From Heliopolis Herodotos continued his voyage down the Pelusiac arm of the Nile to Bubastis, thus following nearly the same line of travel as the modern tourist who goes by train from Cairo to Zagazig. The rubbish heaps of Tel Basta, just beyond the station of Zagazig, mark the site of Bubastis, called Pi-beseth in the Old Testament (Ezek. x.x.x. 17), Pi-Bast, "the Temple of Bast," by the Egyptians. The cat-headed G.o.ddess Bast presided over the fortunes of the nome and city, where she was identified with Sekhet, the lion-headed G.o.ddess of Memphis. But the cat and the lion never lay down in peace together. As a hieroglyphic text at Philae puts it, Sekhet was cruel and Bast was kindly.
The exclusive worship of Bast at Bubastis, however, dated from the time of Osorkon II. of the twenty-second dynasty, as Dr. Naville"s excavations have made plain. Before that period other deities, more especially Buto and Amon-Ra, reigned there. Bast, in fact, was of foreign origin. She was the feminine form of Bes, the warrior G.o.d who came from the coasts of Arabia, and her a.s.sociation with the cat perhaps originated far away in the south.
The description given by Herodotos of Bubastis and its festival is clearly that of an eye-witness. He tells us how the temple stands in the middle of the town surrounded by a ca.n.a.l which is shaded with trees, and how the visitor looks down upon it from the streets of the city, which had grown in height while the level of the temple had remained unaltered. He tells us further how a broad street runs from it to the market-place, and thence to a chapel dedicated to Hermes, and how at the great annual festival crowds of men and women flocked to it in boats, piping and singing, clapping the hands and dancing, offering sacrifices when they arrived at the shrine, and drinking wine to excess. A similar sight can be seen even now in the month of August at Tantah, where the religious fair is thronged by men and women indulging in all the amus.e.m.e.nts recounted by the old Greek traveller, sometimes beyond the verge of decency. Wine alone is absent from the modern feast, its place being taken by _hashish_ and _raki_.
As the festival was held in honour of Bast, it was probably an annual commemoration of the great "Shed-festival" of thirty years celebrated by Osorkon II. in his twenty-second year, and depicted on the walls of the hall which Dr. Naville has discovered. The "Shed-festival" took place during the month of August-in the time of the sixth dynasty on the 27th of Epiphi. It was probably, therefore, at the end of August or the beginning of September that Herodotos found himself in the city of Bast.
The description Herodotos gives of the position of the temple is still true to-day. The temple, which he p.r.o.nounced to be the prettiest in Egypt, is now in ruins, like the houses and streets that encircled it. But the visitor to Tel-Bast still looks down upon its site from the rubbish-mounds of the ruined habitations, and can still trace the beds of the ca.n.a.ls which were carried round it. Even the street which led to the market-place is still visible, and Dr. Naville has found the remains of the little temple which Herodotos supposed to be that of Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth.
In this, however, he was wrong. Like the larger edifice, it was dedicated to Bast, and seems to have been used as a treasury. It was, therefore, under the protection of Thoth, whose figure decorated its walls, and Dr.
Naville is doubtless right in believing that this has led to the mistake of Herodotos or his guides. Osorkon I. consecrated in it large quant.i.ties of precious things, including about 130,300 in gold and 13,000 in silver-an evident proof that the internal condition of his kingdom was flourishing.
Dr. Naville"s excavations were undertaken for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1887-89, and were chiefly made among the broken columns and dislocated stones of the larger temple. They have given us the outlines of its history. Like most of the great temples of Egypt, its foundation went back to the very beginning of Egyptian civilisation. The Pharaohs of the Old Empire repaired or enlarged it, and the names of Kheops and Khephren, as well as of Pepi I., have been found upon its blocks. The kings of the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties embellished it, and even the Hyksos princes did the same. In the days when they had adopted the culture and customs of Egypt and were holding royal state at Zoan, two of them at least restored and beautified the temple of Bubastis and called themselves the sons of Ra. One of them, Apophis, may have been the Apophis whose demand that the va.s.sal-king of Thebes should worship Sutekh instead of Amon brought about the war of independence; the other, Khian User-n-Set-Ra, the Iannas of Manetho, has engraved his name on a colossal lion which was carried to Babylon by some Chaldaean conqueror.
The monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty continued the pious work of the Hyksos whom they had expelled. But the civil disturbances which attended the fall of the dynasty caused injury to the temple, and we find Seti I.
and Ramses II. once more restoring it. The kings of the twentieth dynasty have also left memorials in it, but it was under the twenty-second dynasty-the successors of Shishak-that Bubastis reached the highest point of its prosperity. The princes who followed Shishak made the city their capital and its temple their royal chapel. The great festival hall was built by Osorkon II. between the entrance hall and the main court, and the worship of Bast was exclusively installed in it. Temple and city alike underwent but little change down to the days of Herodotos. It was after his visit that the last addition was made to the sacred buildings. With the recovery of Egyptian independence after the successful revolt from Persia came a new era of architectural activity, and Nektanebo I., the first king of the thirtieth dynasty, erected a great hall in the rear of the shrine. After this the history of the temple fades out of view.
Herodotos was told that the height of the mound on which the city of Bubastis stood was an indication of the evil deeds of its inhabitants.
Sabako, the Ethiopian conqueror, it was said, had caused the sites of the Egyptian cities to be raised by convict labour, just as they had been previously raised by those who cut the ca.n.a.ls under Sesostris. But the whole story was an invention of the dragomen. The disintegration of the crude brick of which the houses of Egypt are built makes them quickly decay and give place to other buildings, which are erected on the mound they have formed. As the city grows in age, so does the _tel_ or mound whereon it stands grow in height, and had Herodotos travelled in Upper Egypt he would have seen the process going on under his eyes. In the Delta, moreover, there was a special cause for the great height of the city-mounds. The water of the inundation percolated through the ground, and in order that the lower floor of a house should be dry, it was necessary to build it on a series of vaults or cellars. A few years ago these vaults were very visible in some of the old houses of Tel-Bast. They had no outlet, either by door or window, and were consequently never employed as store-rooms. Their sole use was to keep the rest of the house dry.
The cemetery of the sacred cats was on the western side of the town. But the cats do not appear to have been embalmed, as elsewhere in Egypt; they were either buried or burned. Among the bones which have been sent to England naturalists have found none of our modern domestic cat. Several, however, of the bronze cats of the Ptolemaic age which have been discovered with the bones unmistakably represent the domestic animal.
Generally they have the small head of the modern Egyptian puss.
"A little below Bubastis" Herodotos pa.s.sed the deserted "camp" and fortress of the Ionian and Karian mercenaries of Psammetikhos, and saw the slips for their vessels and the ruins of their houses still standing on the sh.o.r.e. Amasis had transferred them to Memphis, in the belief that it was rather from his Egyptian subjects that he needed protection than from his neighbours in Asia. The site of the camp was discovered and partially excavated by Professor Petrie for the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1886, and one of the results of his discoveries was to show that it was also the site of the frontier fortress called by the Greeks Daphnae. What its Egyptian name was we do not know with certainty, though it is probable that Professor Petrie is right in holding it to be the Tahpanhes of the prophet Jeremiah. It is now known as Tel ed-Deffeneh.
The drying up of the Pelusiac arm of the Nile has brought the desolation of the desert to Tel ed-Deffeneh. The ca.n.a.l which has replaced it is brackish; Lake Menzaleh, which bounds the Tel to the east, is more brackish still. The land is impregnated with salt, and covered in places with drifts of sand. There is no cultivated soil nearer than Salahiyeh, twelve miles away; no water-way less distant than Kantara on the Suez Ca.n.a.l.
The greater part of the ancient site lies between Lake Menzaleh on the east and a swamp out of which the ca.n.a.l flows on the west, and it covers a large acreage of ground. Northward are the ca.n.a.l, a marsh, and mounds of sand, and beyond the ca.n.a.l lies the cemetery of the ancient fortress, as well as a suburb which was probably the Karian quarter. In the centre of the site rises the Tel proper, a great mound of disintegrated brickwork called "the palace of the Jew"s daughter." Excavation soon made it clear that it represented the fortress of Daphnae, and that it was built by Psammetikhos when he settled his Greek garrison there. For a frontier fortress no place could have been better chosen. It guarded the eastern branch of the Nile, while from its summit we look across the desert, on one side along the high-road which once led to Syria, and on the other as far as the mounds of Tanis. The fort itself has crumbled into dust, but the vaulted chambers on which it was erected still exist, as well as the "pavement" at its entrance.
