Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments / A Sketch of the Most Striking Confirmations of the Bible, From Recent Discoveries in Egypt, Palestine, Assyria, Babylonia, Asia Minor

by A. H. Sayce

In the midst of all these geographical names we find a notice inserted relating to “the mighty hunter” Nimrod, the beginning of whose kingdom, we are told, was Babylon, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh in the land of Shinar. His name has not yet been discovered in the cuneiform records. Some Assyrian scholars have [pg 045] wished to identify him with Gisdhubar, the hero of the great Chaldean epic, which contains the account of the Deluge; but Gisdhubar was a solar hero who had originally been the Accadian god of fire. It is true that Gisdhubar was the special deity of the town of Marad, and that Na-Marad would signify in the Accadian language “the prince of Marad”; such a title, however, has not been found in the inscriptions. Erech, called Uruk on the monuments, is now represented by the mounds of Warka, far away to the south of Babylon, and was one of the oldest and most important of the Babylonian cities. Like Calneh, the Kul-unu of the monuments, it was situated in the division of the country known as Sumir or Shinar. Accad, from which the northern division of the country took its name, was a suburb of Sippara (now Abu-Habba), and, along with the latter, made up the Sepharvaim or “Two Sipparas” of Scripture. The Accadian form of the name was Agadê, and here was the seat of a great library formed in remote days by Sargon I, and containing, among other treasures, a work on astronomy and astrology in seventy-two books.

The translation of the verse which follows the list of Nimrod's Babylonian cities is doubtful. It is a question whether we should render with the Authorised Version: “Out of that land went forth Asshur,” or prefer the alternative translation: “Out of that land he went forth to Assyria.” The latter is favoured by Micah v. 6, where “the land of Nimrod” appears to mean Assyria. But the question cannot be finally decided until we discover some positive information about Nimrod on the monuments.

If, however, little light has been thrown by modern [pg 046] research on the person of Nimrod, this is by no means the case as regards Abraham. Abu-ramu or Abram, “the exalted father,” Abraham's original name, is a name which also occurs on early Babylonian contract-tablets. Sarah, again, is the Assyrian sarrat, “queen,” while Milcah, the daughter of Haran, is the Assyrian milcat, “princess.” The site of Ur of the Chaldees, the birthplace of Abram, has been discovered, and excavations have been made among the ruins of its temples. The site is now called Mugheir, and lies on the western side of the Euphrates, on the border of the desert, immediately to the west of Erech. The chief temple of Ur was dedicated to the moon-god, and the Accadian inscriptions on its bricks, which record its foundation, are among the earliest that we possess. It was, in fact, the capital of one of the oldest of the pre-Semitic dynasties, and its very name, Uru or Ur, is only the Semitic form of the Accadian eri, “city.” It is probable that it had passed into the hands of the Semitic “Casdim” before the age of Abraham; at all events, it had long been the resort of Semitic traders, who had ceased to lead the roving life of their ancestors in the Arabian desert. From Ur, Abraham's father had migrated to Haran, in the northern part of Mesopotamia, on the high road which led from Babylonia and Assyria into Syria and Palestine. Why he should have migrated to so distant a city has been a great puzzle, and has tempted scholars to place both Ur and Haran in wrong localities; but here, again, the cuneiform inscriptions have at last furnished us with the key. As far back as the Accadian epoch, the district in which Haran was built belonged to the rulers of Babylonia; Haran was, in fact, the frontier town of the empire, commanding at once the [pg 047] highway into the west and the fords of the Euphrates; the name itself was an Accadian one signifying “the road”; and the deity to whom it was dedicated was the moon-god of Ur. The symbol of this deity was a conical stone, with a star above it, and gems with this symbol engraved upon them may be seen in the British Museum.

