Finding Truths among the “Lies”: Fact-Checking Herodotus’s Egypt in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This article treats the reception history of Herodotus—reputed to be both “the father of history” and “the father of lies”—between about 1670 and 1850. It focuses attention on book 2 of The Histories, in which Herodotus offers an extensive, and ostensibly firsthand, account of the monuments, geography, customs, flora, and fauna of Egypt. Most arrestingly for modern European readers, book 2 also contains descriptions of Egyptian religious practices and a chronology of Egyptian kings. Crucially, however, much of what Herodotus reports on these two subjects he learned not directly, but by listening to accounts of men whom he labeled “Egyptian priests.” In the eighteenth century in particular, I argue, these “priests” and their indirect testimony began to pose a serious historiographical problem: had Herodotus, naively, trusted them too much? If so, was his credibility with respect to the other contents of the “oriental” prelude to The Histories (books 1–4) impugned? The essay shows that, while some skeptics, and especially philhellenes, favored relegating books 1–4 entirely to the status of myth, “orientalists,” and especially those eager to save the credibility of the Old Testament, defended Herodotus. Their faith in him, I conclude, kept alive belief in the possibility of reconstructing Near Eastern antiquity before the great age of decipherments and archaeological finds began.