The first tool

 A person can’t step in the same river twice, Heraclitus said. It’s never the same water, never the same person.

Herodotus is that way for me. I don’t reread Herodotus. It’s a new book each time.

Fifty years ago, I read his account of the evil Egyptian King Cheops and his brother Chephren to learn how the pyramids were built. I wanted to know how the stone was quarried and how laborers put stone on stone. I was interested in the tools, especially the wooden machines that moved the enormous stones up the steps.

It now strikes me that the first tool was a social device, not a mechanical one. It was Cheops’s tyranny that made his and his brother’s pyramids possible. Herodotus says Cheops “closed the festivals” — he shut down the traditional pastimes of the people to divert their energies to his pyramid. He usurped their rights and made himself great by enslaving them. His brother followed his example.

Cheops and Chephren thought their legacy would be the pyramids. Visitors would come and marvel and praise them.

Actually, the brothers were so hated that Egyptians in Herodotus’s time wouldn’t say their names. If you asked whose pyramids those were, the Egyptians would say they belonged to Philitis, a shepherd who used to graze flocks on the unspoiled land.

• Sources and notes: Herodotus, The Histories, translated by Robin Waterfield; Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 144-6.