For the supplicants who arrived at the oracle, though, the most important people were the priests and the priestesses, whose duty it was to interpret the divine answers. The priests were barefoot, so as to always be in contact with the earth, and they never washed their feet. They slept on the floor of the sanctuary to encourage revelatory dreams. There were also priestesses; Herodotus preserved three of their names (Promenia, Timarete, Nikandre) but perhaps we should view these as titles, similar to Pythia in Delphi. The priestesses were also called Peleiadae (from the Greek word for dove) because visitors thought that their mysterious words often sounded like the twittering of birds.