Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations

by A. H. Sayce

But the recent history of Oriental archaeology is strewn with instances of the danger of historical scepticism where the evidence is defective, and a single discovery may at any moment throw new and unexpected light on the materials we possess. Who, for instance, could have supposed that the name of the Israelites would ever be found on an Egyptian monument? They were but a small and despised body of public slaves, settled in Goshen, on the extreme skirts of the Egyptian territory. And yet in 1886 a granite stela was found by Professor Flinders Petrie containing a hymn of victory in honour of Meneptah the son of Ramses II., and declaring how, among other triumphs, "the Israelites" had been left "without seed." The names of all the other vanquished or subject peoples mentioned in the hymn have attached to them the determinative of place; the Israelites alone are without it; they alone have no fixed habitation, no definite locality of their own, so far at least as the writer knew. It would seem that they had already escaped into the desert, and been lost to sight in its recesses. Who could ever have imagined that in such a case an Egyptian poet would have judged it worth his while even to allude to the vanished serfs?

Still more recently the tomb of Menes, the founder of the united Egyptian monarchy, and the leader of the first historical dynasty, has been discovered by M. de Morgan at Negada, north of Thebes. It was only a few months previously that the voice of historical criticism had authoritatively declared him to be "fabulous" and "mythical." The "fabulous" Menes, nevertheless, has now proved to be a very historical personage indeed; some of his bones are in the museum of Cairo, and the objects disinterred in his tomb show that he belonged to an age of culture and intercourse with distant lands. The hieroglyphic system of writing was already complete, and fragments of obsidian vases turned on the lathe indicate commercial relations with the Ægean Sea.

If we turn to Babylonia the story is the same. Hardly had the critic pronounced Sargon of Akkad to be a creature of myth, when at Niffer and Telloh monuments both of himself and of his son were brought to light, which, as in the case of Menes, proved that this "creature of myth" lived in an age of advanced culture and in the full blaze of history. At Niffer he and his son Naram-Sin built a platform of huge bricks, each stamped with their names, and at Telloh clay bullæ have been discovered, bearing the seals and addresses of the letters which were conveyed during their reigns by a highly organised postal service along the highroads of the kingdom. Numberless contract-tablets exist, dated in the year when Sargon "conquered the land of the Amorites," as Syria and Canaan were called, or accomplished some other achievement; and a cadastral survey of the district in which Telloh was situated, made for the purpose of taxation, incidentally refers to "the governor" who was appointed over "the Amorites."

Perhaps, however, the discovery which above all others has revolutionised our conceptions of early Oriental history, and reversed the critical judgments which had prevailed in regard to it, was that of the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The discovery was made in 1887 at Tel el-Amarna on the eastern bank of the Nile, midway between the modern towns of Minia and Siût. Here is the site of the city built by Khu-n-Aten, the "Heretic" Pharaoh, when the dissensions between himself and the Theban priesthood became too acute to allow him to remain any longer in the capital of his fathers. He migrated northward, accordingly, with his court and the adherents of the new creed which he sought to impose upon his subjects, carrying with him the archives of the kingdom and the foreign correspondence of the empire. It was this foreign correspondence which was embodied in the cuneiform tablets. They make it clear that even under Egyptian rule the Babylonian language and the Babylonian system of writing continued to be the official language and script of western Asia, and that the Egyptian government itself was forced to keep Babylonian secretaries who understood them. The fact proves the long and permanent influence of Babylonian culture from the banks of the Euphrates to the shores of the Mediterranean, and is intelligible only in the light of the further fact that the empire of Sargon of Akkad had been founded more than two thousand years before. Nothing but a prodigiously long lapse of time could explain the firm hold thus obtained by a foreign language, and a system of writing the most complex and difficult to learn that has ever been invented.

The tablets further prove the existence throughout the Oriental world of schools and libraries where the Babylonian language and characters could be taught and learned and its voluminous literature stored and studied. The age of Khu-n-Aten, which is also the age of Moses, was essentially a literary age; a knowledge of reading and writing was widely spread, and an active correspondence was being constantly carried on from one part of the civilised world to the other. Even the Bedâwin shêkhs, who acted as free-lances in Palestine, sent letters to the Pharaoh and read his replies. The archive-chambers of the cities of Canaan contained numberless documents contemporaneous with the events they recorded, and the libraries were filled with the treasures of Babylonian literature, with legends and stories of the gods, and the earlier history of the East. Doubtless, as in Babylonia, so too in Palestine there were also in them contracts and inventories of property, dated in the Babylonian fashion by the events which characterised the years of a king's reign. The scribes and upper classes could read and write, and therefore had access to all these stores of literature and historical materials.

