so in front. At a yearly festival of Athene
their maidens take their stand in two parties and fight against one
another with stones and staves, and they say that in doing so they are
fulfilling the rites handed down by their fathers for the divinity who
was sprung from that land, whom we call Athene: and those of the maidens
who die of the wounds received they call "false-maidens." But before
they let them begin the fight they do this:--all join together and equip
the maiden who is judged to be the fairest on each occasion, with a
Corinthian helmet and with full Hellenic armour, and then causing her to
go up into a chariot they conduct her round the lake. Now I cannot tell
with what they equipped the maidens in old time, before the Hellenes
were settled near them; but I suppose that they used to be equipped
with Egyptian armour, for it is from Egypt that both the shield and the
helmet have come to the Hellenes, as I affirm. They say moreover that
Athene is the daughter of Poseidon and of the lake Tritonis, and that
she had some cause of complaint against her father and therefore gave
herself to Zeus, and Zeus made her his own daughter. Such is the story
which these tell; and they have their intercourse with women in common,
not marrying but having intercourse like cattle: and when the child of
any woman has grown big, he is brought before a meeting of the men held
within three months of that time, 161 and whomsoever of the men the
child resembles, his son he is accounted to be.

181. Thus then have been mentioned those nomad Libyans who live along
the sea-coast: and above these inland is the region of Libya which has
wild beasts; and above the wild-beast region there stretches a raised
belt of sand, extending from Thebes of the Egyptians to the Pillars of
Heracles. In this belt at intervals of about ten days' journey there are
fragments of salt in great lumps forming hills, and at the top of each
hill there shoots up from the middle of the salt a spring of water cold
and sweet; and about the spring dwell men, at the furthest limit towards
the desert, and above the wild-beast region. First, at a distance of ten
days' journey from Thebes, are the Ammonians, whose temple is derived
from that of the Theban Zeus, for the image of Zeus in Thebes also, as I
have said before, 162 has the head of a ram. These, as it chances, have
also other water of a spring, which in the early morning is warm; at the
time when the market fills,