ИСТИНА

The paper concentrates on one of the alleged anachronisms in the sequence of events in the history of Egypt according to Herodotus' Book II: the reigns of Cheops, Chephren and Micerinus (chaps. 124–9; i.e. Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure of Dynasty IV, Old Kingdom, c. 25th century B.C.) are placed after the reign of Rhampsinitus (chaps. 121–2), while Rhampsinitus is said to follow Proteus, the contemporary of the Trojan War (chaps. 112–20), who in turn is the second successor of Sesostris (chaps. 102–10), a complex image revealing in later tradition certain reminiscences of Ramesses II (13th century). As the name of Rhampsinitus is definitely a derivative of “Ramesses”, and its bearer, according to Herodotus, lived after the Trojan War (which is contemporary, in the history of Egypt, to the invasion of the Sea Peoples) this Rhampsinitus must correspond to the historical Ramesses III (early 12th century). Thus the reigns of the pyramid builders appear to be placed by Herodotus after a time-span that corresponded to the mid-13th – early 12th centuries, contrary to the historical reality. An important feature of Herodotus' Book II is that the events in it are grouped in blocks corresponding approximately to the real epochs of the Egyptian history, though sometimes misplaced [Gozzoli 2006: 172–3]; thus the information on their sequence is certainly derived from Egyptian informants. An explanation of the anachronism that I have indicated can be given as follows. The epoch of the pyramid builders is described by Herodotus as a terrible crisis, shortly after which came the decline of the Egyptian state; and this is quite in accordance with the authentic Egyptian vision of Dynasty IV as a royal house which somehow provoked the disaster of the First Intermediate Period (late 23rd – 21st centuries). Symptomatically, the contrasted images of the beneficent Rhampsinitus and the brutal Cheops are similar to what are much the same ideas of Khufu and his immediate predecessor Snofru in the Egyptian tradition. However, in Herodotus' narration the disaster preceded by the pyramid building is the seizure of Egypt by the Ethiopians (chaps. 137–40), i.e. the historical domination of Nubia in Egypt in the late 8th – 7th centuries; it is followed by the rule of the Saite Dynasty XXVI, i.e. by the epoch immediately antecedent to Persian rule and to the time of Herodotus himself. Probably, Herodotus' informants retained the notion that the pyramid building preceded a huge disaster; however, the correct reminiscences of the First Intermediate Period as well as of the subsequent epochs of the second millennium somehow escaped them (see, e.g., the contaminated image of Sesostris combining the reminiscences of both the Middle and the New Kingdom); and they merely “inserted” this crisis before the Nubian time as before the disastrous epoch of their history of which only they were well aware, and which preceded their own “contemporaneity”.