The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

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.

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.