The road which passed through Haran was well known to the Chaldean kings and their subjects. Sargon I of Accad, and his son Naram-Sin, had already made expeditions into the far west. Sargon had carved his image on the rocks of the Mediterranean coast, and had even crossed over into the island of Cyprus. The campaign, therefore, of Chedor-laomer and his allies, recorded in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, was no new thing. The soil of Canaan had already felt the tramp of Babylonian feet. We can even fix the approximate date at which the campaign took place, and when Abraham and his confederates surprised the invaders and recovered from them the spoils of Southern Palestine. For twelve years, we are told, the tribes in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea had served Chedor-laomer, king of Elam, and then they rebelled; but the rebellion was quickly followed by invasion. Chedor-laomer and “the kings that were with him,”—Amraphel, king of Shinar, Arioch, king of Ellasar, and Tidal, “king of nations,”—marched against the revolters, overthrew them in battle, and carried them away captive. The name of Arioch is actually found on the cuneiform monuments. Bricks have been discovered engraved with the legend of Eri-aku, king of Larsa, the son of Kudur-Mabug the Elamite. Eri-aku means in Accadian “the servant of the moon-god,” and Larsa, his capital, is now represented [pg 048] by the mounds of Senkereh, a little to the east of Erech. Kudur-Mabug is entitled “the father of Palestine,” and it would, therefore, seem that he claimed supremacy over Canaan. His name is an Elamite one, signifying “the servant of the god Mabug,” and is closely parallel to the Biblical Chedor-laomer, that is, Kudur-Lagamar, “the servant of the god Lagamar.” Lagamar and Mabug, however, were different deities, and we cannot, therefore, identify Chedor-laomer and Kudur-Mabug together. But it is highly probable that they were brothers, Chedor-laomer being the elder, who held sway in Elam, while his nephew Eri-aku owned allegiance to him in Southern Babylonia. At any rate, it is plain from the history of Genesis that Babylon was at this time subject to Elam, and under the government of more than one ruler. Amraphel would have been king of that portion of Sumir, or Southern Chaldea, which was not comprised in the dominions of the king of Larsa; and the fact that the narrative begins by stating that the campaign in Palestine was made in his days, seems to imply that the whole account has been extracted from the Babylonian archives. As for “Tidal, king of nations,” it is very possible that we ought to read Turgal (Thorgal), with the Septuagint, while Goyyim or “nations” has been shown by Sir Henry Rawlinson to be a misreading for Gutium, the name given to the tract of country northward of Babylonia, which stretched from Mesopotamia to the mountains of Kurdistan, and within which the kingdom of Assyria afterwards arose.

Now, the Assyrian king Assur-bani-pal tells us that an image of the goddess Nana had been carried away from Babylonia by the Elamite king Kudur-Nankhundi when he overran Chaldea 1635 years before his own [pg 049] time, that is to say, in 2280 b.c. It is possible that this invasion of the country by Kudur-Nankhundi was the beginning of Elamite supremacy in Babylonia, and that Kudur-Mabug and Chedor-laomer were descendants of his. If so, we shall have an approximate date for the rescue of Lot by Abraham, and consequently for the age of Abraham himself.

The fourteenth chapter of Genesis is the last in the Book that relates to Babylonia. The history now turns to Egypt; and it is, therefore, from the monuments of Egypt, and not from those of Babylonia and Assyria, that we henceforth have to look for light and information.

No traditions of a deluge had been preserved among the Egyptians. They believed, however, that there was a time when the greater part of mankind had been destroyed by the angry gods. A myth told how men had once uttered hostile words against their creator Ra, the Sun-God, who accordingly sent the goddess Hathor to slay them, so that the earth was covered with their blood as far as the town of Herakleopolis. Then Ra drank 7,000 cups of wine, made from the fruits of Egypt and mingled with the blood of the slain; his heart rejoiced, and he made an oath that he would not destroy mankind again. Rain filled the wells, and Ra went forth to fight against his human foes. Their bows were broken and themselves slaughtered, and the god returned victorious to heaven, where he created Paradise and the people of the stars. This myth agrees with another, according to which mankind had emanated from the eyes of Ra, though there was a different legend of the creation, which asserted that all men, with the exception of the negroes, had sprung from the tears of the two deities Horus and Sekhet.

