The first Greek history, and the first eyewitness account of Egyptian and Babylonian monuments by a foreign traveller: how the Great Pyramid was said to have been built, and how the walls and the stepped temple tower of Babylon were made.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus travelled in Egypt, the Levant and probably Mesopotamia in the mid-fifth century BC, gathering material for his history of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians. Book II is a long description of Egypt; Book I includes his account of Babylon. He reports what priests and guides told him, often with a sceptic’s aside, so his figures need care, but he saw the buildings, and his descriptions shaped how Europe imagined them for two thousand years.
On the pyramids he says that the Great Pyramid took twenty years to build, after ten years spent on the stone causeway along which the blocks were dragged; that it was raised in steps and the stones lifted from step to step by contrivances of short timbers; and that the casing was finished from the top downwards. Of Babylon he describes a city wall of baked bricks bedded in hot bitumen with layers of reed matting at intervals, and a sanctuary with a solid tower of eight stages, climbed by a stair winding round the outside, with a temple at the top.
The book, part by part
I Book I, 178–183: Babylon
The walls, moat and gates of Babylon; bricks moulded from the earth dug for the moat, baked and laid in bitumen with reed mats; the sanctuary of Bel with its tower of eight stages and shrine on top.
Rules: A skin of baked brick bedded in bitumen · The ziggurat: a solid mountain in stages
II Book II, 124–136: the pyramid builders
Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus; the causeway, the building of the pyramid in steps, the finishing of the casing from the top; brick pyramids.
Rules: From mastaba to true pyramid
III Book II, 148: the Labyrinth
The great temple complex near Lake Moeris, with its thousands of rooms, which Herodotus thought surpassed even the pyramids.