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τεσσέρων. Cf. 29. 4, 30. I nn. for the figure.

ῥέει δὲ ἀπὸ κτλ. These words are taken two ways:

(1) The usual view, e.g. Rawlinson's, is that H. means the Nile was flowing from east to west at the furthest point at which he knew of it, i.e. in the land of the Deserters.

(2) But this is not the natural sense of the passage, and it is better to suppose that H. conceives the Nile as flowing from the west in all its course above Elephantine (Bunbury, i. 266, 303), because

(a) He compares it with the Danube, c. 33;

(b) Europe is ‘beyond comparison’ the broadest of his continents (iv. 42. 1 n.); but this could hardly be the case, if Africa were more than four mountains ‘broad’ from north to south, as explanation (1) would make it.

(c) When Cambyses attacks the Ethiopians, at ‘the end of the world’, ‘on the sea to the south of Africa’ (iii. 17. 5), he does not march up the Nile, but plunges into the deserts just south of Thebes. Obviously, then, the Nile is here conceived as coming not from the south but from the west. Some have tried to identify the Ethiopians with the Deserters, but this is flatly contradictory to H.

H. is at any rate consistent in this mistake. Its origin is no doubt the fact that the Nile from 21° to 23° S. Lat. flows north-west, and almost down to Philae (which is about 24°) is a little west in direction.

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