THE RELATION OF BABYLONIAN TO EGYPTIAN
CIVILIZATION
In dealing with the question of origins, science is constantly
confronted with the problem of unity or polygeneity. Has language one
origin or many; are the various races of mankind traceable to one
ancestor or to several? Do the older civilizations presuppose the same
primeval starting-point, or were there independent centres of culture
which grew up unknown to one another in different parts of the world?
Under the influences of theology the belief long prevailed that they
were all sprung from the same source; of late the tendency has been in
an opposite direction. While the biologist has inclined to a belief in
the unity of species, the anthropologist has seen reason to maintain
the diversity of origin in culture.
The two earliest civilizations with which we are acquainted were those
of Babylonia and Egypt. To a certain extent the conditions under
which they both arose were similar. They grew up alike on the banks
of great rivers and in a warm, though not tropical, climate. They
rested, moreover, on organized systems of agriculture, which again had
been made possible by irrigation engineering. In Babylonia the first
settlers had found a plain which was little more than a swamp, over
which the swollen streams of the Euphrates and Tigris wandered at will
during the annual period of inundation, and which needed engineering
works on a large scale before it could be made habitable. The rivers
had to be confined within their channels by means of embankments, and
canals had to be cut in order to draw off the surplus supply of water
and regulate its distribution to the land. While the swamp was thus
being made possible for habitation, the population must have lived
on the edge of the desert plateau which bordered it, and have there
developed a civilization which not only produced the engineers and
their science, but also the concentrated authority which enabled the
science to be utilized.
In Egypt it was the banks and delta of the Nile which took the place
of the Babylonian plain. Recent discoveries have shown that in the
prehistoric age, when the natives still lived in the desert and led a
pastoral life, all this was a morass, the haunt of beasts of prey and
venomous reptiles. But here again the swamp was rendered habitable by
engineering works similar to those of primeval Babylonia. The swamp
was transformed into fertile fields, the annual flood of the river was
regulated, and an elaborate network of canals and embankments spread
over the country. The pastoral nomads of the neolithic age became
agriculturists, or were employed in constructing and repairing the
works of irrigation, or in erecting monumental buildings for their
rulers. There is evidence of the same centralized government, the
same directing brain and organizing force that there is in primitive
Babylonia.
Is it possible that two systems of engineering science, so similar
in their objects, their methods and their results, should have been
invented independently in two different countries? There are scholars
who answer in the negative. But the possibility cannot be denied,
since an even more elaborate system of irrigation was invented in
China without any suggestion, as far as we know, from outside. The
geographical conditions of Babylonia and Egypt, moreover, resemble
one another, and the question of draining the swamps and regulating
the overflow of the rivers once raised, the answer to it seems fairly
obvious. By itself, therefore, the fact that the cultures of ancient
Babylonia and Egypt alike rested on a similar system of irrigation
engineering would be no proof of their common origin.
In some respects the problem which the Babylonian engineers were
called upon to solve was more difficult than that which faced the
Egyptians. The Nile is fed by the rains and melting snows of Abyssinia
and Central Africa, and its annual inundation takes place in the later
summer months. The Euphrates and Tigris flow from the north, from
the highlands of Armenia, and are at their fullest in the spring.
Their overflow accordingly comes just before the summer heats, when
agriculture is difficult or impossible, whereas in Egypt the period
of inundation ushers in the most favourable time of the year for the
growth of the crops. What the Babylonian engineers had to do was not
only to drain off the overflow, but also to store it for use at least
six months later. With them it was a question of storage as well as of
regulation.
Those then, who believe that the engineering sciences of the
Babylonians and Egyptians were no independent inventions are bound to
see in Babylonia their original home. It would have been here that the
great problems were solved, the practical application of which to the
needs of Egypt would have been a comparatively simple matter. On the
chronological side there would be no difficulties in such a view. Old
as was the civilization of Egypt, the excavations in Babylonia have
made it clear that the civilization of Babylonia was at least equally
old. At Nippur the American excavators claim to have found inscribed
remains which reach back for nearly ten thousand years, and though
the data upon which this calculation is based may be disputable, it
is certain that the earliest monuments met with are of immense age.
And it must be remembered that they belong to a time when the early
pictorial writing had already passed into a cursive script, and the
plain of Babylonia had been a land of cultivated fields for unnumbered
generations.
But by itself, I repeat, the practical identity of engineering science
in primeval Babylonia and Egypt is no proof that it had been learnt by
the one from the other. If we are to fall back on the old belief which
brought the civilized population of Egypt from the plain of Shinar,
it must be for reasons which are supported by archæological facts. If
such archæological facts exist, the parallel systems of irrigation
engineering will be additional evidence; alone, they prove nothing.
At the outset we are met by a fact which personally I find it hard to
explain away. The hieroglyphic script of Egypt has little in common
with the primitive pictorial characters of Babylonia. Objects and
ideas like “the sun,” “man,” “number one,” will be represented by the
same pictures or symbols all the world over, and consequently the fact
that in both Babylonian and Egyptian writing the sun is denoted by a
circle and the moon by a crescent is of no significance whatsoever.
