Surprise has often been expressed that Herodotos should make no mention of the Sphinx, which to Arabs and modern Europeans alike has appeared one of most noteworthy monuments of Gizeh. But in sailing along the canal which led from Memphis to the pyramids he would have passed by it without notice. As his boat made its way to the rocky edge on which the huge sepulchres of Kheops and Khephren are built, it would have been concealed from his view; and buried as it was in sand his guides did not think it an object of such surpassing importance as to lead him to it over the burning sand. In the immediate neighbourhood of the great pyramid he was surrounded by monuments more interesting and more striking, which were quite enough to occupy his day and satisfy his curiosity.
South of the Fayyûm and the adjoining city of Herakleopolis, whose ruins are now known as Ahnas el-Medîneh, all that Herodotos has to tell us is derived from older authors. Now and then, it is true, the first person is used, and we think for a moment that he is describing his own adventures. But he is merely quoting from others, and there are no marks of quotation in the manuscript to show us that such is the case. His book is thus like that of another and later Egyptian traveller, Mr. J. A. St. John, whose _Egypt and Nubia_ was published in English only fifty years ago. He too embodies the narratives of his predecessors in the record of his own journey up the Nile without any notice or signs that he is doing so, and it is not until we suddenly light on the name of an earlier writer at the bottom of the page that we become aware of the fact. Herodotos has not given us even this help; and we need not wonder, therefore, that commentators who have never been in Egypt have been deceived by his method of work. But he has preserved fragments of older writers which would otherwise have been lost, and if he has mingled them with the stories he heard from the dragomen of Memphis and Sais, or the answers he received to his questions about Greek legends, we must not feel ungrateful.
Upper Egypt is mentioned only incidentally in his narrative, and, as might be expected in a writer who had to depend upon others for his information, what he tells us about it is very frequently incorrect. Thus he asserts that the hippopotamus was “sacred in the nome of Paprêmis, but nowhere else in Egypt,” although it was also worshipped in Thebes, and he fancies that all the cats in the country were embalmed and buried at Bubastis, all the hawks and mice at Buto, and all the ibises at Hermopolis or Damanhur. But this was because he had visited these places and had not travelled in the south. Had he done so, he would never have imagined that the body of every cat or hawk that died was carried to a distant place in the Delta. Indeed, in the hot weather of the summer months, anything of the kind would have been impossible. Cemeteries, however, of these sacred animals are found all up and down the Nile. The mummies of the sacred cats are to be met with in the cliffs of Gebel Abu Foda, at Thebes, and above all at Beni Hassan, where a little to the south of the Speos Artemidos such quantities of them were recently discovered as to suggest that a commercial profit might be made out of their bones. Tons of them were accordingly shipped to Liverpool, there to be converted into manure; but as it was found that the mummified bones refused to yield to the process, the exportation ceased. Mummies of the sacred hawks were disinterred in equal numbers when the ancient cemeteries of Ekhmîm were excavated a few years ago, and the construction of the canal on the eastern bank opposite Abutîg has lately brought to light another of their burial-places, thus fixing the site of Hierakon, “the city of the Hawk,” the capital of the twelfth nome.