The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

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.