An Account of Egypt

The second book of the Histories, in which Herodotus stops narrating the Persian wars to describe Egypt, where he had travelled. He gives the Nile and his theories about its flood, the crocodile and the hippopotamus, the phoenix as it was described to him, mummification priced in three grades, the gods and their identification with Greek ones, the priests' reckoning of dynasties back beyond any Greek memory, and the building of the pyramids — with the labour, the turnip and onion bill, and the stories the guides told him, which he sometimes repeats and sometimes declines to believe.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote in the fifth century BC and is the earliest Greek prose author whose work survives whole. Book II is where his method is most visible: he distinguishes what he saw, what he was told and what he thinks, and leaves the reader to sort them. This edition is G. C. Macaulay's English translation.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the translator's note and the complete book.