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It is essentially a work of ethnography, and conforms to a classical scheme which goes back at least to Herodotus, in whom it is first attested. Where Herodotus tackled Egypt and Scythia in terms of history, land, and customs, he perhaps established and certainly helped perpetuate a pattern which could later be deployed in specialist monographs on particular countries (Trüdinger 1918).¹ Lucian has adapted this pattern to suit the foundation-myths (1.12–16 recall Hdt. 4.5–15 on the colonization of Scythia), layout, and nomoi associated with the temple. Even the artful disarray of the final section on nomoi is much more planned than it appears at first sight: a well-established alternative to the ordering of such material under headings was associative listing (Trüdinger 1918: 25–26), and Lucian shows himself master of the artful segue (§§45–46/47: the lake and ritual “descents to the lake”; §48 ff.: other major festivals in Hierapolis’s sacred calendar; §§49–51: the Spring Festival and autocastration; §§52–53: burial customs for the galli and for Hierapolitans generally). A penchant for the wondrous and exotic in the selection of nomoi is of course thoroughly Herodotean; the notices on tattooing and hair-cutting with which the treatise ends carefully give the impression of miscellaneous after-thoughts while in fact conveying profound suggestions about national and personal identity (“all Assyrians wear tattoos”; “to this day there remain in the temple my lock and my name”).