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.
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