Herodotus, the Egyptians and the Greeks.

Hello, this is Bertie, and I'm here with another story from Herodotus.

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the Egyptian pharaoh known as Amos,

and his friendship with various powerful Greeks of the time.

I'll include a famous story about the Greek ruler Polycrates of Seamus and his golden ring.

If you're lucky enough to have visited Greece, you will have probably seen that it is partly made up of beautiful islands in the Mediterranean Sea.

One of the most fashionable and exclusive islands is called

Santorini, which in ancient times went by the name of Thera. It's a place where the rich

and famous are like to be seen and photographed. Ordinary people, called the Hoy-Poloy

in Greek, go there too. Around two million tourists

visit the island in a busy year. Thera had an active volcano, which blew up in Manoan times.

That's the time when, according to legend, King Minos ruled the island of Crete, and the

bull god the Minotor lived in the labyrinth.

Well, the people of Thera had strong connections with Crete, but their civilization was destroyed

by the volcano. Eventually the islanders recovered and began to prosper once more.

As the Greeks became better at growing food, their population grew.

The island of Thera was becoming overcrowded, perhaps not quite as overcrowded as it is in the summer

these days, but nonetheless the people of rocky Thera were running out of land to grow their food

on. Herodotus informs us that the fortune-telling oracle, the Pythia, had prophesied that the people of Thera would found a new city in Libya in North Africa.

One year when a terrible drought caused the trees to wither and the crops to fail, a group of islanders from

Thera decided to fulfill the prophecy. They sailed across the Mediterranean Sea to Libya,

Egypt's neighbour in North Africa. Eventually in the year 631 BCE, they settled in a lush green valley

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