Travels with Herodotus (13 page)

This is a fragment from Book Two of Herodotus—the account of his trip into Egypt. In this passage, running several dozen pages, we can clearly observe the Greek’s technique.

How does Herodotus work?

He is a consummate reporter: he wanders, looks, talks, listens, in order that he can later note down what he learned and saw, or simply to remember better.

How does he travel? If by land, then he goes on horseback, donkey, mule, or, most frequently, on foot.

Is he alone, or accompanied by a slave? We do not know for certain, but in those days, whoever had the means took a slave along on journeys. The slave carried the luggage, the gourd with water, the food, the writing implements—a roll of papyrus, clay tablets, brushes, gravers, ink. Because the hardships of the road leveled class differences, the slave was more of a traveling companion: he sustained one’s spirits, afforded protection, asked for directions, reconnoitered. We can imagine how the relations between Herodotus—an inquisitive romantic desirous of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, a diligent student of the impractical and the largely useless—and his slave, who on the road had to take care of things mundane, pedestrian, everyday, resembled those between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. They were the ancient Greek progenitors of that later Castilian pair.

In addition to one’s slave, a traveler also hired a guide and an interpreter. Herodotus’s team might therefore have numbered—not counting himself—at least three people. But often wanderers headed in the same direction eventually joined up.

In the hot Egyptian climate, one makes best progress in the
morning. Travelers therefore rise at dawn, eat breakfast (wheat cakes, figs, sheep cheese, diluted wine—it’s still permissible to drink, Islam will not seize control here for another thousand years), and then set out.

The goal of Herodotus’s journeys? To collect new information about a country, its people, and their customs, or to test the reliability of data already gathered. Herodotus is not content with what someone else has told him—he tries to verify each thing, to compare and contrast the various versions he has heard, and then to formulate his own.

When he arrives in Egypt, its king, Psammetichus, has already been dead for one hundred and fifty years. Herodotus discovers (perhaps having been told this while still in Greece) that Psammetichus had been especially preoccupied with the question of
which was the oldest race on earth
. The Egyptians believed that they were, but Psammetichus, although their king, nevertheless had his doubts. He ordered a shepherd to raise two infants in uninhabited mountains. The language in which they spoke their first word would be proof that the people who speak that language are the oldest on earth. When the children were two years old and were hungry, they cried,
“Bekos!,”
which meant “bread” in the Phrygian language. Psammetichus therefore proclaimed that the first people on earth were the Phrygians and that the Egyptians came only later, and with this clarification he earned his place in history. Psammetichus’s inquiries interest Herodotus because they prove that the Egyptian ruler understood that unalterable law of history according to which whoever elevates himself will be humbled: Be not voracious, do not jostle your way to the fore, maintain moderation and humility; otherwise the chastising hand of Fate, which beheads braggarts and all who presume to lord it over others, will descend upon you. Psammetichus wanted to spare
Egyptians this misfortune and so moved them from history’s front row to the second: the Phrygians were first, and you only came after.

This is what I heard … in Memphis during my conversations with the priests of Hephaestus. The information I gained there led me to travel to Thebes and to Heliopolis, to try to find out whether their accounts would agree with what I had heard in Memphis
. Herodotus travels, therefore, to check, to compare, to clarify. He listens to the priests’ descriptions of Egypt, its dimensions and geography, and comments:
My view is that they are right in saying this about the country
. He has his own opinion about everything and searches for confirmation in the stories of others.

Herodotus is especially fascinated by the Nile, this powerful and mysterious river. Where are its sources? Where do its waters come from? Whence comes the silt it carries, with which it fertilizes the rich delta of this immense nation?
As for the question where the Nile rises, no Egyptian or Libyan or Greek I have spoken to claimed to have a definite answer
… So he decides to search for the river’s sources himself, venturing as far as he can into Upper Egypt.
I myself travelled as far as Elephantine and saw things with my very own eyes, and subsequently made enquiries of others
…

After Elephantine the land rises steeply, so that from then on one has to have a rope running from the boat to both banks, as one harnesses an ox, and to proceed like that. If the rope were to break, the boat would be carried downstream by the force of the current. This kind of terrain lasts for four days’ travelling, and the Nile here twists and turns as much as the Meander
. Another two months of traveling and sailing up the Nile
will bring you to a big city called Meroë ….
.

