Harris dates studies of both to Classical Greece and Classical Rome, specifically, to Herodotus, often called the " father of history " and the Roman historian, Tacitus, who wrote many of our only surviving contemporary accounts of several ancient Celtic and Germanic peoples.

The earliest bestiary in the form in which it was later popularized was an anonymous 2nd century Greek volume called the Physiologus, which itself summarized ancient knowledge and wisdom about animals in the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle's Historia Animalium and various works by Herodotus, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aelian and other naturalists.

Herodotus, who has been called the ' Father of History ', was born in 484 BC in Halicarnassus, Asia Minor ( then under Persian overlordship ).

Herodotus, in Book II of his Histories, describes as a " labyrinth " a building complex in Egypt, " near the place called the City of Crocodiles ," that he considered to surpass the pyramids in its astonishing ambition:

Herodotus reported a temple to her in Egypt supposedly attached to a floating island called " Khemmis " in Buto, which also included a temple to an Egyptian god Greeks identified by interpretatio graeca as Apollo.

Some accounts place the youth of Midas in Macedonian Bermion ( See Bryges ) In Thracian Mygdonia, A wild rose garden at the foot of Mount Bermion was called by Herodotus " the garden of Midas son of Gordias, where roses grow of themselves, each bearing sixty blossoms and of surpassing fragrance ".

On the east Herodotus called them the Neuri, a name related to Old Prussian narus, " the deep ," in the sense of water country.

Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians called the island Callista and lived on it for eight generations.

This civilization seems to have fallen into decline by the late Bronze Age, when, according to Herodotus, Macedonian tribes from the north marched into Peloponnese, where they were called Dorians and subjugating the local tribes, settled there.

According to Herodotus, the Persians broke the Spartan phalanx after a Greek man called Ephialtes betrayed his country by telling the Persians of another pass around the mountains.

Herodotus, who has been called the ' Father of History ', was born in 484 BC in Halicarnassus, Asia Minor ( then under Persian overlordship ).

Hecateus of Abdera writes that the Oceanus of the Hyperboreans is neither the Arctic Ocean nor Western Ocean, but the sea located to the north of the ancient Greek world, called " the most admirable of all seas " by Herodotus ( lib.

He did say that the ancient Persians called all the Scyths Σάκαι ( Sacae, Herodotus 7. 64 ).

Herodotus ( 7. 64 ) describes them as Scythians, called by a different name:

Herodotus and other classical historians listed quite a number of tribes who lived near the Scythians, and presumably shared the same general milieu and nomadic steppe culture, often called " Scythian culture ", even though scholars may have difficulties in determining their exact relationship to the " linguistic Scythians ".

Only the youngest son succeeded in touching the golden implements without them bursting with fire, and this son's descendants, called by Herodotus the " Royal Scythians ", continued to guard them.

Ctesias was the author of treatises on rivers, and on the Persian revenues, of an account of India entitled Indica ( which is of value as recording the beliefs of the Persians about India ), and of a history of Assyria and Persia in 23 books, called Persica, written in opposition to Herodotus in the Ionic dialect, and professedly founded on the Persian royal archives.

Oroe, a tributary river of Boeotian Asopus is called by Herodotus ( 9. 51. 2 ) and Pausanias ( 9. 4. 4 ) daughter of Asopus.

Herodotus follows with what he was told by the prophetesses, called peleiades (" doves ") at Dodona:

Herodotus states that Zalmoxis was also called by some of the Getae Gebeleizis, which made some searchers conclude that Getae were actually henotheists or even polytheists.

A great festival, called the Feast of Lamps, was held annually in her honor and, according to Herodotus, her devotees burned a multitude of lights in the open air all night during the celebration.

Being called Buto by the Greeks during Ptolemaic Egypt, a Greek dynasty ruling from 305 to 30 BC, it was the capital town, or according to Herodian, merely the principal village of the Nile Delta, which Herodotus ( l. c .) calls the Chemmite nome ; Ptolemy, the Phthenothite nome (, iv.

