Egyptian texts emphasize that the Nile could be both creative and destructive, and that it was the job of the king, as the enforcer of Ma’at, the principle of order, to regulate the Nile on behalf of the Egyptian people.64 Kings commonly commemorated their role in opening canals and their nilometers, devices for measuring the Nile floods, were famous in Greece and Rome.65 Kings were responsible for rebuilding if the Nile floods damaged Egyptian settlements, and they claimed to turn the destructive power of the Nile against Egypt’s enemies.66 Sometimes the destruction could not be overcome; when the Nile’s Pelusiac branch filled with silt, the capital city of the nineteenth dynasty (1292–1189 BCE), Pi-Ramesse, had to be permanently abandoned.67 The Egyptian sources that Herodotus and Diodorus drew upon lived with the Nile’s annual gift as well as its potential for violence.
Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s texts reflect a portrait of royal and Nilotic action consistent with what we find in Egyptian literature. Like Egyptian texts, the Histories and Library document the ongoing process of creation as it is carried out by rulers and rivers; indeed, in both Greek and Egyptian texts it is often the ruler’s job to keep rivers in line. The process of creation is neither pregiven nor a pure cultural construct. Instead, both Nile and king make the world and are judged by how their actions benefit the Egyptian people.
HOW BOUNDARIES COME TO MATTER
Although Herodotus and Diodorus do not present humans intervening artificially in an otherwise fixed landscape, neither are their worlds constantly in flux. Rulers and rivers take concrete actions that remake the world, which persists until it is remade again. When Greek historians document erga, they reveal and document the flexibility of the world’s land- and waterscapes and simultaneously create a stable world, fixed at the time of writing or performance, for their readers to apprehend.68 In particular, by freighting certain boundaries with narrative meaning, they materialize these boundaries as fixed and “natural,” and their transgression, for example, Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont, as unnatural. And because different historians see the world differently and draw on different erga, their histories result in different demarcations of the “natural.”
We can see how different boundaries materialize in Herodotus’s account of his predecessors and how they divide the world.69 In Herodotus’s text, the borders between continents are a matter of debate, and he takes time to critique the Ionian Greek division of the world into Europe, Asia, and Libya, with the Nile dividing Libya from Asia (2.16). This schema is absurd, Herodotus argues, because it leaves Egypt split between continents. Instead, he claims that Libya and Asia are divided by “the boundaries of the Egyptians” (2.17.1: tous Aiguptiōn orous), and that Egypt is all the land “inhabited by the Egyptians” (2.17.1: hupo tōn Aiguptiōn). Herodotus returns to this critique in book 4, disparaging the Ionians threefold division of continents and asserting instead that the earth is “one” (4.45.2: miēi), but concluding that he will abide by their “conventions” (4.45.5: toisi . . . nomizomenoisi).
This critique, especially in book 4, has led scholars to conclude that Herodotus considers continental divisions “mere” conventions that bind him against his will.70 While Herodotus is certainly troubled by the process that has led to the threefold division, and especially the naming of continents, he nevertheless asserts his own definition of continental borders. In book 2, he says that the “borders of the Egyptians” divide Egypt from the other continents, defining nations by the people who inhabit them. Yet we also know, from his description of the Nile’s activity, that the human population of Egypt depends on the Nile’s extent and the gift of the earth that it provides and irrigates (2.11). The borders of the Egyptians define Egypt, but the Nile has shaped how far the Egyptians extend. Neither human convention nor riverine agency has made Egypt on its own.71 Instead, Herodotus’s inquiry (historia) materializes Egypt as a flexible cocreation of the Nile and the Egyptian people.
The relationship between historia and erga accords with Karen Barad’s philosophy, which explains how different accounts of the world demarcate boundaries between objects. One of Barad’s most famous examples is a fetus as it is being imaged by ultrasound. Whereas we are used to speaking of the fetus as an object separate from the pregnant body and the ultrasound that sees it, Barad argues that fetus and ultrasound are an inextricable phenomenon. By seeing the fetus through the apparatus of the ultrasound, the fetus emerges as an object with boundaries that can be demarcated from the rest of the pregnant body. As Barad says, “The transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is ‘part of’ the body it images.”72 For Herodotus and Barad, agencies of observation, including the practice of history, are inextricable from the world they would seem to “peer innocently” at.
If there is no longer a world that we see and know from a distance, but rather one whose borders come into being through our interaction with and observation of them, then, as Barad argues, humans are much more accountable to the rest of the universe than we have usually realized. Because we make the world we seek to know, every act of knowledge making is also an ethical act. When the transducer “sees” the fetus, it separates the fetus from surrounding tissue and renders that tissue mere background. This can lead to the humanization of fetuses and the dehumanization of pregnant people, two morally weighty outcomes. When Herodotus documents Xerxes’s bridge across the Hellespont and gives it a “negative moral charge,” he naturalizes the boundary between Europe and Asia and casts the manner in which Xerxes yokes the continents as a transgression.73 On the other hand, when we learn from Diodorus that Semiramis’s huge and expensive bridge, so similar to Xerxes’s, ensures her salvation, the border between India and Assyria “matters” less, in both senses of the word: it is less significant and less real.74 Both Herodotus and Diodorus are fundamentally interested not in a given geographical morality but in the emerging accountability of rulers, rivers, and other beings to the worlds they make.75
If the world can be made and remade, then human interventions must be measured by some other standard than a fixed sense of the natural. As we have seen, Herodotus and especially Diodorus do not conclude that humans (and others) can therefore intervene in the world however they wish; rather, they evaluate erga by their benefit to human beings. This is how they hold the agencies of the world accountable to the worlds they make. But Barad would say, and I agree, that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s standard is insufficient. The more humans see ourselves as cocreators with other beings, the more we realize our interdependence with those beings, the more we should understand that their benefit and ours cannot be easily separated. If the Nile has given human beings gifts, humans should provide for the other creatures of the Nile. Hints of such reciprocal relationships are explored in chapters 4 and 5.
This chapter has considered the role of historia and erga in the production of continents, countries, monuments, and transgressions, especially in Herodotus’s Histories. Chapter 3 turns to the boundaries of another set of categories: men versus women and humans versus animals. And now it is Diodorus’s turn to shine, for while Herodotus takes these divisions more or less for granted, Diodorus demonstrates their contingency and the role of women in remaking them.
CHAPTER THREE
Female Feck
Unlike the boundaries of continents and landscapes, the borders of sex and species may seem much more solid, at least in ancient Greek thought. Greek writers, including Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, employ a consistent vocabulary to differentiate “women” (gunaikes) from “men” (andres) and “humans” (anthrōpoi) from other animals (ktēnea, thēria). But Greek concepts of sex, gender, and species are surprisingly complex.1 As demonstrated in this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are more invested in the boundaries between types of bodies
