Herodotos must have reached Egypt in the summer. When he arrived, the whole of the Delta was under water. He describes with the vividness of an eye-witness how its towns appeared above the surface of the water, like the islands in the Ægean, and how the traveller could sail, not along the river, but across the plain. At the time of the inundation, he says, all Egypt “becomes a sea, above which the villages alone show themselves.” The voyage from Naukratis to Memphis was direct and rapid, and the tourists in making it passed by the pyramids instead of the apex of the Delta.
In northern Egypt the rise of the Nile begins to be perceptible during the first few days of July. Criers go about the streets of Cairo announcing each day how high it has risen, and in the first or second week of August the ceremony of cutting the Khalîg or Canal of Cairo, and therewith declaring that the Nile was once more flooding its banks, used to be observed with great rejoicings. It is, in fact, in August that the land is first covered with the flood. For another month the height of the water continues to increase, and then for a short while to remain stationary. But towards the end of October, when the canals of Upper Egypt are emptied, there is again another rise, soon followed by a rapid fall. If the Delta was like a sea when Herodotos saw it, he must have been there between the beginning of July and the end of October.
These are the limits of the time which he could have spent in the country. That he did not remain till after the fall of the river and the drying up of the land is evident from incidental statements in his work. Thus when he visited the Fayyûm it was like the Delta, a sea of waters, and the pyramids of Biahmu, which Professor Petrie’s excavations have shown to have always stood on dry land, as they still do to-day, were seen by him in the middle of a vast lake. Nowhere, indeed, is there any hint of his having seen the country in its normal condition. Even his reference to Kerkosôros, at the apex of the Delta, which every traveller to Memphis had to pass except at the period of high Nile, is derived from “the Ionian” writers of a previous generation, not from his own experience. Neither in going nor in returning was his boat obliged to pass that way. We need not be surprised, therefore, at finding that the festivals he witnessed in the Egyptian towns were those which took place in the summer.