Deeper <i>Histories</i> : The Integration of Geologic Time and Human History in Herodotus’ Egyptian <i>Logos</i>

This article argues that the second book of Herodotus’ Histories, rather than being a lengthy and insufficiently historical digression, is a proportional response to the difficulties posed by the scale of Egyptian history and the unusual stability of Egyptian society to his understanding of historical change. To resolve these difficulties, I demonstrate that Herodotus develops an alternative framework for the interpretation of Egyptian history based on the Nile’s deposition of sediment, according to which historical change unfolds over the geologic timescale of millennia rather than the limited span of human lifetimes. In making this argument, I show that the Egyptian logos not only permits comparison to the modern intellectual project of deep history, but also makes a significant contribution to our understanding both of central themes of the Histories, such as the instability of human happiness and the influence of environments on human history, and of Herodotus’ methodology.