In Sources for Egyptian History you met the evidence Egyptians left themselves: inscriptions, papyri and monuments. For centuries after hieroglyphs fell silent, though, Europe knew Egypt almost only through a second kind of source: what Greek and Roman visitors wrote about it. Those accounts are still worth reading, as long as we read them the way a historian does.
Key idea
Herodotus (5th century BC), Diodorus of Sicily (1st century BC) and Strabo (late 1st century BC) described Egypt from their own travels and from what priests, guides and older books told them. What they saw with their own eyes is often good; what they were told about the distant past is often hearsay.
Why it works
A source is only as good as its access to the events. Herodotus could watch the Nile flood and Egyptian customs of his day, so those passages can be checked against other evidence and often hold up. But he wrote about two thousand years after the pyramids were built, could not read hieroglyphs, and depended on interpreters. For the pyramid age he was a tourist hearing stories, not a witness.
| Writer | In Egypt | Work | Useful for | Read with care |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Herodotus | mid-400s BC (by his own account) | Histories, Book 2 | the Nile, the flood, customs and religion in his own day, embalming as it was described to him | stories of kings from long before, with numbers he could not check |
| Diodorus of Sicily | 60–56 BC (he dates his visit by the Olympic games) | Library of History, Book 1 | Ptolemaic Egypt, which he saw; he says he watched a crowd kill a Roman who had killed a cat | much is copied from earlier Greek writers, mixed with his own views |
| Strabo | about 25 BC, traveling up the Nile with the Roman governor Aelius Gallus | Geography, Book 17 | places and distances; the Nilometer at Elephantine; the statue at Thebes that was said to "sing" at dawn | little on the deep past; a geographer, not a historian of Egypt |
Worked example: How far back was the pyramid age?
Khufu reigned c. 2589–2566 BC. Herodotus was in Egypt around 450 BC. About how long before his visit did Khufu begin his reign?
- Both dates are BC, so subtract: 2589 − 450 = 2139.
- Round it, since Khufu's dates are uncertain by decades: about 2,100 years.
- For comparison, about 2,475 years separate Herodotus from today. He stood almost as far from Khufu as we stand from him.
Answer: About 2,100 years.
Worked example: Sorting an account
Herodotus says the Great Pyramid took twenty years to build and that 100,000 men worked on it in three-month shifts. How should a historian treat this?
- Ask how he knew. He was told this by guides about two thousand years after the building, and he could not read the inscriptions.
- Ask what other evidence says. Archaeologists have excavated the workers' town and cemeteries beside the Giza plateau; most modern estimates of the workforce are much smaller, though the figures are still argued over.
- Conclusion: a tradition worth recording, but not a measurement. It tells us what Egyptians of the 400s BC said about their past.
Answer: Treat it as a later tradition, checked against archaeology, not as an eyewitness count.
Common mistake
Treating Herodotus as an eyewitness to the pyramid age. He wrote about two thousand years after it, from what guides told him. A quick check: before trusting a classical statement about Egypt, ask whether the writer could have seen it himself. The Nile flood, yes; Khufu's workforce, no.
Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in Greek in the 3rd century BC, could read the old records. His history survives only in quotations by later writers, but it gave us the numbered dynasties: see Manetho's Dynasties.