When Abraham went down into Egypt the empire was already very old. Its history begins with Menes, who united the independent states of the Nile valley into a single kingdom, and established his capital at Memphis. The first six dynasties of kings, who reigned 1,478 years, represent what is called the Old Empire. It was under the monarchs of the fourth dynasty that the pyramids of Gizeh were built; and at no time during its later history did the art and culture of Egypt reach again so high a level as it did under the Old Empire. With the close of the sixth dynasty came a period of disaster and decline. When Egypt again emerged into the light of history it was under the warrior princes of the twelfth dynasty. The capital had been shifted to the new city of Thebes, in the south, a new god, Amun, presided over the Egyptian deities, and the ruling class itself differed in blood and features from the men of the Old Empire. Henceforth Egyptian art was characterised by a stiff conventionality wholly unlike the freedom and vigour of the art of the early dynasties; the government became more autocratic; and the obelisk took the place of the pyramid in architecture. But the Middle Empire, as it has been termed, did not last long. Semitic invaders from Canaan and Arabia overran the country, and established their seat at Zoan or Tanis. For 511 years they held the Egyptians in bondage, though the native princes, who had taken refuge in the south, gradually acquired more and more power, until at last, under the leadership of Aahmes or Amosis, the founder of the eighteenth dynasty, they succeeded in driving the hated foreigners out. These foreigners are known to history as the Hyksos or Shepherds, Hyksos being the Egyptian hik shasu, “prince of the Shasu,” or [pg 051] “Beduins.” The name which they bear upon the monuments is Menti.

It must have been while the Hyksos monarchs were holding their court at Zoan that Abraham entered the land. He found there men of Semitic blood, like himself, and speaking a Semitic language. A welcome was assured him, and he had no need of an interpreter. But the Hyksos kings had already begun to assume Egyptian state and to adopt Egyptian customs. In place of the Semitic shalat, “ruler,” the title by which their first leaders had been known, they had borrowed the Egyptian title of Pharaoh. Pharaoh appears on the monuments as pir-aa, “great house,” the palace in which the king lived being used to denote the king himself, just as in our own time the “porte” or gate of the palace has become synonymous with the Turkish Sultan.

By the time that Joseph was sold into Egypt there was little outward difference between the court at Zoan and the court of the native princes at Thebes. The very names and titles borne by the Hyksos officials had become Egyptian; and though they still regarded the god Set as the chief object of their worship, they had begun to rebuild the Egyptian temples, and pay honour to the Egyptian deities. Potiphar, to whom Joseph was sold, bore a purely Egyptian name, meaning “the gift of the risen one,” while the name of Potipherah, the high priest of On, whose daughter, Asenath, was married by Joseph, is equally Egyptian, and signifies “the gift of the Sun-God.” The Sun-God was the special deity of On; to him the great temple of the city was dedicated, and the name by which the place was known to the Greeks was Heliopolis, “the city of the sun.” It was the city whose name is played upon in Isaiah xix. 18, where [pg 052] the prophet declares that in the day when Egypt shall be converted to the Lord, “the City of the Sun” ('ir ha-kheres) shall become “the city of the destruction” of idols ('ir ha-heres). Jeremiah, too, plays similarly upon the name, when he says that Nebuchadnezzar, “shall break also the images of Beth-Shemesh (the house of the Sun-God) that is in the land of Egypt” (Jer. xliii. 13); while Ezekiel changes the Egyptian word On into the Hebrew aven, “nothingness,” and prophesies that “the young men of Aven shall fall by the sword” (Ezek. xxx. 17). The ruins of On are within an afternoon's drive of Cairo: but nothing remains of the city except mounds of earth, and a solitary obelisk that once stood in front of the great temple of the sun, and had been reared by Usertasen I, of the twelfth dynasty, a thousand years before the daughter of its priest became the wife of Joseph. The name of this daughter, Asenath, is the Egyptian 'Snat.