Note 583 — Chapter XX · EGYPTIANS.

Compare Herodot. ii, 30-32; iii, 19-25; Strabo, xvi, p. 818. Herodotus gives the description of their armor and appearance as part of the army of Xerxês (vii, 69); they painted their bodies: compare Plin. H. N. xxxiii, 36. How little Ethiopia was visited in his time, may be gathered from the tenor of his statements: according to Diodorus (i, 37), no Greeks visited it earlier than the expedition of Ptolemy Philadelphus,—οὕτως ἄξενα ἦν τὰ περὶ τοὺς τόπους τούτους, καὶ παντελῶς ἐπικίνδυνα. Diodorus, however, is incorrect in saying that no Greek had ever gone as far southward as the frontier of Egypt: Herodotus certainly visited Elephantinê, probably other Greeks also.

The statements respecting the theocratical state of Meroê and its superior civilization come from Diodorus (iii, 2, 5, 7), Strabo (xvii, p. 822), and Pliny (H. N. vi, 29-33), much later than Herodotus. Diodorus seems to have had no older informants before him, about Ethiopia, than Agatharchidês and Artemidôrus, both in the second century B. C. (Diod. iii, 10.)