The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

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?