The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions

by A. H. Sayce

But it is noticeable that throughout the historical period whenever the civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia came into contact, it was Egypt that was influenced rather than Asia. The tradition of the earliest ages was thus carried on; the stream of influence flowed from the east, and Herodotus was justified in assigning Egypt to Asia rather than to Africa. It was, in fact, Asia with an African colouring. In the days of the Eighteenth dynasty, when Egypt for the first and last time possessed an Asiatic empire, the eastern influence is very marked. The script itself became Babylonian, the correspondence of the Government with its own officials in Canaan was conducted in the Babylonian language and the Babylonian syllabary, and there are indications that even the official memoranda of the campaigns of Thothmes III. were drawn up in cuneiform characters. The clay tablets of Babylonia were imitated in Upper Egypt, where hieroglyphic and hieratic characters were somewhat awkwardly impressed upon them, and the language was filled with Semitic loan-words. The fashionable author of the age of the Nineteenth dynasty interlarded his style not only with Semitic words, but even with Semitic phrases. It is true that the Semitic words and phrases are Canaanite; but Canaan had long been a province of Babylonia, and it was because it was permeated with Babylonian culture and used the Babylonian script, that the foreign words and phrases were introduced into the literary language of Egypt.

On the other hand, so far as, we can judge, there was no reflex action of Egypt upon Babylonia. The seal-cylinder was never superseded there by the scarab; indeed the only scarabs yet found in the Mesopotamian region are memorials of the Egyptian conquests of the Eighteenth dynasty. Neither the hieroglyphs nor the hieratic of Egypt made their way eastward into Asia, a fact which is somewhat remarkable when we remember over how wide an area the more complicated cuneiform spread. It was Europe that was affected by Egypt rather than Asia. Before Egypt laid claim to Palestine, Babylonian culture had already taken too firm a hold of Western Asia to be dislodged, and in Babylonia itself Egyptian influences are hard to find. In the age of Khammu-rabi, we meet with a few proper names which may contain the name of the Sun-god Ra, as well as with the name of Anupum or Anubis on a stone cylinder, and the hieroglyphic character nefer, “good,” is affixed to a legal document.[107] But this merely proves that in a period when the Babylonian Empire reached to the confines of Egypt, there were Egyptians settled in Babylon for the purpose of trade. A more curious example of possible Egyptian influence is one to which I have drawn attention in my lectures on the Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia.[108] Thoth, the Egyptian god of literature, was accompanied by four apes, who sang hymns to the rising and setting sun. Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and the origin of these companions of Thoth has been cleared up by an inscription in a tomb at Assuan. Here we learn that in the age of the Old Empire, expeditions were sent by the Pharaohs into the Sudan—the home of the apes of Thoth—in order to bring back from “the land of the gods” Danga dwarfs who could “dance the dances of the gods.” In the eyes of the Egyptians, it would seem, there was little difference between the ape and the Danga dwarf; the one was a dwarf-like ape, the other an ape-like man. But they alone could perform correctly the dances that were held in honour of certain gods, and which are already depicted on the prehistoric vases of Egypt.[109] Closely allied to the Danga dwarfs and the apes of Thoth are the Khnumu or Patæki of Memphis, the followers of Ptah, who were also dwarfs with bowed legs. Now dwarfs of precisely the same form are found on early Babylonian seal-cylinders where they are associated sometimes with the goddess Istar, sometimes with an ape and the god Sin.[110] The Babylonian name of the dwarf was the Sumerian Nu-gidda, an indication that his association with the deity went back to Sumerian times. We may conclude that, like the Danga dwarf of Egypt, he, too, performed dances in honour of the gods.

The extraordinary resemblance of form between the Egyptian and Babylonian sacred dwarfs, as represented in art, raises the question whether the Babylonian dwarf was not an importation from Egypt, since the ape with which he was confounded was a native of the Sudan. This was the view to which I was long inclined, but there are certain considerations which make it difficult to be accepted. The Khnumu of Memphis were not the only dwarfs who were represented by the Egyptian artists. Still better known was Bes, who became a special favourite in the Roman period, when he was made a sort of patron of childbirth. But Bes, it was remembered, had come to Egypt from the southern lands of Somali and Arabia, like the goddess Hathor or the god Horus. Hathor is, I believe, the Babylonian Istar, who has passed to Egypt through her South Arabian name of Athtar; however this may be, Ptah of Memphis, whose followers were the Khnumu dwarfs, bears a Semitic name, and must therefore be of Semitic derivation. He belongs, that is to say, to the Egyptians of the dynastic stock, and is accordingly one of the few Egyptian divinities who is depicted in human form. On the other hand, the Sumerian dwarf Nu-gidda is the companion of Istar.

On the Egyptian side, therefore, the dwarfs of Ptah are associated with a god who has come from Asia, while the dwarf Bes was confessedly of foreign extraction. On the Babylonian side the dwarf Nu-gidda was the associate of Istar, the counterpart of Hathor, and of Sin, the Moon-god, who was adopted by the people of Southern Arabia, and whose name was carried as far as Mount Sinai on the borders of Egypt. All this suggests that the sacred dwarf came to the valley of the Nile from Babylonia and Arabia like the name of Ptah, the creator of the world. In this case it would have come with the dynastic Egyptians before the age of history begins.

