I used the material thus acquired afterward for my habilitation essay, but the impulse natural to me of imparting my intellectual gains to others had induced me to utilize it in a special way.

The material I had collected appeared in my judgment exactly suited for a history of the time that Egypt fell into the power of Persia.

Jacob Burckhardt's Constantine the Great was to serve for my model.

I intended to lay most stress upon the state of civilization, the intellectual and religious life, art, and science in Egypt, Greece, Persia, Phoenicia, etc., and after most carefully planning the arrangement I began to write with the utmost zeal.
[I still have the unfinished manuscript; but the farther I advanced the stronger became the conviction, now refuted by Eduard Meyer, that it would not yet be possible to write a final history of that period which would stand the test of criticism.] While thus engaged, the land of the Pharaohs, the Persian court, Greece in the time of the Pisistratidae and Polycrates grew more and more distinct before my mental vision.

Herodotus's narrative of the false princess sent by Pharaoh Amasis to Cambyses as a wife, and who became the innocent cause of the war through which the kingdom of the Pharaohs lost its independence, would not bear criticism, but it was certainly usable material for a dramatic or epic poem.