Hecataeus of Abdera

Hecataeus of Abdera or of Teos (Greek: Ἑκαταῖος ὁ Ἀβδηρίτης), was a Greek historian and sceptic philosopher who flourished in the 4th century BC.

Diogenes Laertius (ix.61) relates that he was a student of Pyrrho, along with Eurylochus, Timon the Phliasian, Nausiphanes of Teos and others, and includes him among the "Pyrrhoneans". Diodorus Siculus (i.46.8) tells us that Hecataeus visited Thebes in the times of Ptolemy I Soter, and composed a history of Egypt. Diodorus supplies the comment that many additional Greeks went to and wrote about Egypt in the same period. The Suda gives him the nickname, 'critic grammarian' and says that he lived in the time of the successors to Alexander.

No complete works of Hecataeus have survived to our time, and our knowledge of his writing exists only in fragments located in various ancient Greek and Latin authors' works, primarily in Diodorus Siculus, whose ethnography of Egypt (Bibliotheca historica, Book I) represents by far the largest amount. Diodorus mostly paraphrases Hecataeus, thus it is difficult to extract Hecataeus' actual writings. (see Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Müller's Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum).

Hecataeus wrote the work Aegyptiaca or On the Egyptians (the same title of Manetho's later work), both suggestions are based on known titles of other ethnographic works, an account of Egypt’s customs, beliefs and geography, and the single largest fragment from this lost work is held to be Diodorus' account of the Ramesseum, tomb of Osymandyas (i.47-50).

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