Now For Some Of The Egyptians The
Crocodiles Are Sacred Animals, And For Others Not So, But They Treat
Them On The Contrary As Enemies:
Those however who dwell about Thebes
and about the lake of Moiris hold them to be most sacred, and
Each of
these two peoples keeps one crocodile selected from the whole number,
which has been trained to tameness, and they put hanging ornaments of
molten stone and of gold into the ears of these and anklets round the
front feet, and they give them food appointed and victims of
sacrifices and treat them as well as possible while they live, and
after they are dead they bury them in sacred tombs, embalming them:
but those who dwell about the city of Elephantine even eat them, not
holding them to be sacred. They are called not crocodiles but
/champsai/, and the Ionians gave them the name of crocodile, comparing
their form to that of the crocodiles (lizards) which appear in their
country in the stone walls. There are many ways in use of catching
them and of various kinds: I shall describe that which to me seems the
most worthy of being told. A man puts the back of a pig upon a hook as
bait, and lets it go into the middle of the river, while he himself
upon the bank of the river has a young live pig, which he beats; and
the crocodile hearing its cries makes for the direction of the sound,
and when he finds the pig's back he swallows it down: then they pull,
and when he is drawn out to land, first of all the hunter forthwith
plasters up his eyes with mud, and having done so he very easily gets
the mastery of him, but if he does not do so he has much trouble.
The river-horse is sacred in the district of Papremis, but for the
other Egyptians he is not sacred; and this is the appearance which he
presents: he is four-footed, cloven-hoofed like an ox, flat-nosed,
with a mane like a horse and showing teeth like tusks, with a tail and
voice like a horse and in size as large as the largest ox; and his
hide is so exceedingly thick that when it has been dried shafts of
javelins are made of it. There are moreover otters in the river, which
they consider to be sacred: and of fish also they esteem that which is
called the /lepidotos/ to be sacred, and also the eel; and these they
say are sacred to the Nile: and of birds the fox-goose.
There is also another sacred bird called the phoenix which I did not
myself see except in painting, for in truth he comes to them very
rarely, at intervals, as the people of Heliopolis say, of five hundred
years; and these say that he comes regularly when his father dies; and
if he be like the painting he is of this size and nature, that is to
say, some of his feathers are of gold colour and others red, and in
outline and size he is as nearly as possible like an eagle. This bird
they say (but I cannot believe the story) contrives as follows: -
setting forth from Arabia he conveys his father, they say, to the
temple of the Sun (Helios) plastered up in myrrh, and buries him in
the temple of the Sun; and he conveys him thus: - he forms first an egg
of myrrh as large as he is able to carry, and then he makes trial of
carrying it, and when he has made trial sufficiently, then he hollows
out the egg and places his father within it and plasters over with
other myrrh that part of the egg where he hollowed it out to put his
father in, and when his father is laid in it, it proves (they say) to
be of the same weight as it was; and after he has plastered it up, he
conveys the whole to Egypt to the temple of the Sun. Thus they say
that this bird does.
There are also about Thebes sacred serpents, not at all harmful to
men, which are small in size and have two horns growing from the top
of the head: these they bury when they die in the temple of Zeus, for
to this god they say that they are sacred. There is a region moreover
in Arabia, situated nearly over against the city of Buto, to which
place I came to inquire about the winged serpents: and when I came
thither I saw bones of serpents and spines in quantity so great that
it is impossible to make report of the number, and there were heaps of
spines, some heaps large and others less large and others smaller
still than these, and these heaps were many in number. This region in
which the spines are scattered upon the ground is of the nature of an
entrance from a narrow mountain pass to a great plain, which plain
adjoins the plain in Egypt; and the story goes that at the beginning
of spring winged serpents from Arabia fly towards Egypt, and the birds
called ibises meet them at the entrance to this country and do not
suffer the serpents to go by but kill them. On account of this deed it
is (say the Arabians) that the ibis has come to be greatly honoured by
the Egyptians, and the Egyptians also agree that it is for this reason
that they honour these birds. The outward form of the ibis is this: -
it is a deep black all over, and has legs like those of a crane and a
very curved beak, and in size it is about equal to a rail: this is the
appearance of the black kind which fight with the serpents, but of
those which most crowd round men's feet (for there are two several
kinds of ibises) the head is bare and also the whole of the throat,
and it is white in feathering except the head and neck and the
extremities of the wings and the rump (in all these parts of which I
have spoken it is a deep black), while in legs and in the form of the
head it resembles the other.
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