But when we turn to less obvious symbols there is comparatively little
similarity between the two forms of script. The ideograph of “god,” for
example, is a star in Babylonia, a stone axe and its shaft in Egypt;
“life” is represented by a flowering reed in the one case, by a knotted
girdle in the other. It is true that Professor Hommel and others have
pointed to a few coincidences like those between the Egyptian symbol
for “foreign land” and the Babylonian ideograph of “country,” or
between the Egyptian and Babylonian signs for “city,” “place,” but
such coincidences are rare.[92] As a rule, as soon as we leave the
more obvious conventions of pictorial writing little or no connection
can be traced between the pictorial characters of Egypt and those of
Babylonia. As a whole the two graphic systems stand apart.
Nevertheless I am bound to add that it is only as a whole that they
do so. With all the general unlikeness there is a curious similarity
in a few--a very few--instances which it is difficult to interpret as
merely the result of accident. The round circle with lines inside it
which denotes “a city” in Egyptian might be explained from the circular
villages which still characterize Central Africa; but then how is it
that the ideograph for “place” in the pictorial script of Babylonia had
precisely the same form? That the word for “country” should be denoted
in the Babylonian script by the picture of three mountain peaks may
be due to the fact that to the Babylonian “country” and “mountain”
were the same; but such an explanation fails us in the case of the
Egyptian hieroglyph of “foreign land,” where the three peaks appear
again, since the hieroglyph for “mountain” in Egyptian has but two.
The picture of a seat, and a seat, too, of peculiar shape, represents
“place” in Egyptian; in Babylonian the same picture represents “city,”
thus inverting the ideographic signification of the picture which in
Egyptian and Babylonian has respectively the meanings of “city” and
“place.” Between the primitive Babylonian picture of a “ship” and
the boats depicted in the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, again, the
resemblance is very exact, and Professor Hommel has pointed out to me a
curious likeness between the original form of the Babylonian ideograph
for “a personal name” and the _ka_-sign with the Horus-hawk above
it within which the names of the earliest Pharaohs are inscribed.[93]
Indeed the learned and ingenious Munich Professor has made out a list
of even more striking coincidences, where the characters agree not only
in sense but also in the phonetic values attached to them.[94]
Here, however, we trench on another question, the philological position
of the Egyptian language. Egyptian scholars to-day are practically
unanimous in believing it to belong, more or less remotely, to the
Semitic family of speech. The Berlin school of Egyptologists, who under
the guidance of Professor Erman have made Egyptian grammar a special
subject of investigation, are largely responsible for the dominance
of this belief. I ought to be the last person in the world to protest
against it, seeing that I maintained it years ago when the patronage
of the Berlin Egyptologists had not yet made it fashionable. At the
same time I confess that I cannot follow the Berlin philologists to
the extent to which they would have us go. For them the old Egyptian
language is not related to the Semitic family of speech “more or less
remotely,” but very closely indeed. Indeed in their hands it becomes
itself a Semitic language, and as a logical consequence the Egyptian
script is metamorphosed into one of purely Semitic invention. But
while admitting that Egyptian grammar is Semitic in the sense in which
English grammar is Teutonic, the comparative philologist is bound
to add that it contains much which cannot be reduced to a Semitic
pattern. The structure, moreover, is not on the whole Semitic, neither
is a large part of its vocabulary. And among the words in the lexicon
which have Semitic affinities there are a good many which are better
explained as the result of borrowing than as belonging to the original
stratum of the language. In some cases they are demonstrably words
which have been introduced into the Egyptian language at a late date;
in other cases it seems possible to regard them as loan-words from
Semitic Babylonian which entered the language at a “pre-dynastic”
epoch. Thus, _qemḳu_, “the wheaten loaf” which was used for
offerings, is the Hebrew _qemakh_, the Babylonian _qêmu_,
and may have been brought into Egypt along with the wheat which was
first cultivated in Babylonia and still grows wild on the banks of the
Euphrates. To what an early period the importation of the cereal must
be referred is shown by its occurrence in the prehistoric graves of
Upper Egypt.[95]
When all allowances are made, however, the fact remains that the
Egyptian language as we know it was related to the Semitic family of
speech. It stood to the latter as an elder sister, or rather as the
sister of the parent-language which the existing Semitic dialects
presuppose. It was not like the so-called Hamitic dialects of Eastern
Africa, which are African languages Semitized, but it was itself
of the same stock as Hebrew or Semitic Babylonian. It represents,
however, a form of language at an earlier stage of development than
are any of those which we call Semitic, and it has, moreover, been
largely influenced and modified by foreign languages, which we may
term African. So extensive has this influence been that the Semitic
element has been even more disguised in it than the Teutonic element is
disguised in modern English. In leaving the soil of Asia the language
of Egypt took upon it an African dress.
Now though language can prove but little as regards race, it can
prove a great deal as regards history. A mixed language means a mixed
history, and indicates an intimate contact between the populations who
spoke the languages which are represented in it. Egyptian grammar would
not have been Semitic if those who imposed it upon the natives of the
Nile had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had not come
from a region where the language was Semitic. Nor would this grammar
have been modified by foreign admixture if a part of those who learned
to use it had not previously been accustomed to some other form of
speech. And since we know of no Semitic languages in Africa which were
not brought from Asia, we are justified in concluding that the Semitic
element in the Egyptian language was of Asiatic origin.
