrowed by Sophocles (O. C. 337 seq.), who makes Oedipus contrast his daughters and his sons. “ὦ πάντ̓ ἐκείνω τοῖς ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ νόμοις
φύσιν κατεικασθέντε καὶ βίου τροφάς.
” [For the relations between H. and Soph. cf. Introd. p. 7]. But it must be added that there are no verbal similarities in the two passages. The point is made by other Greek writers, e. g. Anaxandrides (Athen. 299), a comic poet circ. 370 B.C., draws an elaborate contrast between Greece and Egypt; his illustrations are from the treatment of animals, e.g. βοῦν προσκυνεῖς, ἐγὼ δὲ θύω τοῖς θεοῖς. It is even more exaggerated later, e.g. by Diod. i. 27 (as to incestuous marriages). Nymphodorus (a third-century writer, F. H. G. ii. 380) absurdly puts the topsyturvydom down to Sesostris, who wished to make his subjects effeminate and so prevent their demanding liberty. As so large a part of the details furnished by H. are on religious matters, it may be worth while to sum up here the main points in which his account of Egyptian religion is defective or erroneous (cf. Sourdille, R. pp. 367-401): (1) It quite fails to bring out the importance of certain cults, e.g. of Ptah, of Râ (the Sun), of Hâpi (the Nile), of Thoth (Hermes, who is only mentioned c. 67, Ἑρμέω πόλις), of Hâthor (Aphrodite). (2) It has far too much uniformity. H. speaks as if all Egypt had the same beliefs; ‘but no people is so destitute of the systematic spirit as the Egyptians.’ But cf. 43. 2 n. (3) The religion is made too Greek: （a) It is distinctly anthropomorphic; τὤγαλμα is made everywhere the centre of the temple worship, and H. seems to have conceived of this as usually in human form (46. 2); correspondingly the theriomorphic character of Egyptian religion is underestimated. （b) Greek ideas, e. g. of mysteries and oracles, are wrongly introduced. (Some, however, maintain that the Egyptians really had mysteries in the Greek sense of the word; cf. 171. 1 n.) (4) The magic, which is so marked a feature of all Egyptian religion, is ignored. On the other hand, H.'s merits as an observer are now recognized. Erman, the leading German Egyptologist, writes (R. p. 175): ‘Where our Egyptian sources fail us, we receive for the first time help from outside; about 450 B.C. H., an indefatigable and careful observer, travelled in Egypt. He observed exactly those things which are of special interest to us.’ He proceeds to sketch later Egyptian religion, mainly from the data given by H. (pp. 176-81).
τὰ πολλὰ πάντα, ‘in almost all cases.’ αἱ γυναῖκες: the monuments certainly show women marketing and men weaving, but these are the exceptions: H., struck by the contrasts to Greece, forgets to notice they are only occasional in Egypt. κρόκην: the ‘woof’ pushed home to its place in the warp (στήμων） by the κερκίς. This was done from below by the Greeks and Romans, and from above by the Jews (cf. John xix. 23, the seamless coat of Christ, ‘woven from the top’); the Egyptians used both methods, more usually the latter; H. is so far right, but they also used horizontal looms as well as perpendicular ones. For pictures of weaving see Wilkinson, i. 317; ii. 170 (horizontal), 171.
τὰ ἄχθεα κτλ.: this contrast is wrong; all that can be said is that some loads were carried by men ‘on their heads’, e.g. the baker in Gen. xl. 16, while the women probably carried their babies ‘on their shoulders’, like the modern Fellahîn (cf. B. M. G. p. 78). ἐσθίουσι: the Egyptian upper classes certainly did not eat out of doors; H. only saw the Egyptians of the streets.
H. is struck by the fact that he heard of no women in Egypt in positions like that of Hera's priestess at Argos, and he (as often) generalizes from a single point. But he himself knew that there were women in the temples, cf.i. 182. 5 n.; ii. 54. 1. He is quite wrong in his statement; two contrary instances may be quoted; women under the Old Empire especially devoted themselves to Neith and Hathor, while under the Saites, the ‘consort of Amon’ was the nominal ruler of Thebes. Wiedemann has a more elaborate explanation. As the Egyptians called all the dead, men and women alike, ‘Osiris’, and made them male, he thinks that H. was told this, but misunderstood it, and, transferring it from the other world to the present one, supposed that no woman could appear before the gods as priestess. Wiedemann is very fond of charging H. with confusion; he seems to estimate the historian's capacity by his own. τρέφειν κτλ. Sons at Athens were, as usually in Greece, required to care for their parents; a law of Solon fixed ἀτιμία as a penalty for neglecting this duty (Diog. Laert. i. 55). In Egypt the duty of seeing to a parent's grave was certainly imposed on sons; the law in c. 136 implies this. H. is supposed to be referring to the comparative independence of Egyptian women (B. M. G. p. 77), who were able to incur obligations on their own account; struck by this contrast to their dependent position in Greece, he states, in an exaggerated way, that daughters alone had duties to their parents. But this explanation seems very far-fetched.
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