[89] Erech was one of the earliest of the Semitic settlements in the Babylonian plain, and Erech was known later as ’supuru, “the sheepfold,” as is shown by its ideographic equivalent.
[90] The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp. 276–80.
[91] See my Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, pp. 276–89, 348–61.
[92] If, however, the Sumerian pictograph for “city” represents a tower on a mound, as seems to be the case, the identity in form of the Egyptian hieroglyph cannot be an accident, since both the tower and the artificial platform were essentially Babylonian. In the cursive cuneiform two separate pictographs have coalesced, one representing a seat, the other what appears to be a tower on a mound.
[93] In Egyptian, however, the bird stands over a door, while in Babylonian it is over the two-legged stool on which two vases of offerings are set when it is used to denote the image of a god. The Sumerian pictograph for “(divine) lord” or “lady” (NIN) is the representation of a similar vase on a mat, and thus has the same form as the Egyptian hotep. The Egyptian nefer, “good,” finds its exact counterpart in the Babylonian pictograph of “ornament” (ME-TE). The Babylonian “house,” too, is given the same tower-like shape as the Egyptian (āhā).
[94] In a short Paper entitled Lexicalische Belege zu meinen Vortrag über die sprachliche Stellung des Altægyptischen (1895), in which he has attempted to draw up a list of phonetic equivalences between Egyptian and Sumerian. In this, however, I am unable to follow him, as his comparisons of Egyptian and Sumerian words are not convincing.
[95] See de Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de l’Egypte, pp. 94, 95. According to Schweinfurth, barley, which is also found in the prehistoric graves of Egypt, must originally have come from Babylonia like the wheat. Qemḥu is found in the Pyramid texts (Maspero, Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie et à l’Archéologie égyptiennes et assyriennes, v. p. 10). Boti, whence the Coptic bôti and the battawa or “durra cake” of modern Egyptian Arabic, was “durra,” not “wheat.”
[96] See Maspero, Études de Mythologie, ii. pp. 313 sqq.
[97] I have put “Lower” between parentheses since it is very questionable whether this particular system of registering time was known in the Delta until it was introduced from Upper Egypt. On the Palermo stone a list of the early kings of Lower Egypt is given, but without any dates, which make their appearance along with the kings of the First dynasty, who belonged to Upper Egypt. It is interesting to observe that the ideograph for “year” is denoted in exactly the same way in both the Babylonian and the Egyptian hieroglyphs by the branch of a (palm) tree. Such a curious symbol for the idea can hardly have been invented independently. Professor Hommel further draws attention to the fact that while the literal translation of a common ideographic mode of representing “year” in Babylonian is “name of heaven,” that of the two syllables of the Egyptian word renpet, “year,” would also be “name of heaven.”
[98] Hierakonpolis, part i. plate xxix. The name of the king is usually (but erroneously) written Nar-Mer.