It was in the island of Prosôpitis 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 Menûf, 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’-unîyeh. 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 space of a year and a half. Herodotos indeed asserts that the island of Prosôpitis was nine skhœnœ, or about sixty miles in circumference, 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 Semennûd or Sebennytos, on the railway line from Tanta to Mansûrah. 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 Mnêvis, in the environs of Heliopolis. This latter Herodotos would have seen when he paid his visit to the city of the Sun-god, and this too was near Memphis, where the Karians lived.