The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

The fact, then, that the cuneiform syllabary was studied and used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile, brings with it the further fact that throughout this area there must have been numerous schools and teachers. Time and persevering labour were needed for its acquisition, while a knowledge of the Babylonian language which accompanied its study could not have been obtained without the help of teachers. It is accordingly a matter of no small astonishment that the letters received at the Egyptian foreign office were written, not only by professional scribes, but also by officials and soldiers.

Naturally the study of the foreign syllabary and language was facilitated in every possible way. In his excavations at Tel el-Amarna, Professor Flinders Petrie has discovered fragments of lists of cuneiform characters, as well as of comparative dictionaries of Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian. Moreover, a Babylonian mythological text has been found, in which the words have been divided from one another by dots of red paint, in order to assist the learner in making his way through the legend.

This mythological text is not the only one which [pg 066] has been met with among the tablets of Tel el-Amarna. The existence of such texts is a proof that the literature of Babylonia, as well as its language and script, was carried to the West. From very remote times public libraries, consisting for the most part of clay-books, were to be found in the Babylonian and Assyrian cities, and when Babylonian culture made its way to the West, similar libraries must have sprung up there also. The revelations made to us by the tablets of Tel el-Amarna show that these libraries, like those of Babylonia, were stocked with books written upon clay, many of which contained copies of Babylonian legends and myths.

One of the mythological tales discovered at Tel el-Amarna is the latter portion of a story which described the creation of the first man, Adapa or Adama, and the introduction of death into the world. Adapa had broken the wings of the south wind, and was accordingly ordered to appear before Anu, the lord of the sky. There he refused to touch the food and water of “death” that were offered him, and when subsequently the heart of Anu was “softened” towards him, he refused also the food and water of “life.” Whereupon “Anu looked upon him and raised his voice in lamentation: ‘O Adapa, wherefore eatest thou not? wherefore drinkest thou not? The gift of life cannot now be thine.’ ”

The beginning of the story has been in the British Museum many years. It is a fragment of a copy of the myth which was made for the library of Nineveh some eight centuries after the rest of the story, which has now been disinterred on the banks of the Nile, had been buried under the ruins of Khu-n-Aten's city. I copied it nearly twenty years ago, but had to wait for the discovery of the tablets of Tel el-Amarna before ascertaining its true meaning and significance. Nineveh and Tel el-Amarna had to unite in the restoration of the old Babylonian myth.

Canaan was the country in which the two streams of Babylonian and Egyptian culture met together, and we now know that Canaan was the centre of that literary activity which the Tel el-Amarna tablets have revealed to us. Canaan, in the age of the eighteenth dynasty, was emphatically the land of scribes and letter-writers. If libraries existed anywhere in Western Asia, they would surely have done so in the cities of Canaan.

One of these cities, Kirjath-Sepher, or “Book-town,” is mentioned in the Old Testament. It was also called Kirjath-Sannah, or “City of Instruction,” doubtless from the school which was attached to its library. The site of it is unfortunately lost; should it ever be recovered, we may expect to find beneath it literary treasures similar to those which the [pg 068] mounds of Assyria and Babylonia have yielded. Perhaps some day the papyri of Egypt will tell us where exactly to look for it.

A reference to it has already been met with. In the time of Ramses ii., an Egyptian scribe composed an ironical account of the adventures of a military officer in Palestine. The officer in question was called a Mohar, a word borrowed from the Babylonians, in whose language it signified “an envoy.”

The Egyptian work is consequently usually known as The Travels of a Mohar, and it gives us an interesting picture of Canaan shortly before the Israelitish Exodus. The author was clearly very proud of his geographical knowledge, and has therefore introduced the names of a large number of places. In one passage he asks: “Hast thou not seen Kirjath-Anab together with Beth-Sopher? Dost thou not know Adullam and Zidiputha?” Dr. W. Max Müller, to whom the correct reading of the passage is due, points out that the scribe has interchanged the words Kirjath, “city,” and Beth, “house,” and that he ought to have written Beth-Anab and Kirjath-Sopher. That he was acquainted, however, with the meaning of the Canaanitish word Sopher (in Egyptian Thupar) is shown by his adding to it the determinative of “writing.” Sopher, in fact, means “scribe,” just as sepher means “book,” and indicates the fact that [pg 069] Kirjath-Sepher was not only a town of books, but of book-writers as well. It will be remembered that Beth-Anab, “the house of grapes,” in the abbreviated form of Anab, is associated with Kirjath-Sepher in the Old Testament (Josh. xi. 21; xv. 49, 50), just as it is in the Egyptian papyrus.

In the Tel el-Amarna tablets we have a picture of Canaan in the century which preceded the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt. As we have seen, it was at that time an Egyptian province. We can thus understand why, in the tenth chapter of Genesis, Canaan is made a brother of Mizraim, or Egypt. For a while it obeyed the same sovereign and was administered by the same laws; the natives of Canaan held office in the court of the Pharaoh, and Egyptian governors ruled in the Canaanitish cities. It was not until after the death of Ramses ii., of the nineteenth dynasty, and about the very time when the Israelites were escaping from their house of bondage, that Canaan ceased to be an Egyptian dependency. From that time forward it was politically and geographically severed from the valley of the Nile, and the geographer could never again couple it with the land of Egypt.