The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

There is little room for wonder that, with their Asiatic proclivities and half-Asiatic descent, the later Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty should have surrounded themselves with Asiatic officials and courtiers. The conquest of Western Asia by Thothmes iii. had [pg 059] brought Asiatic fashions into Egypt. Thothmes himself, on the walls of his temple at Karnak, shows the spirit of an Asiatic rather than of an Egyptian conqueror. The inscriptions engraved upon them differ wholly from those which usually adorn the walls of an Egyptian temple. There are no praises or lists of the gods, no description of the offerings made to them, no interminable catalogue of the empty titles of the Pharaoh; we have, on the contrary, a business-like account of his campaigns, much of it copied from the memoranda of the scribes who accompanied the army on its march. It reads like an inscription on the walls of an Assyrian palace rather than one belonging to an Egyptian temple. It is, in fact, unique, the solitary example of a historical text which the great monuments of Egypt have bequeathed to us. It is, of itself, an eloquent testimony to the influence which Asia had already acquired in the valley of the Nile.

The conquests of Thothmes iii. placed the northern boundary of the Egyptian empire at the banks of the Euphrates. The kingdoms to the east, including Assyria, offered tribute to the Egyptian monarch, and those of northern Syria and eastern Asia Minor paid him homage. Farther south, Palestine, Phœnicia, and the land of the Amorites, which lay to the north of Palestine, became Egyptian [pg 060] provinces, garrisoned by Egyptian troops and administered by Egyptian officers. Even the country beyond the Jordan, Bashan and the Haurân, formed part of the Egyptian empire.

In many cases the native princes were left to manage the affairs of their several states, like the protected princes of modern India, but they were controlled by “commissioners” sent from the valley of the Nile. More frequently their place was taken by Egyptian governors, a very considerable number of whom, however, were of Canaanitish descent. This, indeed, is one of the most remarkable facts connected with the Egyptian empire in Asia; it was governed for the Pharaoh by natives rather than by Egyptians. But this was not all. Under Khu-n-Aten Egypt itself was invaded by the Asiatic stranger. The high places about the court were filled with foreigners whose names proclaim their Canaanitish origin; even the Vizier was called Dudu, the Biblical Dodo, to which the name of David is akin. The adherents of the cult of Aten who gathered round the Pharaoh at Tel el-Amarna seem largely to have belonged to Asia instead of Egypt.

Even the official language and writing were of Asiatic derivation. The language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of the same country. The Babylonian script and language [pg 061] were used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. They were the common medium of intercourse throughout the civilised world. It is in these that an Egyptian official writes to his master, and it is again in these that the reply is sent from the Egyptian foreign office.

The fact is a very surprising one, but recent discoveries have tended to explain it. At a very remote epoch Babylonian armies had made their way to the west, and Palestine was a province of Babylonia long before it became a province of Egypt. The long-continued and deep-seated influence of Babylonia brought to it the culture and civilisation of the Babylonian cities. The Babylonian system of writing formed a very important element in this ancient culture, and, along with the language of which it was the expression, took deep root in Western Asia. How long it continued to be employed there may be gathered from the fact that each district of Western Asia developed its own peculiar form of cuneiform script.

All this we have learned from a discovery made in 1887 in the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. Among the ruins of the foreign office of Khu-n-Aten, which adjoined the royal palace, the fellahin found a collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. They turned out to be [pg 062] the foreign correspondence of Khu-n-Aten and his father. When Khu-n-Aten quitted Thebes he took with him the archives of his father, and to these were subsequently added the official letters which he himself received.

Altogether, about three hundred tablets were discovered. But no one was on the spot who could appreciate their value, and, owing to a series of deplorable accidents, several of them were injured or destroyed before they fell into European hands. Eighty-two found their way to the British Museum, more than 160 fragments are at Berlin, the Gizeh Museum possesses 56, and a few are in the hands of private individuals.

The tablets have thrown a new and unexpected light on the history of the past. To find that the language and script of Babylonia were the common medium of literary and official intercourse throughout Western Asia in the century before the Exodus was sufficiently startling; it was much more startling to find that this early period was emphatically a literary era. Letters passed to and fro along the high-roads upon the most trifling subjects, and a constant correspondence was maintained between the court of the Pharaoh and the most distant parts of Western Asia. The Bedouin chiefs beyond the Jordan send letters protesting their loyalty to the [pg 063] Egyptian monarch, and declaring that their forces were at his disposal; the vassal-king of Jerusalem begs for help from Egypt to protect him against his personal enemies; the governors of Phœnicia and the land of the Amorites describe the threatening attitude of the Hittites in the north; the king of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim dwells with pride on his relationship to the ruler of the Egyptian empire; while the kings of Assyria and Babylonia ask that gold may be sent them from Egypt, where it is as plentiful as “the dust,” or discuss questions of international policy or commercial interest. We are suddenly transported to a world much like our own;—a world in which education is widely spread, where schools and scholars abound, and libraries and archive-chambers exist.

The nature of the cuneiform system of writing would of itself indicate that schools were numerous. It was a system which was extraordinarily difficult to learn. Unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, no assistance was afforded to the memory by any resemblance between the characters and external objects; like the Chinese characters of to-day, they consisted merely of groups of conventionally arranged lines or wedges. Like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, the number of characters was extremely large, and each character not only represented more than one [pg 064] phonetic value, but it could also be used ideographically to express ideas. Thus the same character may not only represent the phonetic values kur, mat, nat, lat, sat, and gin; it may also denote the ideas of “country,” “mountain,” and “conquest.” But this was not all. The original picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldæa, from whom it had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors. Accordingly, whole groups of characters which denoted a particular word in Sumerian—the non-Semitic language of ancient Chaldæa—were taken over by the Semites and used by them to denote the same word, though, of course, with a totally different pronunciation. In Sumerian, for example, mer-sig signified “trousers,” but though the two characters mer and sig continued to be written in Semitic times in order to express the word, the pronunciation attached to them was sarbillu, the modern Arabic shirwâl.

The pupil, therefore, who wished to learn the cuneiform syllabary at all thoroughly was compelled to know something of the old Sumerian language of Chaldæa. It was far more necessary in his case than a knowledge of Latin would be in our own. Moreover, it was necessary for him to learn the various forms which the same cuneiform character assumed in [pg 065] different countries or at different periods in the same country. These various forms were very numerous, and they often differed more than black letter differs from ordinary modern type.