But we can go yet a step further. Where two languages are brought
into close contact, the general rule is that that of the stronger
race prevails. The conqueror is less likely to learn the language
of the conquered than the conquered are to learn the language of
their masters. On the other hand, the negro slave in America became
English-speaking, whereas the English emigrant wherever he goes
preserves the language of his fathers. It is only where a conquering
caste brings no women with it that it is likely to lose its language.
When, therefore, we find that Old Egyptian is an Africanized Semitic
language, we have every right to infer that it is because invaders
brought it with them from Asia who were Semites either by race or by
language. In other words, Egypt must have been occupied in prehistoric
days by a people who came from the Semitic area in Asia.
The days were prehistoric, but of the invasion itself history preserved
a tradition. On the walls of the temple of Edfu it is recounted how
the followers of Horus, the totem guide and patron deity of the first
kings of Upper Egypt, made their way across the eastern desert to the
banks of the Nile, and there, with the help of their weapons of metal,
subjugated the older inhabitants of the valley. Battle after battle
was fought as the invaders slowly pushed their way down the Nile to
the Delta, establishing a forge and a sanctuary of Horus on every
spot where a victory had been gained.[96] The story has come down
to us under a disguise of euhemeristic mythology, but the tradition
it embodies has been strikingly confirmed by modern discovery. The
“dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians, that is to say, who founded the
Egyptian monarchy and to whom we owe the great monuments of Egypt, were
immigrants from the east.
The culture of these “dynastic” Egyptians was built up on two solid
foundations, the engineering skill which made Egypt a land of
agriculture, and a system of writing which made the organization of
the government possible. The culture was at once agricultural and
literary, and this alone marked it off from the culture of neolithic
(or “prehistoric”) Egypt, which belonged to the desert rather than to
the banks and delta of the river, and which knew nothing of writing.
Now we have seen that there was one other country in the world in which
a similar form of culture had come into existence. In Babylonia too
we have a civilization which has as its basis the training of rivers
for the purpose of irrigation and the use of a pictorial script. The
civilization of Babylonia was, it is true, Sumerian at its outset, but
in time it became Semitic, and expressed itself in a Semitic tongue.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Semitic-speaking
people who brought the science of irrigation and the art of writing to
the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat they cultivated, from the
Babylonian plain.
There are two archæological facts connected with the early culture of
“dynastic” Egypt which seem to me to prove at any rate some kind of
intercourse with Babylonia. No building-stone exists in the Babylonian
plain; it was therefore the natural home of the art of building in
brick, and since every pebble was of value it was also the natural
birthplace of the gem-cutter. Nowhere else could the use of clay as a
writing material have suggested itself, or that of the inscribed stone
cylinder which left its impression behind it when rolled over the clay.
Wherever we have the clay tablet and the seal-cylinder we have evidence
of Babylonian influence.
Now recent discoveries have shown that the culture of the early
dynastic period of Egypt is distinguished from that of later times by
the employment of clay and the stone seal-cylinder. Neither the one nor
the other could have originated in the country itself, for Upper Egypt
(where all authenticated discoveries of early seal-cylinders have been
made) is a land of stone, and the river-silt, which is mixed with sand,
is altogether unsuited for the purpose of writing. When the Egyptians
of the Eighteenth dynasty corresponded in Babylonian cuneiform with
their subjects and allies in Asia, the clay upon which they wrote was
brought from a distance. Moreover, the stone seal-cylinder of the
early dynasties is an exact reproduction of the early seal-cylinder
of Babylonia. Substitute cuneiform characters for the hieroglyphs and
there is practically no difference between them in many cases. It is
difficult to believe that such an identity of form is the result of
accident, more especially when we find that, as Egyptian civilization
advanced, the seal-cylinder became less and less like its Babylonian
original, and finally disappeared from use altogether. That is to
say, as the culture of the people was further removed from its first
starting-point, and therefore more national, an object which never
had any natural basis in the physical conditions of the country grew
more and more of an anomaly, and was eventually superseded, first by
the “button-seal” and then by the scarab. I see no other explanation
of this than that it was originally introduced from Babylonia, and
maintained itself so long in an alien atmosphere only because it was
bound up with a culture which had come from the same region of the
world. The seal-cylinder of the early Egyptian dynasties seems to me,
apart from everything else, to prove the existence of some kind of
“prehistoric” intercourse between the civilizations of the Euphrates
and the Nile. And in this intercourse the influences came from
Babylonia to Egypt, not from Egypt to Babylonia.
The use of brick in early Egypt points in the same direction. While
Babylonia was a land of clay, Upper Egypt was a land of stone, and
it was as unnatural to invent the art of brick-making in the latter
country as it was natural to do so in the former. To this day the
Nubians build their cottages of stone; so too do the Bedâwîn squatters
on the east bank of the Nile; it is only where the population is
Egyptian and the influence of the old Egyptian civilization is still
dominant that brick is employed. Under the Old Empire the Egyptian
Pharaohs built even the temples of the gods of brick; it was but
gradually that the brick was superseded by stone. It was the same also
in Assyria; here too, in a land of stone, brick was at first the sole
building material, and even the great brick platforms which the marshy
soil of Babylonia had necessitated continued to be laid. But Assyrian
culture was confessedly Babylonian in origin, and the brick edifice
was therefore a characteristic of it. It was only by degrees that
Assyrian architecture emancipated itself from its early traditions,
and at first timidly, then more boldly, superseded the brick by stone.