The pottery found at Tel ed-Deffeneh is early Greek, but of a different type from that of Naukratis. Like the latter, it would seem to have been manufactured on the spot and exported from thence to all parts of the Greek world. Jewellery, too, appears to have been made there by the Greek or Karian artisans who lived under the protection of their military kinsmen. But the manufacture of both pottery and jewellery came to a sudden end. When Amasis removed the mercenaries to Memphis in the middle of the sixth century before Christ the civilian population departed with them. Between that date and a new and unimportant settlement in the Ptolemaic period the site seems to have been deserted. When Herodotos pa.s.sed it by, it had no inhabitants.
From Daphnae to Pelusium the voyage was short. Pelusium, once the key of Egypt, has shared the fate of Daphnae. The channel of the river that flowed by it has become a dreary reach of black salt mud, and the fields which once supplied the city with food are wastes of sterile soil or mountains of yellow sand. Not even a solitary Bedouin disturbs the solitude of the spot at most seasons of the year. All that reminds the traveller of human life as he encamps on the edge of the sand-dunes is the electric light which flashes through the night from Port Said far away on the horizon.
In the midst of the desolate waste of poisonous mud rise the two large mounds which alone are left of Pelusium. On the larger of these, to the westward, lie the granite columns and other relics of the Roman temple, beneath which, and below the present level of the water, are the ruins of the temple of the Pharaonic age. The ground is strewn with broken gla.s.s and pottery, some Roman, some Saracenic.
The Egyptian name of Pelusium is still unknown, and before we can discover it excavations upon its site will be necessary. Ezekiel calls it Sin (x.x.x.
15, 16)-at least, if the commentators are to be trusted-and when the Greeks sought an etymology for the name they gave it in their own word for "mud." But it was a famous spot in the records of Egyptian history.
Avaris, the Hyksos stronghold, must have been in its neighbourhood, and it was outside its walls that the Persian conquest of Egypt was decided. The battle-field where the army of Kambyses, led by the Greek deserter Phanes, overthrew the Greek mercenaries of the Pharaoh, was near enough for Herodotos to walk over it and compare the skulls of the Egyptian and Persian combatants, as he had already done at Papremis. Here, too, he was shown the spot where the Greek and Karian soldiers of Psammetikhos III.
had slaughtered the sons of Phanes over a huge bowl in the sight of their father, and after mixing the blood of the boys with wine and water, had savagely drunk it and then rushed to the battle.
Not far from Pelusium another tragedy took place four centuries after Herodotos had been there. The fugitive Pompey was welcomed to the sh.o.r.e by Septimius, the general of the Roman forces in Egypt, and Akhillas, the commander of the Egyptian army, and murdered by them as he touched the land. Akhillas then hastened to Alexandria, to besiege Caesar in the royal palace, and the burning of the great library was the atonement for Pompey"s death.
Down even to the middle ages Pelusium was still the seaport of the eastern Delta. It held the place now occupied by Port Said. It was from its quays that the vessels started for the Syrian coast. In one that was bound for Tyre, Herodotos took his pa.s.sage and ended his Egyptian tour.
But he had visited certain cities in the Delta into which we have been unable to follow him, owing to the uncertainty that still hangs over their exact position. Besides the places already described, we know that he saw Buto, which is coupled with Khemmis, as well as Papremis and Prosopitis, and probably also Busiris.
Khemmis-which must be carefully distinguished from the other Khemmis, the modern Ekhmim-was, he tells us, a floating island "in a deep broad lake by the side of the temple at Buto," where Leto, the Egyptian Uaz, was worshipped. Brugsch identifies this island of Khemmis with the town and marshes of Kheb, where the young Horus was hidden by his mother Isis out of the reach of Set. Kheb was in the nome called that of Menelaos by the Greeks, the capital of which seems to have been Pa-Uaz, "the temple of Uaz," transformed by Greek tongues into Buto, and of which another city was Kanopos. Buto, or at least the twin-city where the great temple of the G.o.ddess stood, is probably now represented by Tel Fera"in, not far to the west of Fuah, at the extremity of the Mahmudiyeh ca.n.a.l. It was thus within easy distance of Kanopos on the one side and of Sais on the other, and Herodotos might have visited it from either one of them.
