Herodotos seems to have visited Howâra from the capital of the Fayyûm, much as a traveller would do to-day. At least, such is the inference which we may draw from his words. Its position is defined as being “a little above Lake Mœris, near the city of the Crocodiles.” But we must remember that the Lake Mœris of the Greek tourist included not [pg 284] only the actual lake, but also the inundation, which covered at the time the cultivated land of the Fayyûm. Nor was it, as he supposed, an artificial piece of water excavated in a district which was “terribly waterless,” the excavators of which were wasteful enough to fling all the earth they had extracted into the Nile twenty miles away. It was, on the contrary, an oasis reclaimed from marsh and water by the wise engineering labours of the kings of the twelfth dynasty and the embankments which they caused to be erected. So far from destroying the precious cultivable ground by turning it into a lake, they drained the lake so far as was possible, and thereby created a new Egypt for the cultivators of the soil.
From the walls of the city of the Crocodiles Herodotos looked out over a vast expanse of water, which he thought was the creation of the Pharaohs, but which was really the result of man's neglect. The dykes were broken which should have kept back the flood and prevented it from swamping the summer crops. It was with this view of almost boundless waters that the journey of Herodotos up the Nile came to an end. He returned to Memphis, and from thence pursued the way along which we have followed him to Pelusium and the sea. His note-book was filled with memoranda of all the [pg 285] wonders he had seen; of the strange customs he had observed among the Egyptian people; above all, with the folk-tales which his guides had poured into his ear. At a later day, when his eastern travels were over, and he had leisure for the work, he combined all this with the accounts written by his predecessors, and added a new book to the libraries of ancient Greece. From the outset it was a success, and though malicious critics endeavoured to condemn and supersede it, though Thukydides contradicted its statements in regard to Athens, though Ktêsias declared that its oriental history was a romance and Plutarch discoursed on the “malignity” of its author, the book survived all attacks. We have lost the work of Hekatæos of Miletos, we have lost also—what is a more serious misfortune—that of the careful and well-informed Hekatæos of Abdera, but we still have Herodotos with us. And in spite of our own knowledge and his ignorance, in spite even of his innocent vanity and appropriation of the words of others, it is a pleasure to travel with him in our hand and visit with him the scenes he saw. Nowhere else can we find the folk-lore which grew and flourished in the meeting-place of East and West more than two thousand years ago, and in which lay the germs of much of the folk-lore of our own childhood. It may even be that some of the [pg 286] stories which the modern dragoman relates to the modern traveller on the Nile have no better parentage than the guides of Herodotos. Cairo is the successor of Memphis, and 'the caste' of the dragomen is not yet extinct.
Appendices.
Appendix I.
The Egyptian Dynasties According To Manetho (As Quoted By Julius Africanus, a.d. 220), Etc.
[The excerpts of Africanus are known from George the Synkellos (a.d. 790) and Eusebius (a.d. 326): where Eusebius differs from Synkellos the fact is stated.]
(Each king is followed by the number of years reigned.)