Had Herodotos travelled in Egypt a year or two later, the ease and security with which he did so would be readily explained. But in this case we should be brought too near the time when his history was finished and he himself was a resident in Italy. We must therefore believe that he was there before the final blow had been struck at Persian supremacy in the Mediterranean, but when the Athenian invasion of Egypt was already a thing of the past, and the unarmed trader and tourist were once more able to move freely about.
For more than half a century Egypt had been closed to Greek curiosity. There had been an earlier period, when the Delta at least had been well-known to the Hellenic world. The Pharos of the future Alexandria is already mentioned by Homer (_Od._ iv. 355); it was there, “in front of Egypt,” that Menelaos moored his ships and forced “Egyptian Prôteus” to declare to him his homeward road. Even “Egyptian Thebes,” with its hundred temple-gates, is known both to the _Iliad_ (ix. 381) and to the _Odyssey_ (iv. 126), and the Pharaoh Polybos dwelt there when Alkandra, his wife, loaded Menelaos with gifts. Greek mercenaries enabled Psammetikhos to shake off the yoke of Assyria, and Greek traders made Naukratis and Daphnæ wealthy centres of commerce. Solon visited Egypt while Athens was putting into practice the laws he had promulgated, and there he heard from the priest of Sais that, by the side of the unnumbered centuries of Egyptian culture, the Greeks were but children and their wisdom but the growth of to-day. Before the Ionic revolt had broken out, while Ionia and Egypt were still sister provinces of the same Persian empire, Hekatæos of Miletus had travelled through the valley of the Nile, enjoying advantages for information which no Greek could possess again till Egypt had become a Macedonian conquest, and embodying his knowledge and experiences in a lengthy book.
But the Persian wars had put an end to all this peaceful intercourse between Greece and the old land of the Pharaohs, and the Karian dragomen who had made their living by acting as interpreters between the Greeks and the Egyptians were forced to turn to other work. At length, however, Egypt was once more open to visitors, and once more, therefore, visitors came from Greece. Anaxagoras, the philosopher and friend of Periklês, was among the first to arrive and to investigate the causes of the rise and fall of the Nile. Hellanikos the historian, too, the older contemporary of Herodotos, seems to have travelled in Egypt, though doubt has been cast on the authenticity of the works in which he is supposed to have recorded his experiences of Egyptian travel. At any rate, Herodotos found a public fresh and eager to hear what he had to tell them about the dwellers on the Nile.