But from then there is no reliable information to be had about it: the land is uninhabited because of the heat
.

He abandons the Nile, the mystery of its sources, the enigma of the seasonal rising and falling of its waters, and begins to observe closely the Egyptians, their way of being, their habits, their customs.
He states that
almost all Egyptian customs and practices are the opposite of those of everywhere else
. And he carefully, scrupulously records:

For instance, women go out to the town square and retail goods, while men stay at home and do the weaving … Or again, men carry loads on their heads, while women do so on their shoulders. Women urinate standing up, while men do so squatting. They relieve themselves indoors, but eat outside on the streets; the reason for this, they say, is that things that are embarrassing but unavoidable should be done in private, while things which are not embarrassing should be done out in the open. There are no female priestesses of any god or goddess; all their gods, and goddesses too, are served in this capacity by men. Sons do not have to look after their parents if they do not want to, but daughters must even if they are reluctant
.

Everywhere else in the world, priests have long hair, but in Egypt they shave their heads …. Everywhere else in the world people live separately from their animals, but animals and humans live together in Egypt …. They knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands … Other people, unless they have been influenced by the Egyptians, leave their genitals in their natural state, but the Egyptians practise circumcision
.

And on and on like this stretches the long list of Egyptian customs and behaviors, which surprise and astonish the newcomer with their otherness, distinctness, uniqueness. Herodotus is saying: Look, these Egyptians are so different from us Greeks, and yet we coexist so well together (there are many Greek colonies in Egypt at this time, whose inhabitants live on friendly terms with the local population). Yes, Herodotus is never shocked at difference, never condemns it; rather, he tries to learn about it, to understand and describe it. Difference? It serves by some paradox only to emphasize a greater oneness, speaking to its vitality and richness.

All the while he returns to his great passion, his obsession almost: reproaching his kinsmen for their pride, their conceitedness, their belief in their own superiority (it is from the Greek that
the word “barbarian” comes, from the word
“barbaros,”
signifying someone who does not speak Greek but rather something garbled, incomprehensible, and who by the same token is a lower, inferior being). It was the Greeks who later instilled in other Europeans this tendency to turn up one’s nose, and Herodotus fights the impulse every step of the way. And he does so when juxtaposing Greeks and Egyptians—as if purposely traveling to Egypt to gather there material and proof for his philosophy of moderation, modesty, and common sense.

He begins with a fundamental, transcendent matter: Where did the Greeks get their gods? Where do they come from? What do you mean, where do they come from? the Greeks respond. They are our gods! Oh, no, blasphemes Herodotus, we got our gods from the Egyptians!

How fortunate for him that he proclaimed this in a world in which mass communication did not yet exist and only a handful of people heard or read him. If his views had been disseminated widely, our Greek would have been instantly stoned, or burned on the pyre! But because Herodotus lived in a pre-media epoch, he could safely say that
the Egyptians were the first people in the world to hold general festive assemblies, and religious processions and parades, and the Greeks learnt from the Egyptians
. And what of the great Greek hero Heracles? …
The Greeks got the name of Heracles from Egypt, rather than the other way round … I have a great deal of evidence pointing in this direction. Here is just one item: both parents of the Greek Heracles, Amphitryon and Alcmene, trace their lineage back to Egypt …. In fact Heracles is a very ancient Egyptian god; as they themselves say, it was seventeen thousand years before the reign of King Amasis when the Twelve Gods descended from the Eight Gods, and they regard Heracles as one of the Twelve
.