The example of Assyria throws light on that of Egypt, and as the
Assyrian employment of brick was due to the Babylonian origin of its
civilization, it is permissible to infer that the Egyptian employment
of brick was also due to the same cause. Once more we may repeat that
there was early intercourse between Egypt and Babylonia--the land of
the brick-maker--and that in this intercourse the prevailing influences
came from the east.
Such, then, is the conclusion to which the most recent research leads
us. The “dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians of history, spoke a
language which is related to those of the Semitic family; their first
kingdoms, so far as we know, were in Upper Egypt, and tradition brought
them across the eastern desert to the banks of the Nile. The culture
which they possessed was characterized by Babylonian features, and was
therefore due either wholly or in part to intercourse with Babylonia.
The fact that the use of the seal-cylinder--which, by the way, bore the
Semitic name of _khetem_--should have lingered in the valley of
the Nile to the very beginnings of the Middle Empire, is an indication
that the period of its introduction could not have been very remote.
The earliest historical monuments which have been revealed to us by
modern excavation may not, after all, be many centuries later than the
time when the culture of Babylonia found its way to the Nile.
Indeed, there is a fact which indicates that this is the case, and that
the literary culture of Babylonia had been imported into the valley of
the Nile at a time when Egypt was divided into independent kingdoms.
At an early epoch an ingenious system of official chronology had been
invented in Babylonia. The years were named there after the chief
events that had occurred in each of them, among these the accession
or death of a king being naturally prominent. At the death of a king
a list was drawn up of his regnal years, with their characteristic
events, and such lists were from time to time combined into longer
chronicles. The Babylonians were preeminently a commercial people, and
for purposes of trade it was necessary that contracts and other legal
documents should be dated accurately, and that in case of a dispute the
date should be easily ascertained. Now an exactly similar system of
dating had been adopted in Egypt before the age of the First historical
dynasty. A pre-Menic monument dated in this way has been discovered at
Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, and the same method of reckoning time
is found on ivory tablets that have been disinterred at Abydos. The
method lasted down to the age of the Fifth dynasty, since the Museum
of Palermo contains the fragment of a stone from Heliopolis, on which
the chronology of the Egyptian kings is given from Menes onward, each
year being named after the event or events from which it had received
its official title. The successive reigns are divided from one another
as in the Babylonian lists, and the height of the Nile in each year
is further added--a note which naturally is of Egyptian origin. It
is, therefore, interesting to observe that it is added as a note,
independent of the event which gave its name to the year. Nothing
could prove more clearly the foreign origin of the whole system of
chronology, since, had it been of native invention, the height of the
Nile, on which the prosperity of the country depended, would have been
the first event to be recorded. After the fall of the Old Empire this
ancient Babylonian method of dating seems to have passed out of use
like the Babylonian seal-cylinder; at all events we find no further
traces of it. It was, in short, an exotic which never took kindly to
Egyptian soil.
Did the “dynastic” Egyptians bring this method of dating with them,
or did they borrow it after their settlement in Egypt? The second
supposition is very difficult to entertain, for intimate trade
relations between Babylonia and Upper (or Lower)[97] Egypt in the
pre-Menic age appear to be out of the question, and are unsupported by
any known facts. And literary correspondence, such as was carried on in
the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, seems equally out of the question.
How, then, did the Egyptians come to learn the peculiar Babylonian
system of chronology unless the founders of the culture of which it
formed a portion had originally brought it with them from the east?
The same question is raised by the existence in early Egypt of an
artistic _motif_ which had its origin in Babylonia. This is what
is usually known as the heraldic position of the figures of men and
animals. An example of it is found on the famous “palette” of Nar-Buzau
discovered by Mr. Quibell at Hierakonpolis,[98] where the hybrid
monsters whose necks form the centre of the slate are heraldically
arranged. In this case the design is known to be Babylonian, since
M. Heuzey has pointed out a Babylonian seal-cylinder on which the
two monsters recur. Nar-Buzau is made the immediate predecessor of
Menes by Professor Petrie on grounds to which every archæologist must
assent; but an even better example of the heraldic design is met with
on a great isolated rock of sandstone near El-Kab which was quarried
in the time of the Old Empire. Here the ownership and opening of the
quarry are denoted by an elaborate sculpture of the Pharaoh, who is
duplicated, his two forms being figured as seated back to back, with
a column between them, while the winged solar disk of Edfu, with the
royal uræi on either side of the orb, spreads its wings above them.