But after all it is not certain that he did so. Buto is mentioned again by him in a pa.s.sage which shows that it could not have been Pa-Uaz, but must have rather lain on the eastern side of the Delta, in the land of Goshen, where the desert adjoined the "Arabian nome." It is where he tells us about "the winged serpents" which fly in the spring-time from Arabia to Egypt, on the confines of which they are met and slain by the sacred ibises. Anxious to learn something about them, he visited the spot where the yearly encounter took place, and there saw the ground strewn with the bones and spines of the slaughtered snakes. This spot, he further informs us, is in the Arabian desert, where it borders on "the Egyptian plain,"
"hard by the city of Buto."
Thanks to the excavations made by Mr. Griffith for the Egypt Exploration Fund at Tel en-Nebesheh, near Salahiyeh, we now know where this eastern city of Buto stood. Its Egyptian name was Am, and it was the capital of the nineteenth nome of Am-pehu, but it was consecrated to the worship of the G.o.ddess Uaz, who was symbolised by a winged snake. The great temple of the G.o.ddess was built on the western side of the town, and the Pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty, as well as Ramses II. and his successors, and the Saites of the twenty-sixth dynasty, had all helped to endow and embellish it. When the Greek garrison was established in the neighbourhood at Daphnae, a colony of Cyprian potters settled at Am. But in the age of the Ptolemies it fell into decay, and by the beginning of the Roman era its magnificence belonged to the past.
Just beyond the precincts of the town was the Arabian desert, the realm of Set. The legend of Isis and Horus was accordingly transferred to it, and its patron G.o.ddess became Uaz of Buto, who, under the form of Isis, concealed Horus in its marshes. Was it here, therefore, in the Pa-Uaz of Am, that the Buto of Herodotos has to be looked for, rather than in the Menelaite nome?
We know that he must have pa.s.sed the city of Am on his way from Bubastis to Daphnae, and his expedition to the desert in search of the winged serpents shows that he stopped there. On the other hand, his account of the floating island of Khemmis was derived from his predecessor Hekataeos, and when he states that the Buto with which it was connected was built on the Sebennytic branch of the Nile, "as one sails up it from the sea," it would seem certain that his account of this Buto was also quoted from the older writer. And yet it is difficult to believe that his description of the monolithic shrine which stood there is not given at first-hand.
Perhaps the best explanation would be that Herodotos really made an excursion to the city, but has so skilfully mingled what he himself saw there with the description of Hekataeos as to make it impossible to separate the two.
The site of Papremis is absolutely unknown, and we have no clue even to its relative position. But Prosopitis may be the fourth nome, Sapi-ris or "Sapi of the south." In Byzantine times its capital bore the name of Nikiu, which Champollion long ago identified with the Coptic Pshati and the modern Abshadi, not far from Menuf. Menuf stands in a straight line due westward of Benha, and would have lain directly in the path of the traveller on his way from Naukratis to Memphis.
It was in the island of Prosopitis that the Athenian fleet was blockaded by the Persians under Megabazus, and captured only when the river was turned into another channel, after the blockade had lasted for a year and a half. Immediately westward of Menuf, in fact, an island is formed by the Rosetta and Damietta branches of the Nile which unite at the southern end of it, and are joined together towards the north by the Bahr el-Fara"-uniyeh. But the island is twenty-seven miles long by fifteen wide, and it is difficult to understand how this could have been blockaded by the Persian army, much less defended by the crews of seventy vessels, for the s.p.a.ce of a year and a half. Herodotos indeed a.s.serts that the island of Prosopitis was nine skhn, or about sixty miles in circ.u.mference, and that it contained many cities; but this only makes the difficulty the greater.
Lastly, we come to Busiris, which is described by the Greek traveller as "in the centre of the Delta." This description exactly suits the position of Pa-Usar or Busiris, "the temple of Osiris, the lord of Mendes," and the capital of the Busirite nome. Its modern representative is Abusir, a little to the south of s.e.m.e.nnud or Sebennytos, on the railway line from Tanta to Mansurah. If Herodotos really visited this place, he must have done so from Sais, to the west of which it lies in a pretty direct line.
But the distance was considerable, and there is nothing in the language he uses in regard to it which obliges us to believe that he was really there.