There is no longer any reason, therefore, for doubting that Moses and his contemporaries could have read and written books, or that the Hebrew legislator was learned in "all the wisdom of the Egyptians." If we are to reject the historical trustworthiness of the Pentateuch, it must be on other grounds than the assumption of the illiterateness of the age or the impossibility of compiling at the time an accurate register of facts. The Tel el-Amarna tablets have made it impossible to return to the old critical point of view; the probabilities henceforward are in favour of the early date and historical truth of the Old Testament narratives, and not against them. Accurately-dated history and a reading public existed in Babylonia long before the days of Abraham; in the age of Moses the whole Eastern world from the Nile to the Euphrates was knit together in the bonds of literary intercourse, and all who were in contact with the great nations of the East—with Egypt, with Babylonia, or with Assyria—came of necessity under its influence and held the book and its author in the highest reverence.

But besides thus revolutionising our ideas of the age that preceded the Hebrew Exodus, the Tel el-Amarna letters have thrown a welcome light on the political causes of the Exodus itself. They have made it clear that the reaction against the reforms and government of "the Heretic King" Khu-n-Aten was as much national as religious. It was directed quite as much against the foreigner who had usurped the chief offices of state, as against the religion which the foreigner was believed to have brought with him. The rise of the Nineteenth dynasty marks the triumph of the national uprising and the overthrow of Asiatic influence. The movement of which it was the result resembled the revolt of Arabi in our own days. But there was no England at hand to prevent the banishment of the stranger and his religion; the Semites who had practically governed Egypt under Khu-n-Aten were expelled or slain, and hard measure was dealt out to such of their kinsfolk as still remained in the land. The free-born sons of Israel in the district of Goshen were turned into public serfs, and compelled to work at the buildings with which Ramses II. was covering the soil of Egypt, and their "seed" was still further diminished by the destruction of their male offspring, lest they should join the enemies of Egypt in any future invasion of the country, or assist another attempt from within to subvert the old faith of the people and the political supremacy of the Theban priests. That the fear was not without justification is shown by the words of Meneptah, the son of Ramses, at the time when the very existence of the Egyptian monarchy was threatened by the Libyan invasion from the west and the sea-robbers who attacked it from the Greek seas. The Asiatic settlers, he tells us, had pitched "their tents before Pi-Bailos" (or Belbeis) at the western extremity of the land of Goshen, and the Egyptian "kings found themselves cut off in the midst of their cities, and surrounded by earthworks, for they had no mercenaries to oppose to" the foe. It would seem that the Israelites effected their escape under cover of the Libyan invasion in the fifth year of Meneptah's reign, and on this account it is that their name is introduced into the pæan wherein the destruction of the Libyan host is celebrated and the Pharaoh is declared to have restored peace to the whole world.

If the history of Israel thus receives light and explanation on the one side from the revelations of Oriental archaeology, on the other side it sometimes clears up difficulties in the history of the great nations of Oriental antiquity. The Egyptologist, for instance, is confronted by a fact towards the explanation of which the monuments furnish no help. This is the curious change that passed over the tenure of land in Egypt during the period of Hyksos rule. When the Fourteenth dynasty fell, a large part of the soil of Egypt was in the hands of private holders, many of whom were great feudal landowners whose acknowledgment of the royal supremacy was at times little more than nominal. When, however, the Hyksos were at last driven back to Asia, and Ahmes succeeded in founding the Eighteenth dynasty, these landowners had disappeared. All the landed estate of the country had passed into the possession of the Pharaoh and the priests, and the old feudal aristocracy had been replaced by a bureaucracy, the members of which owed their power and position to the king. The history of Joseph accounts for this, and it is the only explanation of the fact which is at present forthcoming. Famine compelled the people to sell their lands to the king and his minister, and a Hyksos Pharaoh and his Hebrew vizier thus succeeded in destroying the older aristocracy and despoiling the natives of their estates. It was probably at this period also that the public granaries, of which we hear so much in the age of the Eighteenth dynasty, were first established in Egypt, in imitation of those of Babylonia, where they had long been an institution, and a superintendent was appointed over them who, as in Babylonia, virtually held the power of life and death in his hands.

One of the main results, then, of recent discovery in the East has been to teach us the solidarity of ancient Oriental history, and the impossibility of forming a correct judgment in regard to any one part of it without reference to the rest. Hebrew history is unintelligible as long as it stands alone, and the attempt to interpret it apart and by itself has led to little else than false and one-sided conclusions; it is only when read in the light of the history of the great empires which flourished beside it that it can be properly understood. Israel and the nations around it formed a whole, so far as the historian is concerned, which, like the elements of a picture, cannot be torn asunder. If we would know the history of the one, we must know the history of the other also. And each year is adding to our knowledge; new monuments are being excavated, new inscriptions being read, and the revelations of to-day are surpassed by those of to-morrow. We have already learnt much, but it is only a commencement; Egypt is only now beginning to be scientifically explored, a few only of the multitudinous libraries of Babylonia have been brought to light, and the soil of Assyria has been little more than touched. Elsewhere, in Elam, in Mesopotamia, in Asia Minor, in Palestine itself, everything still remains to be done. The harvest truly is plentiful, but the labourers are few.