Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: the Cleverest Man Who Ever Lived (Part 4: Happily Ever After) Open on the royal chambers, and the king interrogating his guards. “Let me get this straight,” the king said. “Y’all … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: the Cleverest Man Who Ever Lived (Part 3: Good to His Mother) Picking up from the last entry: the morning after the thieves’ final visit to the treasury, the king enters … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: the Cleverest Man Who Ever Lived (Part 2: Desperate Measures) Picking up from last entry, we find the mason’s two sons. They followed up on his instructions and found his hidden … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: the Cleverest Man Who Ever Lived (Part 1: the Master Mason) This bit is a good bit. Once upon a time (during the reign of Proteus’s successor Remphis, also called Rhampsinitus, … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: Helen of Troy! After Pharaoh died or was deposed, he was succeeded not by his own son but by a prominent aristocrat of Memphis, a man Homer called Polybus and Herodotus … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: the Misogynistic Blindness Cure Story! Rameses II’s heir was, according to Herodotus, the unimaginatively-named Pharaoh. Seriously! Pharaoh was overall a pretty nebbishy king, neither an effective administrator nor a captain of … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: Rameses II! Well, probably Rameses II. Maybe. Herodotus calls him Sesostris, and there’s a considerable amount of dispute as to whether he’s talking Rameses II or some later pharaoh, Sensoret III … Continue reading →
Herodotus Tells Tales From Egypt’s Hoary Past! Today’s installment: Nitrocris, Queen of Babylon! Wait, no. That can’t be right. We already covered Nitocris back in Book I, when Herodotus was listing off everything he knew about Babylon. According to our … Continue reading →
Herodotus’s source for all this Nile lore was some cool guys in Cyrene, a Hellenic colony on the African coast just to the west of Egypt proper. He met them in a bar (probably) and they spun him a tale … Continue reading →
In which we talk about Kush, finally As hinted yesterday, today we examine a fun new topic here in Herodotus Explains African Geography: the source of the Nile! Nobody knows from whence the Nile flows, except the clerk at the … Continue reading →
