FR MYTH H559 .N58 1858
Nitocris
Herodotus, Histories, Book II (Euterpe), the Nitocris passage. English: George Rawlinson, The History of Herodotus (London: John Murray, 1858–60). Text from the Wikisource Rawlinson Book II. The classical source only — not Tennessee Williams, “The Vengeance of Nitocris” (1928).
Why it is here: source of Williams’s August 1928 Weird Tales story, and of the drowned-banquet motif shared with Dunsany’s The Queen’s Enemies.
United States public domain.
Histories, Book II (Euterpe), the Nitocris passage. George Rawlinson’s English translation. Not the 1928 Weird Tales story.
Next, they read me from a papyrus the names of three hundred and thirty monarchs, who (they said) were his successors upon the throne. In this number of generations there were eighteen Ethiopian kings, and one queen who was a native; all the rest were kings and Egyptians. The queen bore the same name as the Babylonian princess, namely, Nitocris. They said that she succeeded her brother; he had been king of Egypt, and was put to death by his subjects, who then placed her upon the throne. Bent on avenging his death, she devised a cunning scheme by which she destroyed a vast number of Egyptians. She constructed a spacious underground chamber, and, on pretence of inaugurating it, contrived the following:- Inviting to a banquet those of the Egyptians whom she knew to have had the chief share in the murder of her brother, she suddenly, as they were feasting, let the river in upon them by means of a secret duct of large size. This and this only did they tell me of her, except that, when she had done as I have said, she threw herself into an apartment full of ashes, that she might escape the vengeance whereto she would otherwise have been exposed.