But, on the other hand, there is the ape, and the ape is figured along with the dwarf on the Babylonian seals, It is true that the ape is equally foreign to Egypt and Babylonia, but the Sudan is nearer Egypt than Southern Arabia is to Babylonia. The actual date and path of migration, therefore, of the sacred dwarf must be left undecided. Whether he was brought to Egypt at the dawn of history, or whether he travelled to Babylonia in the historical age remains doubtful. All we can be sure of is that the sacred dwarfs of Babylonia and Egypt were originally one and the same, and that they testify to an intercourse between the two countries of which all literary record has been lost.[111]

The same verdict must be given in the case of another point, not only of resemblance, but of identity, between ancient Egypt and Babylonia. This is the shadûf or contrivance for drawing water from a falling river for the sake of irrigation. The shadûf, which is still used in Upper Egypt, can be traced back pictorially to the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, but the basin system of irrigation with which it was connected was already of immemorial antiquity. It is a simple yet most effective invention, and on that account perhaps the less likely to have been independently invented, for it is always the obvious which remains longest unnoticed. In the modern shadûf a long pole is laid across a beam which is supported at either end upon other poles or on pillars of brick or mud; it is kept in place by thongs and is heavily weighted at one end, while at the other end a bucket or skin is attached to it by means of a rope. The shadûf of the Eighteenth dynasty was supported sometimes, as to-day, on a cross-beam, sometimes on a column of mud, and the bucket was of triangular form with two handles to which the rope was tied. Representations of it from Theban tombs will be found in Maspero’s Dawn of Civilization, p. 764, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, plates 38 and 356. Precisely the same machine is represented on a bas-relief found by Layard in the palace of Kûyunjik at Nineveh,[112] the only difference being that the shadûf-worker stands upon a platform of brick instead of on the bank itself, and that the pillar upon which the pole is supported seems to be built of bricks rather than of mud. The machine, however, is identical in both its Egyptian and its Assyrian form. That the bas-relief should have been found in Assyria and not in Babylonia is a mere accident. Like almost everything else in Assyrian culture, the invention was of Babylonian origin, and, in fact, formed part of the system of irrigation which made the plain of Babylonia habitable. Herodotus, who calls the machine a κηλωνεῖον, describes it as being used as in Egypt, and for the same reason, since the river did not rise to the actual level of the cultivated ground, which, like that of Egypt, was divided into a number of basins.[113]

The palace of Kûyunjik belongs to the last age of Assyrian history. But the shadûf in Babylonia went back to the Sumerian period, as we know from the references to it in the lexical tablets. It was called dulâtum in Semitic Babylonian, the pole or poles being kakritum, and the bucket zirqu or zirqatum (Sumerian sû),[114] and an old Sumerian collection of agricultural precepts describes how the irrigator “fixes up the shadûf, hangs up the bucket and draws water.”[115] The “irrigator” was naturally an important personage in early Babylonia, and legend averred that the famous Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic Empire, had been rescued as a child from a watery grave, and brought up by one. In both Babylonia and Egypt the shadûf was closely associated with a system of irrigation which went back to the dawn of their several histories.

What explanation must we give of its identity in the two countries? There are three possibilities. In the first place, it may have been invented independently on the banks of both the Euphrates and the Nile. Similar conditions tend to produce similar results. But against this is the fact that the shadûf was not the only kind of irrigating machine that was suggested by the nature of the two rivers and the lands through which they flowed. In modern Egypt, besides the shadûf there are the saqia, or water-wheel, and an irrigating contrivance which is in use in the Delta. The water-wheel, we know, was a Babylonian invention which was imported into Egypt in comparatively recent times; the irrigating contrivance of the Delta, which consists of a bucket suspended on a rope swung by two men who stand facing each other, is a primitive instrument which might have been invented anywhere. Its survival is due to the fact that in the flat marshes of the Delta, the shadûf, though saving labour, is not necessary, and it therefore continued to be employed there after the shadûf was known. But this implies that the shadûf was not the oldest instrument for raising the water of the Nile.

Then there is the second possibility that the shadûf was borrowed by Egypt from Babylonia or by Babylonia from Egypt in historical times. In Babylonia, however, we can trace its history back to the Sumerian epoch, and in both countries it was intimately connected with a system of irrigation the origin of which must be sought in the prehistoric age, and which was probably carried from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. There remains the third possibility that it came to Egypt along with the system of irrigation itself.

It is always easier to ask questions than to answer them, in archæology as in other things. There are many details connected with the early relationship between the civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt which must be left to future research to discover. But of that relationship there can now be little question in the minds of those who are accustomed to deal with inductive evidence. There was intercourse in the prehistoric age between the two countries, and the civilizing influences, like the wheat and the language, came from the lands which bordered on the Euphrates. Civilized man made his way from the east, and dwelt in primeval days “in the land of Shinar.”[116]