Dr. Roel Konijnendijk

He's interested in particular in describing the Persian Empire and all its pluriformity.

And the Persians would have happily helped him with this because that actually corresponds a lot with their royal ideology.

They're always stressing how many peoples they rule over, the vast extent of their empire.

They're trying to express the far corners of it in order to say, look at this geographical span.

But even for Herodotus, it was very difficult to see beyond that.

So when you get past the borders of the spaces and the peoples that the Persians essentially have interacted with, or the Greeks themselves, but more likely the Persian, you get into very fuzzy territory.

And quite literally, you know, when he goes north inland into Central Asia, he says, okay, first there are the Scythians, but then beyond them, there's the Amazons, and beyond them, there are like people eaters.

and then beyond them.

And you get this sort of increasing sort of fantastical idea of people's living in faraway places become more and more extreme and more and more divorced from what's normal and less and less reliable as an indicator of the actual ethnography of the world.

Actually, he enumerates the peoples of North Africa all the way down to the Atlantic.

It's just that a lot of that, again, has become more and more fantastical as you go.

So obviously, Greeks living in Libya, and he knows the Carthaginians.

And in that sense, we have quite a bit of information.

He talks about the chariot riders of the Nassimones and people like that, right, too, in Libya.

Exactly, yeah.

So these are people that Greeks and Carthaginians and Persians have interacted with.

And so in that sense, he knows something about them that we can trace back to a source, you know, potentially.

But then you get further on and on and you get all sorts of peoples that he describes that, you know, people of the Atlas Mountains and things like that, which he doesn't know anything much about them.

He just knows that the world extends to the Straits of Gibraltar.

And so he has to sort of people it in some way.