Introduction

Herodotus shows himself to have been acutely sensitive to the ethnic ramifications of Greek colonization, as his catalogue of forces before Salamis is careful to trace such lines of filiation of settlement and potential contemporary affiliation. Herodotus’ interlocutors were themselves also fundamentally conditioned by the processes of assimilation, hybridity, and biculturalism that lie at the heart of the histor’s own impetus to confront the ‘other’. Yet Herodotus was also a universalist in his own terms, as his reflections on Egyptian religion indicate especially: people tapped the same transcendent order, even if their rituals varied, their awareness of it was imperfect, and their ability to adhere to its dictates may have fallen short or lapsed to a lesser or greater extent. In some cases, especially regarding Egyptian culture, the image in the Herodotean mirror assumes the authority of a prototype or archetype.