His description of the festival held there in honour of Isis is not that of an eye-witness; indeed, the remark he adds to it that "all the Karians who live in Egypt slash themselves on the forehead with swords" in their religious exercises goes to show that it could not have been so. All he knows about the festival is that, after sacrificing, men and women strike themselves in honour of Osiris. The Karians, however, who cut their heads like the Persian devotees of Huseyn in modern Cairo, were not Egyptians, and therefore would not have been allowed to join in the mysteries of the worship of Osiris; moreover, they did not live in Busiris, but in the Karian quarter of Memphis. What Herodotos tells us about them plainly comes from his Karian dragoman, and refers to some native Karian festival.
There was more than one Pa-Usar or Temple of Osiris in Lower Egypt. Next to that in the Busirite nome, the most famous was that of the Ur-Mer or the bull Mnevis, in the environs of Heliopolis. This latter Herodotos would have seen when he paid his visit to the city of the Sun-G.o.d, and this too was near Memphis, where the Karians lived.
There was yet another Busiris a little to the north of Memphis itself.
According to Pliny, its inhabitants made their living by climbing the pyramids for the amus.e.m.e.nt of strangers, like the Bedouin of Gizeh to-day.
Its name has been preserved in the village and pyramids of Abusir. But neither the Busiris of Memphis nor the Busiris of Heliopolis was "in the centre of the Delta," and it would seem that in this instance also Herodotos is either quoting from other travellers or is mixing their experiences with his own. With the Busiris of Memphis and the Busiris of Heliopolis he was doubtless acquainted: with the Busiris of the middle Delta we must conclude he was not. Hence his scanty notice of the festival that was celebrated there; hence also his reference to the Karian settlers in Memphis and their religious ceremonies. We must remember that Herodotos was not the first Greek tourist in Egypt, and that he too had his _Murray_ and his _Baedeker_ like the tourist of to-day.
CHAPTER VIII. MEMPHIS AND THE FAYYuM.
We have followed Herodotos in his travels through the Delta, have seen him make his way from Kanopos and Naukratis to Memphis and back again to Pelusium, and it is now time to accompany him through Memphis itself and the Fayyum. There are no longer any uncertain sites to identify; from Memphis southward all is clear and determined.
To the visitor the interest of Memphis centred in its temple of Ptah. It was round the temple that the city had grown up, and as the city had been the capital of the older dynasties, so the temple had been their royal chapel. When the supremacy pa.s.sed from Memphis to Thebes, it pa.s.sed also from Ptah the G.o.d of Memphis to Amon the G.o.d of Thebes.
It is the great temple of Ptah, accordingly, about which Herodotos has most to tell us. Other localities in Memphis, such as the citadel and the palace, the Karian quarter, or "the Tyrian Camp" with its shrine of Ashtoreth, are noticed only incidentally. But the great temple and its monuments are described as fully as was possible for an "impure"
foreigner, who was not permitted to enter its inner courts and who was unacquainted with the Egyptian language.
The history of Egypt known to Herodotos before the age when Greek mercenaries and traders were settled in the country by Psammetikhos is almost wholly connected with the monuments of the temple which were shown to him. And a very curious history it is-a collection of folk-tales, partly Egyptian, but mainly Karian or Greek in origin, and not always of a seemly character, which the dragomen attached to the various objects the visitor saw. Even the royal names round which they revolved were sometimes indiscoverable in the authentic annals of Egypt. But the stories were all gravely noted down by the traveller, and though they have lost nothing in the telling, it is probable that they have not always been reported by him correctly.
In one respect, at all events, this mythical history of Egypt is the creation of Herodotos himself and not of his guides. This is the order in which he has arranged the kings. It is the order in which he visited the monuments to which the dragomen attached their names, and it thus throws a welcome light on the course of his movements. With this clue in our hands we can follow him from one part of the temple of Ptah to another, and can trace his footsteps as far as the Fayyum.
