unable to keep up its temples and palaces. Herodotus
scarcely mentions it, and we can hardly wonder at it: he had visited
the still flourishing Memphis, where the temples were cared for and
were filled with worshippers. What had Thebes to show him in the way of
marvels which he had not already seen, and that, too, in a better state
of preservation? His Theban ciceroni also told him the same stories that
he had heard in Lower Egypt, and he states that their information agreed
in the main with that which he had received at Memphis and Heliopolis,
which made it unnecessary to repeat it at length. Two or three things
only appeared to him worthy of mention. His admiration was first roused
by the 360 statues of the high priests of Amon which had already excited
the wonder of his rival Hecataeus; he noted that all these personages
were, without exception, represented as mere men, each the son of
another man, and he took the opportunity of ridiculing the vanity of his
compatriots, who did not hesitate to inscribe the name of a god at the
head of their genealogies, removed by some score of generations only
from their own. On the other hand, the temple servitors related to him
how two Theban priestesses, carried off by the Phoenicians and sold, one
in Libya and the other in Greece, had set up the first oracles known
in those two countries: Herodotus thereupon remembered the story he had
heard in Epirus of two black doves which had flown away from Thebes, one
towards the Oasis of Ammon, the other in the direction of Dodona; the
latter had alighted on an old beech tree, and in a human voice had
requested that a temple consecrated to Zeus should be founded on the
spot.*

* This indicates a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian
dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and
Nephthys, considered as _Zarait_, that is to say, as two
birds of a different species, according to the different
traditions either vultures, rooks, or doves.

Herodotus is quite overcome with joy at the thought that Greek
divination could thus be directly traced to that of Egypt, for like most
of his contemporaries, he felt that the Hellenic cult was ennobled by
the fact of its being derived from the Egyptian. The traveller on the
Nile had to turn homewards on reaching Elephantine, as that was the
station of the last Persian garrison. Nubia lay immediately beyond the
cataract, and the Ethiopians at times crossed the frontier