The Old and the Restless - The Egyptians and the Scythians in Herodotus' Histories by Robert J. Hagan

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2. Space and Geography
Herodotus is fascinated by Scythia and Egypt partly because of their great rivers, the Ister
(Danube) and the Nile, respectively. While Herodotus, an Eastern Greek, was certainly exposed
to rivers, the Nile and Ister must have been of interest especially to the mainland Greeks, whose
land suffers from a dearth of rivers. Herodotus provides his audience with ample information,
ranging from a detailed geological history of the Nile to a detailed survey of the five rivers that
flow into the Ister. The two rivers are the ties that bind the two cultures, on a global scale.
Herodotus uses information from knowledge of the Ister to posit the location of the source of the
Upper Nile. In reality the sources of the Nile would not be truly discovered until the 19th
century, and not in the place he locates them. Because of his belief in geographical symmetry,
Herodotus places the flow and source of the Nile to the west, flowing into the Sahara and
terminating somewhere in Algeria, as a mirror image to the Ister.
How does Herodotus come to this conclusion? He supposes that, since the Nile empties
in the same latitudinal location as the Ister, they have the same length and direction, mirroring
each other. While no modern scholar would make a geographical statement based on such
reasoning, Herodotus' logic was essentially supported by the knowledge of his time. Maps in the
sixth century, particularly Ionian ones produced by Anaximander and Hecataeus, looked to
symmetry to make sense of the world. 2 While Herodotus does not accept these simplified world
views on the whole, for instance rejecting the widespread idea of a shield-shaped continent
surrounded by one ocean (ôkeanos), he does embrace some tenets of symmetry in the mechanics
of the world, as proven in his theory on the Nile’s sources.
2 J Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, 34.