And They Told Me That Because Of The Going Down
Of Rhampsinitos The Egyptians After He Came Back Celebrated A
Feast,
which I know of my own knowledge also that they still observe even to
my time; but whether it
Is for this cause that they keep the feast or
for some other, I am not able to say. However, the priests weave a
robe completely on the very day of the feast, and forthwith they bind
up the eyes of one of them with a fillet, and having led him with the
robe to the way by which one goes to the temple of Demeter, they
depart back again themselves. This priest, they say, with his eyes
bound up is led by two wolves to the temple of Demeter, which is
distant from the city twenty furlongs, and then afterwards the wolves
lead him back again from the temple to the same spot. Now as to the
tales told by the Egyptians, any man may accept them to whom such
things appear credible; as for me, it is to be understood throughout
the whole of the history that I write by hearsay that which is
reported by the people in each place. The Egyptians say that Demeter
and Dionysos are rulers of the world below; and the Egyptians are also
the first who reported the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal,
and that when the body dies, the soul enters into another creature
which chances then to be coming to the birth, and when it has gone the
round of all the creatures of land and sea and of the air, it enters
again into a human body as it comes to the birth; and that it makes
this round in a period of three thousand years. This doctrine certain
Hellenes adopted, some earlier and some later, as if it were of their
own invention, and of these men I know the names but I abstain from
recording them.
Down to the time when Rhampsinitos was king, they told me there was in
Egypt nothing but orderly rule, and Egypt prospered greatly; but after
him Cheops became king over them and brought them to every kind of
evil: for he shut up all the temples, and having first kept them from
sacrifices there, he then bade all the Egyptians work for him. So some
were appointed to draw stones from the stone-quarries in the Arabian
mountains to the Nile, and others he ordered to receive the stones
after they had been carried over the river in boats, and to draw them
to those which are called the Libyan mountains; and they worked by a
hundred thousand men at a time, for each three months continually. Of
this oppression there passed ten years while the causeway was made by
which they drew the stones, which causeway they built, and it is a
work not much less, as it appears to me, than the pyramid; for the
length of it is five furlongs and the breadth ten fathoms and the
height, where it is highest, eight fathoms, and it is made of stone
smoothed and with figures carved upon it.
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