Buto, the most revered oracle in Egypt according to Herodotus

When Herodotus visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, he tried to find out which oracle the Egyptians respected most. The answer he received led him into the Nile Delta, to the city of Buto, home of a sanctuary of the goddess whom the Greeks identified with Leto. The historian devotes several pages of his second book to it, mixing direct observations, the accounts of priests and legends that he himself says he cannot verify.

The city of the cobra goddess

The Greek name Buto derives from the Egyptian Per-Wadjet, “house of Wadjet”. Wadjet was the cobra goddess who protected Lower Egypt, depicted on the brow of the pharaohs together with the vulture of Upper Egypt. The city, identified with the present-day site of Tell el-Fara'in, originally consisted of two neighbouring centres, Pe and Dep, and held great religious importance from the earliest periods of Egyptian history.

Herodotus describes the goddess's temple as magnificent, with gateways ten fathoms high. What amazed him most, however, was a shrine made from a single block of stone, enormous in every dimension, and covered by another block that served as a roof. The historian considers it the greatest marvel of all the things he saw in that sanctuary.

Replies for the pharaohs

Several episodes told by Herodotus turn on prophecies from Buto. To the pharaoh Mycerinus, builder of the third pyramid at Giza, the oracle announced that he would live only six years. The king, feeling unjustly treated, is said to have lit lamps every night so as to live day and night without pause, thereby doubling, according to the story, the time granted him. It is, of course, a legendary tradition.

Closer to political history is the reply given to Psammetichus I. According to Herodotus, the oracle foretold that vengeance would come from the sea, when men of bronze appeared. Shortly afterwards Ionian and Carian pirates clad in bronze armour landed in Egypt, and Psammetichus took them into his service, gaining with their help power over the whole country.

The prophecy of Cambyses and the floating island

The Persian conqueror Cambyses, too, according to Herodotus, had received a reply from Buto: he would die at Ecbatana. He thought of the capital of Media, but when he was mortally wounded in Syria he learned that the village where he lay was also called Ecbatana. It is a typical example of the ambiguity the Greeks attributed to oracles, found in many similar stories.

Near Buto lay the island of Chemmis, which the Egyptians said floated on the waters of a lake. The myth told that there the goddess had hidden and protected the young Horus, whom the Greeks identified with Apollo. Herodotus honestly admits that he did not see the island move and that he was astonished to hear that an island could really float.

Herodotus' account of the oracle of Buto combines precious information with marvellous tales. Excavations at Tell el-Fara'in have confirmed the antiquity and importance of the site, while the details of how the oracle worked remain largely entrusted to the pages of the historian from Halicarnassus. No Egyptian text known so far describes with the same vividness the consultations held there.