Each of the royal forms holds a sceptre, but that on the left has
no head-dress, whereas that on the right wears a skull-cap, above
which is the solar orb with the uræus serpent issuing from it.[99]
In front of the latter is an altar consisting of a bowl on a stand,
loaves of bread and a cup and jar of wine (with the customary handles
for suspension) being engraved above the bowl along with a series
of perpendicular lines which in this instance cannot (as has been
suggested) represent the fringes of a mat. In front of the figure on
the left is another altar, of different shape, the place of the bowl
being taken by a flat top, above which are six upright lines and a
flat cake. Precisely the same altar with the same objects above it are
engraved on a broken seal-cylinder of ivory found by Dr. Reisner at
Naga’ ed-Dêr, which I understand from the discoverer to be of the age
of the First dynasty. When, therefore, was it that the heraldic design
in art was introduced into Egypt from its Babylonian birthplace? In any
case it would seem to have been before the foundation of the united
monarchy.
In Babylonia itself, as we have seen, tradition looked seaward, towards
the Persian Gulf, for the elements of its civilization. At any rate
the seaport of Eridu was the gateway through which the culture of
Babylonia was believed to have passed. Here on the shores of the sea
the culture-god of Sumer had his home; here trade sprang up, and the
sailors and merchants of Eridu came into contact with men of other
lands and other habits. Is it possible to discover a connection between
Eridu and primeval Egypt?
I believe that it is, though in making the attempt we are of
course treading upon precarious ground. There are certain curious
coincidences, one of which, since it goes to the heart of Sumerian and
Egyptian religion, is necessarily of considerable weight. But they are
all, it must be remembered, more in the nature of indications and
possibilities than of ascertained facts.
Eridu meant in Sumerian “the good city.” Memphis (Men-nofer), “the good
place,” the name of the first capital of united Egypt, had the same
signification. In the case of Eridu the name had something to do with
the fact that the city was the seat of Ea, the god of beneficent spells
and incantations, who had given the arts and sciences to man, and was
ever ready to heal those that were sick. The son and vice-gerent of
Ea, who carried his commands to earth and spent his time in curing
diseases and raising “the dead to life,” was Asari, “the prince,” who
was usually entitled Mulu-dugga, “the good” or “beneficent one.” The
character and attributes of Asari are thus the same as those of the
Egyptian Osiris, who was also known as Ati, “the prince,” and was
commonly addressed as Un-nofer, “the good being.” Unlike most of the
Egyptian deities, Osiris had the same human form as Asari of Eridu,
and the resemblance between the names of Asari and Osiris--Asar in
Egyptian--is rendered more striking by the remarkable fact that they
are both represented by two ideographs or hieroglyphs of precisely
the same shape and signification.[100] It does not appear possible to
ascribe such a threefold identity to mere coincidence. And the theory
of coincidence becomes still more improbable when we remember that
while the story of Osiris centres in his death and resurrection, one
of the chief offices of the Sumerian Asari was to “raise the dead
to life.” Nowhere else in Babylonian literature, whether Sumerian
or Semitic, do we find any reference to a resurrection; the Semitic
Babylonians, indeed, did not look forward to a future life at all, or
if they did, it was to a shadowy existence in a subterranean land of
darkness “where all things are forgotten.” It is only in connection
with Asari that we hear of a possibility that the dead may live again.
Other resemblances between the theologies of Eridu and primitive Egypt
have been pointed out. Professor Hommel believes that in the Egyptian
deity Nun, the heavenly ocean, we must see a Sumerian god Nun, who also
represented the celestial abyss. However this may be, an old formula,
torn from its context, which has been introduced into the Pyramid texts
of the Pharaoh Pepi I., takes us back not only to the cosmology of
Eridu but to the literary form in which it had been expressed. Pepi, it
is said, “was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not,
the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was
no death.” The words are almost a repetition of those with which the
Babylonian epic of the creation begins: “At that time the heaven above
was not known by name, the earth beneath was not named ... at that
time the gods had not appeared, any one of them”; and they are also a
distant echo of the commencement of the cosmological legend of Sumerian
Eridu: “At that time no holy house, no house of the gods in a holy
place had been built, no reed had grown, no tree had been planted.”[101]
The testimony of philological archæology, if I may use such a term, is
supplemented by that of archæological discovery. Sumerian Babylonia and
early dynastic Egypt are alike characterized by vases of hard stone,
many of which have the same forms. Examples of some of them will be
found in de Morgan’s _Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte_,
ii. p. 257, where Jéquier observes that analogues to the Egyptian vases
have been disinterred by de Sarzec at Tello in Southern Babylonia,
“the shape and execution of which are exactly like” those discovered
in Egypt, “the only difference being that the one are ornamented with
hieroglyphics, and the others with a cuneiform inscription; apart
from this they are identical in make.” The most remarkable instance
of identity, however, is the design on the palette of the pre-Menic
Pharaoh Nar-Buzau to which attention was first called by Professor
Heuzey.[102] On this we have a representation of two lions set face
to face in the Babylonian fashion, and with long serpentine necks
which are interlaced so as to enclose a circle. Precisely the same
representation is met with on an early Babylonian seal-cylinder from
Tello.
