Phoinix (2)Phoenix

An Arabian bird; the Phoinix is often the emblem of immortality or of reborn ideals or hope.

When the historian, Herodotus, was in Egypt he was told the story of the Phoinix which he did not believe but dutifully recorded anyway.

The Egyptians said that the Phoinix was an Arabian bird the size of an eagle which was mostly red but accented with gold plumage; the bird was said to live in the Arabian desert and, when its father died, the noble bird would wrap the body in a cocoon of myrrh and fly the body to the Egyptian city of Heliopolis and deposit it in the temple of the Sun.

The common conception of the Phoinix is of a bird which was said to burn itself on a funeral pyre and to rise from the ashes in the freshness of youth and live through another cycle of years.

• Histories, book 2, chapter 73