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42.
I wonder, then, at those who have mapped out and divided the world into Libya, Asia, and Europe; for the difference between them is great, seeing that in length Europe stretches along both the others together, and it appears to me to be wider beyond all comparison.
[2]
For Libya shows clearly that it is bounded by the sea, except where it borders on Asia. Necos king of Egypt first discovered this and made it known. When he had finished digging the canal which leads from the Nile to the Arabian Gulf, he sent Phoenicians in ships, instructing them to sail on their return voyage past the Pillars of Heracles until they came into the northern sea and so to Egypt.
[3]
So the Phoenicians set out from the Red Sea and sailed the southern sea; whenever autumn came they would put in and plant the land in whatever part of Libya they had reached, and there await the harvest;
[4]
then, having gathered the crop, they sailed on, so that after two years had passed, it was in the third that they rounded the pillars of Heracles and came to Egypt. There they said (what some may believe, though I do not) that in sailing around Libya they had the sun on their right hand.1
1 The detail which Herodotus does not believe incidentally confirms the story; as the ship sailed west round the Cape of Good Hope, the sun of the southern hemisphere would be on its right. Most authorities now accept the story of the circumnavigation.
Herodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.
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References (30 total)
- Commentary references to this page
(2):
- Sir Richard C. Jebb, Commentary on Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus, 513-862
- C.E. Graves, Commentary on Thucydides: Book 4, CHAPTER LXIV
- Cross-references to this page
(8):
- Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 3.5.3
- Harper's, Neco
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), AEGYPTUS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), HE´RCULIS COLUMNAE
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), HY´PANIS
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), LI´BYA
- Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (1854), PHOENI´CIA
- Smith's Bio, Neco
- Cross-references in notes to this page
(1):
- Herodotus, The Histories, Hdt. 4.37
- Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (19):
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