It is true he a.s.serts that his list of kings was given on the authority of "the Egyptians and the priests," and that it was they who reckoned three hundred and forty-one generations from Menes, the founder of the kingdom, to Sethos, the antagonist of Sennacherib, the number of kings and high-priests during the period being exactly equal to the number of generations. But it can easily be shown that the calculation was made by Herodotos himself, and that neither the "Egyptians," whose language he did not understand, nor the sacristans, whom he dignifies with the t.i.tle of priests, are in any way responsible for the absurd statement that a generation and a reign are equivalent terms. The number of kings whose names he heard from his dragoman is exactly eleven; in addition to these, he tells us, the names of three hundred and thirty kings were read to him from a papyrus roll by one of the temple scribes; so that the number three hundred and forty-one is obtained by adding the three hundred and thirty names to the eleven which were furnished him by his guides. Among the three hundred and thirty must have been included some of the latter, though the Greek traveller did not know it.
At Memphis Herodotos learned that Menes was the first king of united Egypt, though the further statements he records in regard to him are not easily reconcilable one with the other. On the one hand he was informed that in his time all Egypt was a marsh except the Thebaic nome-a piece of information which seemed to Herodotos consonant with fact-on the other hand, that the land on which Memphis was built was a sort of huge embankment reclaimed from the Nile by Menes, who forced the river to leave its old channel under the plateau of Gizeh and to run in its present bed.
Mariette believed that the d.y.k.e by means of which the first of the Pharaohs effected this change in the course of the river still exists near Kafr el-Ayyat, and it is geologically clear that the Nile once ran along the edge of the Libyan desert, and that the rock out of which the Sphinx was carved must have been one of those which jutted out into the stream.
But it was not on account of his engineering works that the name of Menes has been preserved in the histories of Herodotos. It was because he was the founder of the temple of Ptah and the city of Memphis. The temple which was the object of the tourist"s visit owed its origin to him, and the traveller"s sight-seeing naturally began with the mention of his name.
Before Herodotos could be shown round such parts of the sanctuary as were accessible to strangers, it was necessary that he should be introduced to the authorities and receive their permission to visit it. Accordingly he was ushered into what was perhaps the library of the temple, and there a scribe read to him out of a roll the names of the three hundred and thirty kings, beginning with Menes and ending with Mris. To three only does a story seem to have been attached, either by the scribe or by the interpreter, and only three names therefore did Herodotos enter in his note-book. The first of these was that of Menes, the second that of Nitokris, the third that of Mris. Nitokris was celebrated not only because she was the one native woman who had ruled the country, but also because she had treacherously avenged the death of her brother and then flung herself into the flames. Neit-aker, as she was called in Egyptian, was actually an historical personage; she was the last sovereign of the sixth dynasty, but was very far from being the only queen who had reigned over Egypt. As regards Mris the statements of Herodotos are only partially correct. He is said to have built the propylaea on the north side of the temple of Ptah, to have dug the great lake of the Fayyum, and to have erected the pyramids which Herodotos believed he had seen standing in the middle of it. Mris, however, was not the name of a king, but the Egyptian words Mi ur or "great lake"; the Fayyum was not created by the excavation of an artificial reservoir, but by banking out the water which had filled the oasis from geological times; and the monuments seen by Herodotos were not pyramids, but statues on pyramidal bases erected by Amon-em-hat III. of the twelfth dynasty in front of an ancient temple. Nor could any educated Egyptian have alleged that a king of the twelfth dynasty, who was not even the last monarch of that dynasty itself, closed the line of the Pharaohs. The whole account must rest on a combination of the Greek historian"s own erroneous conclusions with the misinterpreted statements of the Egyptian "priest."
Mris, in the topographical chronology of Herodotos, was followed by Sesostris, but this was because the tourist, after leaving the scribe"s chamber, first visited the northern side of the temple. Here stood the two colossal figures of Ramses II. in front of the entrance, which, after centuries of neglect and concealment, have again become objects of interest. The larger one, forty-two feet in length, was discovered in 1820 and presented by Mohammed Ali to the British Government, but, as might have been expected, was never claimed. For years it lay on its face in the mud and water, but in 1883 Major Bagnold turned it round and raised it, and finally placed it in the shed, where it is now safe from further injury. The son and daughter of the Pharaoh were originally represented standing beside him. Major Bagnold also brought to light the companion statue, of lesser height and of a different stone. This is in a better state of preservation, and has been set up on a hillock by the side of a stele which was discovered at the same time. Fragments of papyri inscribed with Greek and demotic have been found at the north-eastern foot of the hillock, and it may be that they mark the site of the chamber where Herodotos listened to the words of the roll.