fixing the site of Hierakon, “the city of the Hawk,” the capital of the twelfth nome. In his geography of the river above the Fayyûm Herodotos was similarly misinformed. Thus, he avers that “the country above the Fayyûm for the distance of a three days’ voyage resembles the country below it.” A three days’ voyage would mean about eighty miles, since he reckons it a voyage of seven days from the sea to the Fayyûm, a distance of about 190 miles. Dahabîyeh travellers will willingly assent to the calculation. With a fair wind, a day’s voyage is about thirty miles, more or less, so that 190 miles could be easily traversed in seven days. Now eighty miles would bring the visitor from the Fayyûm to Qolosaneh and the Gebel et-Têr. For many miles before reaching the Gebel the banks of the Nile wear a very different aspect from that which they present lower down. In place of a dull monotony of sand-banks and level plains, there are picturesque lines of cliff, amphitheatres of desert and rugged headlands. It is only as far as Feshn, twenty miles to the south of Herakleopolis, that the description of Herodotos is correct. It is, in fact, merely based on what he could see from the southernmost point to which he attained. The view which he had from thence over the flat desert reaches of Libya led him to make another statement equally wide of the truth. It is that for four days after leaving Heliopolis the valley of the Nile is narrow, but that then it once more becomes broad. But such was the case only where the Fayyûm and the province of Beni-Suef spread towards the west, and there too only when they are covered with the waters of the inundation. Elsewhere the cultivated valley is for the most part narrower even than in the neighbourhood of Memphis, where it seemed to the Greek traveller to be so confined; here and there, indeed, as at Abydos and Thebes, it broadens out for a space, but otherwise the wilderness encroaches upon it ever more and more until at Silsilis the barren rocks obliterate it altogether. Herodotos knows nothing of the great monuments of Thebes, and the Pharaohs accordingly whose names he records have no connection with the ancient capital of the empire. They belong to Memphis, to the Fayyûm, and to the Delta—none of them to Thebes. Even Sesostris, in whom some of the features of Ramses II. may be detected, reigns in the north rather than in the south. Of all the multitudinous monuments that he has left, two only are known to the Greek traveller, and these are the two statues of himself which stood before the temple of Ptah in Memphis.