Herodotus, the Greek historian and traveller to Egypt in the 5th century BC, was the first foreigner to try to bridge this gap in understanding by telling the world about the Egyptians of his time and. insofar as possible, of their ancestors. He collected extensive information about this strange people. He was concerned with almost any kind of information and he passed on whatever he heard, leaving it to the reader to believe it or not. We are still wondering how much of it was actually true.
Among the more intimate details concerning the Egyptians he obtained the following piece of information, apparently a mixture of what he had himself observed and what he had been told.
The women urinate in a standing position, whereas the men sit down. They relieve themselves indoors and eat in the street, and they give as reason for this the fact that things unseemly should be performed in private, but things not unseemly should be done in the open. The Egyptians and those who have learnt it from them are the only ones to perform circumcision. Every man has two garments, every woman just one. They are particularly careful always to wear clean linen. They circumcise for reasons of cleanliness more than secmlincss. Their priests shave their bodies every second day, so that no lice nor any other pollution should contaminate them in the service of the god.... They wash with cold water twice during the day and twice during the night.
On this occasion Herodotus had nothing more to say about anything remotely connected with sexual matters (but he refers to them later, cf. below). One may perhaps take it however, that erotic activities were among those which took place indoors (or he would have noticed and not omitted commenting on it) and therefore considered by the Egyptians to be, if not ‘unseemly’, at least fairly private.
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