The monuments even now contain evidence that, after the age of Hekatæos, Greek sightseers did not make their way into southern Egypt until the Macedonian conquest had made travel there easy and safe. At Abu-Simbel in Nubia and Abydos in Upper Egypt are the records of the Greek mercenaries of Psammetikhos and their Greek and Karian contemporaries who visited the oracle of Abydos. But then comes a long blank in the history of Greek writing in Egypt. With the foundation of Alexander’s empire a new epoch in it begins. From that time forward the walls of the tombs and temples were covered with the scrawls of innumerable Greek visitors. At Thebes the royal tombs were especial objects of attention, and ciceroni led the inquisitive stranger round them just as they do to-day. But among all the mass of Greek names that have been collected from the monuments of Upper Egypt we find neither that of Herodotos nor of any other of his countrymen of the same age. In fact, it was not a time for sightseeing in the southern valley of the Nile. The population were in only half-repressed rebellion against their Persian rulers, and the whole country swarmed with bandits. Persian authority was necessarily weaker than in the north, and the people were more combative and had near allies in the desert, the Bedouin and the Ethiopians. A voyage up the river was even more dangerous than in the anarchical days of the last century: pirates abounded, and out of reach of the Persian garrison at Memphis the traveller carried his life in his hand. As in the time of Norden no Egyptian bey could or would allow the traveller in Nubia to go south of Dirr, so in the time of Herodotos the southern limit of the foreigner’s travels was the Fayyûm. The “Egypt into which Greeks sail” was, as he himself declares, the Egypt which lay north of the Theban nome and Lake Mœris. Even a visit to the Fayyûm was doubtless a bold and unusual undertaking, and on this account Herodotos describes what he saw there at more than ordinary length, and extols the wonders of the district at the expense of the better-known monuments of Memphis and the Delta. But the Oasis had suffered much from the civil troubles which had afflicted Egypt. The dykes which kept out the inundation had been neglected, and the fertile nome was transformed into a stagnant lake. Herodotos saw it as the French _savans_ saw it at the beginning of the present century; the embankments were broken, and fields and roads were alike submerged.