A closer reading of the text suggests that Herodotus was more interested in castigating religious prejudice regardless of the ethnicity of its practitioners. Other abbreviations are as per OCD 3. Translations of ancient texts are attributed to their respective translator as they are used.
Although both descriptions fall under the customs of the Babylonians described in Book I, Herodotus himself does not encourage their fusion, which nevertheless lingers in modern scholarship. And in the last tower there is a large cell and in that cell there is a large bed, well covered, and a golden table is placed near it. And there is no image set up there nor does any human being spend the night there except only one woman of the natives of the place, whomsoever the god shall choose from all the women, as the Chaldaeans say who are the priests of this god.
These same men also say, but I do not believe them, that the god himself comes often to the cell and rests upon the bed, just as it happens in the Egyptian Thebes according to the report of the Egyptians, for there also a woman sleeps in the temple of the Theban Zeus and both these women are said to abstain from contact with men , and as happens also with the prophetess of the god in Patara in Lycia, whenever there is one, for there is not always an oracle there, but whenever there is one, then she is shut up during the nights in the temple within the cell.
But the text lacks the explicit vocabulary that would allow us to assume with confidence that a sexual relationship was meant to take place here, unlike the few occasions where the verb is used with clear sexual connotations. The phenomenon was apparently known, as Herodotus stresses, in Egyptian Thebes and Lycia.
It could, therefore, be argued that the practice refers to cases of incubation in search of the divine will, a practice popular throughout the ancient Near East. This was especially so in connection with the cult of Asclepius, as attested by Pausanias and Strabo. The dream occurs during the war against Elam, and was presumably received in the temple of the goddess.