Presumably following Herodotus ' description, the occultist Eliphas Levi in his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie ( 1855 ) called his goat-headed conception of Baphomet the " Baphomet of Mendes ", thus popularizing and perpetuating this incorrect attribution, which has given rise to a flood of spurious connections, such as " The Goat of Mendes " by the blackened death metal band Akercocke.

Herodotus placed them in a region bordering Scythia in Sarmatia ( modern territory of Ukraine ).

In the repulse of Xerxes I it is possible that the Aeginetans played a larger part than is conceded to them by Herodotus.

In view of these considerations it becomes difficult to credit the number of the vessels that is assigned to them by Herodotus ( 30 as against 180 Athenian vessels, cf.

Herodotus records that when heralds of the Persian king Darius the Great demanded " earth and water " ( i. e., symbols of submission ) of various Greek cities, the Athenians threw them into a pit and the Spartans threw them down a well for the purpose of suggesting they would find both earth and water at the bottom, these often being mentioned by the messenger as a threat of siege.

Ephorus made Homer a younger cousin of Hesiod, Herodotus ( Histories, 2. 53 ) evidently considered them near-contemporaries, and the 4th century BC sophist Alcidamas in his work Mouseion even brought them together for an imagined poetic agon, which survives today as the Contest of Homer and Hesiod.

Another author, Thomas Geoghegan, whose speciality is labour rights, comes down on the side of Herodotus when it comes to drawing lessons relevant to Americans, who, he notes, tend to be rather isolationist in their habits ( if not in their political theorizing ): " We should also spend more funds to get our young people out of the library where they're reading Thucydides and get them to start living like Herodotus — going out and seeing the world.

Other writers, such as Herodotus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Pausanias, and Eutropius, describe them as Greeks.

Epicurus also calls them " the meanings that underlie the words " ( hypotetagmena tois phthongois: semantic substance of the words ) in his letter to Herodotus.

Herodotus also records a Persian commander threatening to enslave daughters of the revolting Ionians and send them to Bactria.

Their medical expertise was later documented by Herodotus: " The practice of medicine is very specialized among them.

There is nothing to fill the gap until history begins with the classical Greek historian, Herodotus, who mentions them extensively, except legend.

# Thirdly ( 4. 11 ), in the version which Herodotus said he believed most, the Scythians came from a more southern part of Central Asia, until a war with the Massagetae ( a powerful tribe of steppe nomads who lived just northeast of Persia ) forced them westward.

Herodotus ( IV. 64 ) describes them as Scythians, although they figure under a different name:

* c. 484 – 425 BC Herodotus tells us Egyptian doctors were specialists: Medicine is practiced among them on a plan of separation ; each physician treats a single disorder, and no more.

Herodotus discussed how members of each city would collect their own dead after a large battle to bury them.

Some current historians tend to believe Herodotus ' account, primarily because he stated with disbelief that the Phoenicians " as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya ( Africa ), they had the sun on their right-to northward of them " ( The Histories 4. 42 ) -- in Herodotus ' time it was not known that Africa extended south past the equator ; however, Egyptologists also point out that it would have been extremely unusual for an Egyptian Pharaoh to carry out such an expedition.

An anthropophage or anthropophagus ( from, " people-eater ", plural anthropophagi ) was a member of a mythical race of cannibals described first by Herodotus in his Histories as androphagi (" man-eaters "), and later by other authors, including the playwright William Shakespeare.

During his travel to Egypt, Herodotus heard that Psammetichus (" Psamṯik ") sought to discover the origin of language by conducting an experiment with two children.

Herodotus or his source seems to have misunderstood the Scythian word as a combination of the roots arima (" one ") and spou (" eye ") and to have created a mythic image to account for it.

What Herodotus called the " hemp-seed " must have been the whole flowering tops of the plant, where the psychoactive resin is produced along with the fruit (" seeds ").