Years ago I noticed the general likeness presented by the seated
statues of Tello to those of the Third Egyptian dynasty,[103] and
suggested that both belonged to the same school of sculpture. A little
earlier Professor Flinders Petrie had demonstrated that the standard
of measurement marked upon the plan of the city which one of the Tello
figures holds in his lap is the same as the standard of measurement of
the Egyptian pyramid-builders, the cubit, namely, of 20·63, which is
quite different from the later Assyro-Babylonian cubit of 21·6.[104]
Still more convincing, perhaps, is the Babylonian division of the year
into twelve months of thirty days each, which was already known in
Egypt in the age of the early dynasties. The Babylonian week of five
and ten days reappears in the Egyptian week of ten days, while the
division of the day into twelve “double hours,” six belonging to the
day and six to the night, has its counterpart in the Egyptian day of
twenty-four hours, twelve of which were reckoned to the day and the
other twelve to the night. Since a list of the thirty-six decans or
zodiacal stars has recently been found on a coffin of the time of the
Twelfth Dynasty[105] it is possible that this distinctively Babylonian
invention may also go back to the age of the first Egyptian dynasties.
At all events one of the chief stars in the Pyramid texts is “the Bull
of heaven,” a translation of the Sumerian Gudi-bir, or “Bull of Light,”
the name given to the planet Jupiter in its relation to the ecliptic.
In primitive Babylonian astronomy the zodiacal sign of the Bull ushered
in the year.
[Illustration: SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA.]
It may be that some of these evidences of Babylonian influence are
referable to contact between Babylonia and Egypt in the age that
immediately preceded the foundation of the united Egyptian monarchy
rather than to that still earlier age when the “dynastic” settlers
first settled in the valley of the Nile. But at present we do not
know how such a contact could have taken place. Upper Egypt and not
the Delta was the seat of the first Pharaohs with their Horus-hawk
totem, and at the remote period when the future civilization of the
country was being developed under their fostering care it is difficult
to believe that Babylonian soldiers or traders had made their way
to the shores of the Mediterranean, much less to the deserts of the
Sayyîd. For the present, at all events, where we have clear proof of
the dependence of early Egyptian culture upon that of the Babylonians
we have no alternative but to ascribe it to the Semitic emigrants or
invaders to whom the historical civilization of Egypt was primarily
due.[106]
This civilization, like that of Babylonia, implied a knowledge of
metal. It was a civilization of the copper age, and thus stood in sharp
contrast to the neolithic culture, such as it was, of “prehistoric”
Egypt. Egyptian tradition, it is true, believed that the metal weapons
with which the followers of Horus had overcome the stone-defended
natives of the country were of iron, but this was because the compilers
of the story in its existing form projected the knowledge and usages
of their own time back into the past. There is incontrovertible proof
that in Egypt, as in Europe, the ages of copper and bronze preceded
that of iron. But the tradition was doubtless right in laying stress
upon the fact that the invaders were forgers and blacksmiths. It
would have been by reason of the superiority of their arms that
they succeeded in subduing the valley of the Nile and reducing its
inhabitants to serfdom. They were, too, “the followers of Horus,”
under the leadership of a single prince who was himself a Horus, that
is to say, an incarnate god. Here, again, we find ourselves in the
presence of a conception and doctrine of Semitic Babylonia. There, too,
as we have seen, the kings were incarnate gods, not only the sons of
a divinity, but themselves divine. In Egypt, apart from the Osirian
circle, the gods were not men, but animals, and so deeply rooted was
this beast-worship in the hearts of the indigenous population that
even the “dynastic” civilization, with all its unifying and absorbing
power, never succeeded in doing more than in uniting the head of the
beast with the body of the man. Even the human Pharaoh was forced to
picture himself as a hawk. In Semitic Babylonia on the other hand, as
we have seen, the deification of the king flowed naturally from the
anthropomorphic conception of the deity; where man was made in the
image of God, it was easy to see in him a god on earth. Like the use
of copper, therefore, the deification of the king which characterized
dynastic Egypt points back to Babylonia.
It must not be supposed, however, that because certain elements and
leading characteristics in the civilization of historical Egypt
indicate that the Semitic-speaking race to whom it was mainly due
came originally from Babylonia, there are no elements in it which can
be derived from elsewhere. On the contrary, there is much that is
native to Egypt itself. Even the script shows but comparatively few
traces of a Babylonian origin. If the “dynastic” Egyptians came from
Babylonia, they must have very considerably modified and developed
the seeds of culture which they brought with them. And in Egypt they
found a neolithic culture which had already made considerable progress.
The indigenous population possessed the same artistic sense as the
palæolithic European of the Solutrian and Magdalenian epochs, with whom
perhaps it was contemporaneous, and under the direction of its dynastic
conquerors this sense was trained and educated until the Egyptians of
history became one of the most artistic peoples of the old world.
