It is acknowledged that Herodotus foregrounds methodological concerns in book two of his Histories, but I challenge the notion that his frequent claims to have heard a thing.from Egyptian priests are mere source citations. I argue that Herodotus emphasizes how he listened to the Egyptians in order to differentiate his method of inquiry from the…
Elysion and Egypt
The purpose of this paper is to present a novel synthesis of Archaic Greek cosmography and to highlight the role of the Near East—and especially Egypt—in the formation of Greek imagination about the beyond. The time span under examination is the era between the eighth and seventh centuries bce, the so- called Orientalizing period. It will be…