The Old and the Restless: The Egyptians and the Scythians in Herodotus' Histories
On a historiographical level, if we look at all the ethnographic material in the Histories, it appears that Herodotus wishes the reader to view the world and its peoples in a sort of grid. Scythia and Egyptians are the extremes (in several ways) and other central cultures like the Greeks and Persians fall into place between them.