But it is noticeable that throughout the historical period whenever the
civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia came into contact, it was Egypt
that was influenced rather than Asia. The tradition of the earliest
ages was thus carried on; the stream of influence flowed from the east,
and Herodotus was justified in assigning Egypt to Asia rather than
to Africa. It was, in fact, Asia with an African colouring. In the
days of the Eighteenth dynasty, when Egypt for the first and last time
possessed an Asiatic empire, the eastern influence is very marked. The
script itself became Babylonian, the correspondence of the Government
with its own officials in Canaan was conducted in the Babylonian
language and the Babylonian syllabary, and there are indications that
even the official memoranda of the campaigns of Thothmes III. were
drawn up in cuneiform characters. The clay tablets of Babylonia were
imitated in Upper Egypt, where hieroglyphic and hieratic characters
were somewhat awkwardly impressed upon them, and the language was
filled with Semitic loan-words. The fashionable author of the age of
the Nineteenth dynasty interlarded his style not only with Semitic
words, but even with Semitic phrases. It is true that the Semitic words
and phrases are Canaanite; but Canaan had long been a province of
Babylonia, and it was because it was permeated with Babylonian culture
and used the Babylonian script, that the foreign words and phrases were
introduced into the literary language of Egypt.
On the other hand, so far as, we can judge, there was no reflex action
of Egypt upon Babylonia. The seal-cylinder was never superseded there
by the scarab; indeed the only scarabs yet found in the Mesopotamian
region are memorials of the Egyptian conquests of the Eighteenth
dynasty. Neither the hieroglyphs nor the hieratic of Egypt made their
way eastward into Asia, a fact which is somewhat remarkable when we
remember over how wide an area the more complicated cuneiform spread.
It was Europe that was affected by Egypt rather than Asia. Before
Egypt laid claim to Palestine, Babylonian culture had already taken
too firm a hold of Western Asia to be dislodged, and in Babylonia
itself Egyptian influences are hard to find. In the age of Khammu-rabi,
we meet with a few proper names which may contain the name of the
Sun-god Ra, as well as with the name of Anupum or Anubis on a stone
cylinder, and the hieroglyphic character _nefer_, “good,” is
affixed to a legal document.[107] But this merely proves that in a
period when the Babylonian Empire reached to the confines of Egypt,
there were Egyptians settled in Babylon for the purpose of trade. A
more curious example of possible Egyptian influence is one to which
I have drawn attention in my lectures on the _Religions of Ancient
Egypt and Babylonia_.[108] Thoth, the Egyptian god of literature,
was accompanied by four apes, who sang hymns to the rising and setting
sun. Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of
apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and the origin
of these companions of Thoth has been cleared up by an inscription in
a tomb at Assuan. Here we learn that in the age of the Old Empire,
expeditions were sent by the Pharaohs into the Sudan--the home of the
apes of Thoth--in order to bring back from “the land of the gods”
Danga dwarfs who could “dance the dances of the gods.” In the eyes of
the Egyptians, it would seem, there was little difference between the
ape and the Danga dwarf; the one was a dwarf-like ape, the other an
ape-like man. But they alone could perform correctly the dances that
were held in honour of certain gods, and which are already depicted
on the prehistoric vases of Egypt.[109] Closely allied to the Danga
dwarfs and the apes of Thoth are the Khnumu or Patæki of Memphis, the
followers of Ptah, who were also dwarfs with bowed legs. Now dwarfs of
precisely the same form are found on early Babylonian seal-cylinders
where they are associated sometimes with the goddess Istar, sometimes
with an ape and the god Sin.[110] The Babylonian name of the dwarf was
the Sumerian Nu-gidda, an indication that his association with the
deity went back to Sumerian times. We may conclude that, like the Danga
dwarf of Egypt, he, too, performed dances in honour of the gods.
The extraordinary resemblance of form between the Egyptian and
Babylonian sacred dwarfs, as represented in art, raises the question
whether the Babylonian dwarf was not an importation from Egypt, since
the ape with which he was confounded was a native of the Sudan. This
was the view to which I was long inclined, but there are certain
considerations which make it difficult to be accepted. The Khnumu of
Memphis were not the only dwarfs who were represented by the Egyptian
artists. Still better known was Bes, who became a special favourite
in the Roman period, when he was made a sort of patron of childbirth.
But Bes, it was remembered, had come to Egypt from the southern lands
of Somali and Arabia, like the goddess Hathor or the god Horus. Hathor
is, I believe, the Babylonian Istar, who has passed to Egypt through
her South Arabian name of Athtar; however this may be, Ptah of Memphis,
whose followers were the Khnumu dwarfs, bears a Semitic name, and must
therefore be of Semitic derivation. He belongs, that is to say, to the
Egyptians of the dynastic stock, and is accordingly one of the few
Egyptian divinities who is depicted in human form. On the other hand,
the Sumerian dwarf Nu-gidda is the companion of Istar.
On the Egyptian side, therefore, the dwarfs of Ptah are associated
with a god who has come from Asia, while the dwarf Bes was confessedly
of foreign extraction. On the Babylonian side the dwarf Nu-gidda was
the associate of Istar, the counterpart of Hathor, and of Sin, the
Moon-god, who was adopted by the people of Southern Arabia, and whose
name was carried as far as Mount Sinai on the borders of Egypt. All
this suggests that the sacred dwarf came to the valley of the Nile from
Babylonia and Arabia like the name of Ptah, the creator of the world.
In this case it would have come with the dynastic Egyptians before the
age of history begins.
But, on the other hand, there is the ape, and the ape is figured
along with the dwarf on the Babylonian seals, It is true that the ape
is equally foreign to Egypt and Babylonia, but the Sudan is nearer
Egypt than Southern Arabia is to Babylonia. The actual date and path
of migration, therefore, of the sacred dwarf must be left undecided.
