2.4 As far as human matters are concerned, the priests all agreed in what they told me. They claimed that the Egyptians were the first people to discover the year, and to distribute throughout the year the parts into which they divided the seasons. They said that they discovered this from the stars. It seems to me that the Egyptian monthly system is cleverer than the Greek one; the progress of the seasons forces the Greeks to insert an intercalary month every other year, whereas because the Egyptians have twelve months of thirty days and add five extra days on to every year, the seasonal cycle comes round to the same point in their calendar each time. The priests also told me that the Egyptians were the first to establish the epithets of the Twelve Gods and that the Greeks got these epithets from them, and they claim to have been the first to assign the gods altars, statues, and temples and to carve figures on to stones. They actually demonstrated the validity of most of these claims, but I have only their word for the fact that the first man to rule over Egypt was called Min. In his time, the whole of Egypt, except for the Thebaid province, was a marsh and the whole present country below the lake of Moeris (which is a seven-day sail up the river from the sea) was under water.
2.5 My view is that they are right is saying this about the country. Even someone-a person of intelligence, at any rate-who has not already heard about it, but just uses the eyes, can easily see that the Egypt to which the Greeks sail is new land which the Egyptians have gained as a gift from the river. The same also goes for the land up to three days' sailing upstream from this lake; the priests told me nothing of the kind about it, but it is more of the same. The physical geography of Egypt is such that as you approach the country by sea, if you let down a sounding line when you are still a day's journey away from land, you will bring up mud in eleven fathoms of water. This shows that there is silt this far out.
2.9 From Heliopolis upstream to Thebes is a voyage of nine days