Herodotus of Halicarnassus — a Greek city on Turkey's Aegean coast — wrote The Histories, an inquiry into why Greeks and Persians fought and into the peoples he could reach. This is Book 2, Euterpe. Book 1 left Croesus of Lydia ruined by Cyrus of Persia, and Cyrus dead on the steppe beyond the Caspian.

Now he walks into Egypt, which he calls a gift of the Nile. He sits with priests at Memphis, measures the flood, and finds customs inverted: women in the market, men at the loom, the dead housed more carefully than the living. Cheops, the pyramid king, drives a nation to quarry stone. The Labyrinth by Lake Moeris, he says, outdoes the wonders of Greece. Some Egyptians told him Helen of Troy sat out the war under King Proteus; the Greeks at Troy fought a phantom. Naucratis is the Greek door in the Delta. Sacred animals and mummies fill a land that does not yet know Cambyses, son of Cyrus, will arrive with a Persian army.