Whether he was brought to Egypt at the dawn of history, or whether he
travelled to Babylonia in the historical age remains doubtful. All we
can be sure of is that the sacred dwarfs of Babylonia and Egypt were
originally one and the same, and that they testify to an intercourse
between the two countries of which all literary record has been
lost.[111]
The same verdict must be given in the case of another point, not only
of resemblance, but of identity, between ancient Egypt and Babylonia.
This is the shadûf or contrivance for drawing water from a falling
river for the sake of irrigation. The shadûf, which is still used
in Upper Egypt, can be traced back pictorially to the time of the
Eighteenth dynasty, but the basin system of irrigation with which it
was connected was already of immemorial antiquity. It is a simple yet
most effective invention, and on that account perhaps the less likely
to have been independently invented, for it is always the obvious
which remains longest unnoticed. In the modern shadûf a long pole is
laid across a beam which is supported at either end upon other poles
or on pillars of brick or mud; it is kept in place by thongs and is
heavily weighted at one end, while at the other end a bucket or skin
is attached to it by means of a rope. The shadûf of the Eighteenth
dynasty was supported sometimes, as to-day, on a cross-beam, sometimes
on a column of mud, and the bucket was of triangular form with two
handles to which the rope was tied. Representations of it from Theban
tombs will be found in Maspero’s _Dawn of Civilization_, p. 764,
and Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s _Ancient Egyptians_, plates 38 and
356. Precisely the same machine is represented on a bas-relief found by
Layard in the palace of Kûyunjik at Nineveh,[112] the only difference
being that the shadûf-worker stands upon a platform of brick instead
of on the bank itself, and that the pillar upon which the pole is
supported seems to be built of bricks rather than of mud. The machine,
however, is identical in both its Egyptian and its Assyrian form. That
the bas-relief should have been found in Assyria and not in Babylonia
is a mere accident. Like almost everything else in Assyrian culture,
the invention was of Babylonian origin, and, in fact, formed part of
the system of irrigation which made the plain of Babylonia habitable.
Herodotus, who calls the machine a κηλωνεῖον, describes it as being
used as in Egypt, and for the same reason, since the river did not
rise to the actual level of the cultivated ground, which, like that of
Egypt, was divided into a number of basins.[113]
The palace of Kûyunjik belongs to the last age of Assyrian history.
But the shadûf in Babylonia went back to the Sumerian period, as we
know from the references to it in the lexical tablets. It was called
_dulâtum_ in Semitic Babylonian, the pole or poles being _kakritum_,
and the bucket _zirqu_ or _zirqatum_ (Sumerian _sû_),[114] and
an old Sumerian collection of agricultural precepts describes how
the irrigator “fixes up the shadûf, hangs up the bucket and draws
water.”[115] The “irrigator” was naturally an important personage in
early Babylonia, and legend averred that the famous Sargon of Akkad,
the founder of the first Semitic Empire, had been rescued as a child
from a watery grave, and brought up by one. In both Babylonia and Egypt
the shadûf was closely associated with a system of irrigation which
went back to the dawn of their several histories.
What explanation must we give of its identity in the two countries?
There are three possibilities. In the first place, it may have been
invented independently on the banks of both the Euphrates and the
Nile. Similar conditions tend to produce similar results. But against
this is the fact that the shadûf was not the only kind of irrigating
machine that was suggested by the nature of the two rivers and
the lands through which they flowed. In modern Egypt, besides the
shadûf there are the _saqia_, or water-wheel, and an irrigating
contrivance which is in use in the Delta. The water-wheel, we know, was
a Babylonian invention which was imported into Egypt in comparatively
recent times; the irrigating contrivance of the Delta, which consists
of a bucket suspended on a rope swung by two men who stand facing
each other, is a primitive instrument which might have been invented
anywhere. Its survival is due to the fact that in the flat marshes of
the Delta, the shadûf, though saving labour, is not necessary, and it
therefore continued to be employed there after the shadûf was known.
But this implies that the shadûf was not the oldest instrument for
raising the water of the Nile.
Then there is the second possibility that the shadûf was borrowed by
Egypt from Babylonia or by Babylonia from Egypt in historical times.
In Babylonia, however, we can trace its history back to the Sumerian
epoch, and in both countries it was intimately connected with a system
of irrigation the origin of which must be sought in the prehistoric
age, and which was probably carried from the valley of the Euphrates to
that of the Nile. There remains the third possibility that it came to
Egypt along with the system of irrigation itself.
It is always easier to ask questions than to answer them, in archæology
as in other things. There are many details connected with the early
relationship between the civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt which
must be left to future research to discover. But of that relationship
there can now be little question in the minds of those who are
accustomed to deal with inductive evidence. There was intercourse in
the prehistoric age between the two countries, and the civilizing
influences, like the wheat and the language, came from the lands which
bordered on the Euphrates. Civilized man made his way from the east,
and dwelt in primeval days “in the land of Shinar.”[116]
[Illustration: THE 1^{ST}. ASSYRIAN EMPIRE]