herodotus

differently for different sacrifices; I shall speak however of thesacrifices to that goddess whom they regard as the greatest of all,and to whom they celebrate the greatest feast.--When they have flayedthe bullock and made imprecation, they take out the whole of its lowerentrails but leave in the body the upper entrails and the fat; andthey sever from it the legs and the end of the loin and the shouldersand the neck: and this done, they fill the rest of the body of theanimal with consecrated[44] loaves and honey and raisins and figs andfrankincense and myrrh and every other kind of spices, and havingfilled it with these they offer it, pouring over it great abundance ofoil. They make their sacrifice after fasting, and while the offeringsare being burnt, they all beat themselves for mourning, and when theyhave finished beating themselves they set forth as a feast that whichthey left unburnt of the sacrifice. 41. The clean males then of the oxkind, both full-grown animals and calves, are sacrificed by all theEgyptians; the females however they may not sacrifice, but these aresacred to Isis; for the figure of Isis is in the form of a woman withcow's horns, just as the Hellenes present Io in pictures, and all theEgyptians without distinction reverence cows far more than any otherkind of cattle; for which reason neither man nor woman of Egyptianrace would kiss a man who is a Hellene on the mouth, nor will they usea knife or roasting-spits or a caldron belonging to a Hellene, nortaste of the flesh even of a clean animal if it has been cut with theknife of a Hellene. And the cattle of this kind which die they bury inthe following manner:--the females they cast into the river, but themales they bury, each people in the suburb of their town, with one ofthe horns, or sometimes both, protruding to mark the place; and whenthe bodies have rotted away and the appointed time comes on, then toeach city comes a boat[45] from that which is called the island ofProsopitis (this is in the Delta, and the extent of its circuit isnine /schoines/). In this island of Prosopitis is situated, besidesmany other cities, that one from which the boats come to take up thebones of the oxen, and the name of the city is Atarbechis, and in itthere is set up a holy temple of Aphrodite. From this city many goabroad in various directions, some to one city and others to another,and when they have dug up the bones of the oxen they carry them off,and coming together they bury them in one single place. In the samemanner as they bury the oxen they bury also their other cattle whenthey die; for about them also they have the same law laid down, andthese also they abstain from killing.42. Now all who have a temple set up to the Theban Zeus or who are ofthe district of Thebes, these, I say, all sacrifice goats and abstainfrom sheep: for not all the Egyptians equally reverence the same gods,except only Isis and Osiris (who they say is Dionysos), these they allreverence alike: but they who have a temple of Mendes or belong to the