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Bachofen, half a century ago, was the great champion of this view. He found a typical example of a matriarchal state among the ancient Lycians of Asia Minor with whom, Herodotus stated, the child takes the name of the mother, and follows her status, not that of the father. Such peoples, Bachofen believed, were gynæcocratic; power was in the hands of women.
In deciding upon the passages to be read, Herodotus selected such as would be most likely to excite the interest of his Grecian hearers, and many of them were glowing accounts of Grecian exploits in former wars which had been waged in the countries which he had visited.
To these rafts would naturally have succeeded boats of one kind or another. These would probably be of the kind described by Herodotus, and represented on one of the most ancient bas-reliefs round structures like the Welsh coracles, made of wickerwork and covered with skins, smeared over with a coating of bitumen. Boats of this construction were made of a considerable size.
Greek mythology had its source in the legends of a remote antiquity, probably among the Pelasgians, the early inhabitants of Greece, which they brought with them in their migration from their original settlement, or perhaps from Egypt and Phoenicia. Herodotus and he is not often wrong ascribes a great part of the mythology which the Greek poets elaborated to a Phoenician or Egyptian source.
According to Herodotus, the whole host, soldiers and sailors, numbered two million six hundred and forty thousand men, and there were as many or more camp-followers, so that the whole number present, according to this estimate, was over five million men.
Darius may have borrowed the name from Egypt, where such titles as "the 2 eyes of the king for Upper Egypt, the 2 ears of the king for Lower Egypt" are to be found on the earlier monuments, for instance in the tomb of Amen en, heb at Abd el Qurnah. And in Herodotus II. 114. the boy Cyrus calls one of his playfellows "the eye of the king," Herod.
Indeed, there would be but very little exaggeration in affirming that we are practically as near the early Egyptian ages as was Herodotus himself. Well might the Egyptian priests say to the earliest Greek philosophers, "You Greeks are mere children, talkative and vain; you know nothing at all of the past."
And it is probable that it stands over an immense substructure, in which may yet be found the lore of ancient Egypt, and which may even prove to be the famous labyrinth of which Herodotus speaks, built by the twelve kings of Egypt. According to this author, one hundred thousand men worked on this monument for forty years. What a waste of labor!
When he reached his room he flung his Herodotus into the nearest chair, and himself into the most comfortable one, and then beat a vicious serenade on his firegrate with the poker until dinner time. In the evening, while Jim was moodily planted before a small pile of books, he received a visitor, no less a personage than Philips, Jim's occasional hack.
It does not appear that Confucius was received with much distinction, nor did he have much intercourse with the court or the ministers. He was a mere seeker of knowledge, an inquirer about the ceremonies and maxims of the founder of the dynasty of Chow, an observer of customs, like Herodotus.
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