|
Surprises, and what joy!
Many months have passed since I last stretched out my hand for one of the volumes in the five-foot bookshelf of Harvard Classics. It hovered today on several titles, and fell on Vol 33: Voyages and Travels. With not much enthusiasm, I realised I had read much of this before, I managed to avoid Sir Francis Drake and his biographers, and settle on Herodotus.
What joy!
Two major appreciations came back to me.
The first is, appreciation of the increasing speed in which exploration of the past is being done these days. In a decade we have learned almost as much about pre-history and ancient history as we knew in the past thousand years. This, of course, is due to the discoveries of DNA, carbon-dating and other technologies which are tearing aside the mysteries that we loved when my generation grew up 60 and more years ago. Knowledge - about dinosaurs and birdlife; about the Universe and the deep seas; about our minds and bodies; about everything except how to behave and to govern ourselves, is greater now than we could ever have imagined fifty years ago.
The second appreciation is the reminder of how marvellous Herodotus is as a writer and historian. . . You remember even after only ten minutes reading, what an acute observer he was, mixing Arabian Nights-style fables with hard facts, yet keeping his credibility far better than most modern historians. He used deduction, not pet theory. He used personal observation, not hindsight. And he knows how to tell a story.
If a version of history is amusing, witty or salacious, he is not above recording it - while reminding his readers constantly that it is hearsay, and not personally observed or accepted by his own logic. For instance -
In search of the source of the Nile
His first information comes from the world's contemporary authority on the matter, the scribe of the sacred treasure of Athene at the city of Sias in Egypt. Herodotus recounts the authorised version, and adds dryly:
To me, however, this man seemed not to be speaking seriously when he said he had certain knowledge of it.
Herodotus offers other versions and finally, by process of deduction (as unerringly as in numerous other cases) he settles on a version which created controversy from his days in BC 400 and for thousands of years. . . only to be proved correct.
He accepted the version of five young men, chosen by lot within the tribe of the Nasamonians to go to see the desert parts of Libya and to try whether they could discover more than those who had previously explored furthest.
Herodotus explains that Libya is full of wild beasts; and in the parts above the land of wild beasts it is full of sand, terribly waterless and utterly desert. These young men then (said they), being sent out by their companions well furnished with supplies of water and provisions, went first through the inhabited country, and after they had passed through this they came to the country of wild beasts, and after this they passed through the desert, making their journey towards the West Wind; and having passed through a great tract of sand in many days, they saw at last trees growing in a level place; and having come up to them, they were beginning to pluck the fruit which was upon the trees: but as they began to pluck it, there came upon them small men, of less stature than men of the common size, and these seized them and carried them away; and neither could the Nasamonians understand anything of their speech nor could those who were carrying them off understand anything of the speech of the Nasamonians: and they led them (so it was said) through very great swamps [my emphasis]. . .and to a great river, which ran from the West towards the sunrising, and in it were crocodiles.
This, believes Herodotus, after recording his deductions, is the Nile, but of the sources of the Nile no one can give an account. . . About its course, however, so much as it was possible to learn by the most diligent inquiry has been told; and it runs out into Egypt.
Writing about the Egyptians he met nearly 2,500 years ago
Herodotus records that those who dwell in the part of Egypt which is sown for crops practise memory more than any other men and are the most learned in history by far of all those of whom I have had experience: and their manner of life is as follows:-
For three successive days in each month they purge, hunting after health with emetics and clysters, and they think that all the diseases which exist are produced in men by the food on which they live: for the Egyptians are from other causes also the most healthy of all men next after the Libyans. . .
As to their diet, it is as follows: -they eat bread, making loaves of maize, which they caIl kyllestis, and they use habitually a wine made out of barley, for vines they have not in their land. Of their fish some they dry in the sun and eat them without cooking, others they eat cured in brine. Of birds they eat quails and ducks and small birds without cooking, after first curing them; and everything else which they have belonging to the class of birds or fishes, except such as have been set apart for them as sacred, they eat roasted or boiled.
Drink and be merry, for. . .
In the entertainments of the rich among them, when they have finished eating, a man bears round a wooden figure of a dead body in a coffin, made as like the reality as may be both by painting and carving, and measuring about a cubit or two cubits each way; and this he shows to each of those who are drinking together, saying:
"When thou lookest upon this, drink and be merry, for thou shalt be such as this when thou art dead." Thus they do at their carousals.
Sacred traditions
Herodotus is adamant that all except the latest of Grecian gods are not his people's own, but came to them from Egypt. This was clearly a highly controversial statement in 440 BC, for he returns to it often. He translates the names of each of Ancient Egypt's "eight original gods" into Greek and explains how they match the Grecian versions. For instance, Zeus is the Egyptian Amun, and Dionysos is Osiris, who is also celebrated by the Egyptians as in the Feast of Dionysos. But instead of the giant phallus beloved by Grecian peasants, they have another contrivance, namely figures of about a cubit in height worked by strings, which women carry about the villages, with the privy member made to move and not much less in size than the rest of the body. Only the later gods, such as Poseidon, were derived from seafaring peoples, possibly the Hellenes themselves, Herodotus explains.
In dealing with the customs of the Egyptians, Herodotus says that they practise circumcision - unlike most of the nations of his known world - and he describes Ancient Egypt's beliefs in preparing food for sacred rites, using customs which in today's eyes seem similar to kosher practices.
Herodotus observed Ancient Egypt while it still dominated the civilised world, and described it as containing "wonders more than any other land" and ""works beyond expression". Would it be too speculative to suggest that the land of the pharaohs not only directly and immeasurably influenced Greek civilisation, but also the entire Middle East - including Judea?
And the Olympic Games
Here is a contemporary report on the Olympics in about 440BC. Herodotus writes:
While Psammis was king of Egypt, there came to him men sent by the Eleians, who boasted that they ordered the contest at Olympia in the most just and honourable manner possible and thought that not even the Egyptians, the wisest of men, could find out anything besides, to be added to their rules. Now when the Eleians came to Egypt and said that for which they had come, then this king called together those of the Egyptians who were reputed the wisest, and when the Egyptians had come together they heard the Eleians tell of all that which it was their part to do in regard to the contest; and when they had related everything, they said that they had come to learn in addition anything which the Egyptians might be able to find out besides, which was juster than this. They then having consulted together asked the Eleians whether their own citizens took part in the contest; and they said that it was permitted to anyone who desired it, both of their own people and of the other Hellenes equally, to take part in the contest: upon which the Egyptians said that in so ordering the games they had wholly missed the mark of justice; for it could not be but that they [the Elians, whose task it was to act as referees] would take [the] part [of a] man of their own State, if he was contending, and so act unfairly to the stranger: but if they really desired, as they said, to order the games justly, and if this was the cause for which they had come to Egypt, they advised them to order the contest so as to be for strangers alone to contend in, and that no Eleian should be permitted to contend.
Such was the suggestion made by the Egyptians to the Eleians.
I do not know if the Elians took this advice. . . but it finally seeped through to the World Cup - if not the Olympics - 2,500 years later. |