I wanted to understand these matters as clearly as I could, so I also sailed to Tyre in Phoenicia, since I had heard that there was a sanctuary sacred to Heracles there
,
and I found that the sanctuary there was very lavishly appointed with a large number of dedicatory offerings …. I talked to the priests of the god there and asked them how long ago the sanctuary was founded, and I discovered that they too disagreed with the Greek account
…

What is striking in these investigations is their secularism; in fact, the total absence in them of the sacred and the sublime, of the solemn language that typically attends such discourse. In this history the gods are not something unattainable, absolute, super-worldly; the discussion is matter-of-fact and revolves around the simple question of who invented them—the Greeks or the Egyptians?

H
erodotus’s dispute with his countrymen is not over the existence of gods (our Greek would not conceive of the world without Higher Beings), but over who borrowed from whom their names and concepts.

To shore up his position that the entire Greek pantheon, or at least a significant portion of it, was derived from that of the Egyptians, he reached for what to him was an irrefutable argument—that of time, of precedence, of age. Which culture, he asks, is older, the Greek or the Egyptian? And he immediately answers as follows:
Some time ago the writer Hecataeus was in Thebes. He had studied his own lineage and had traced his family history back to a divine ancestor in the sixteenth generation. So the priests of Zeus there did to him what they did to me too (not that I had looked into my family history): they took me into the temple, showed me the wooden figures there, and counted them for me, up to the number I have mentioned [341]
. (Clarification: Hecataeus is a Greek, and the colossi are Egyptian, and each one of them symbolizes one generation.) Observe, you Greeks, Herodotus seems to be saying, our genealogy goes back barely fifteen generations, whereas that of the Egyptians runs as much as 341. So exactly who borrowed gods from whom, if not we from the Egyptians, who are so much older than we are? And in order all the more emphatically to impress upon his compatriots the chasm of historic time separating the two nations, he
elaborates:
Now, three hundred human generations make 10,000 years, because there are three generations in a hundred years
. And he quotes the opinion of Egyptian priests, that during this period
no god ever appeared in human form
. And so, Herodotus seems to be concluding, the gods that we deem to be our very own, Greek gods, already existed in Egypt for more than ten thousand years!

If one accepts that Herodotus is correct and that not only the gods, but culture in its entirety arrived in Greece (i.e., in Europe) from Egypt (i.e., from Africa), then one could argue for the non-European origins of European culture. A debate about this, brimming with ideology and emotion, has been raging for some two and a half thousand years already, and instead of stepping now onto such a dangerous minefield, let’s note one thing: In Herodotus’s world, one in which many cultures and civilizations existed side by side, relations between them were quite varied and fluid; we know of instances in which one civilization was in conflict with another, but there were others which maintained relations of exchange and mutual indebtedness, enriching one another politically. Moreover, there were civilizations that had once fought but subsequently cooperated, only later to find themselves once again at war. In short, for Herodotus, the world’s multiculturalism was a living, pulsating tissue in which nothing was permanently set or defined, but which continually transformed itself, mutated, gave rise to new relationships and contexts.

I first see the Nile in 1960. My initial glimpse is in the evening, as my airplane approaches Cairo. From up high, the river at this time of day resembles a black, glistening trunk, forking and branching, surrounded by garlands of streetlights and bright rosettes defining the squares of this immense and bustling city. Cairo at this moment in history is the hub of Third World
liberation movements. Many who live here will tomorrow become the presidents of new states, and various anticolonial African and Asian political parties have their seats in the city.

Cairo is also the capital of the United Arab Republic, which came into being two years earlier with the union of Egypt and Syria and whose president is the forty-two-year-old Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser—a tall, massive, commanding, and charismatic figure. In 1952, Nasser, then thirty-four, led the military coup that overthrew King Farouk; he became president four years later. For a long time he faced strong internal opposition: on the one hand Communists fought him, and on the other the Muslim Brotherhood, a conspiratorial organization of fundamentalists and Islamic terrorists. To combat them both Nasser maintained numerous police units of all sorts.