From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Thus, recent discoveries in Upper Egypt seem to prove beyond doubt that there was intercourse between the two countries in prehistoric times and that, as a result of this early communication, wheat was first introduced from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. Another consequence of the intercourse between the two lands was that the Egyptians became acquainted with the Babylonian system of irrigation—a system which had rendered the soil of Babylonia the most productive in the then known world. Babylonian engineers, there is reason to believe, introduced into Egypt the shadoff and the sakieh or water wheel, both of which were Babylonian inventions, as is clearly attested by early Assyrian bas-reliefs and by still earlier Sumerian inscriptions.

Yet more exhaustive researches regarding the early script used in the two countries and the relations of the language of Babylonia, which was a Semetic tongue, to that of Egypt lead to the same conclusion as do investigations respecting the introduction of wheat from the land of the Euphrates, where it still grows wild, into that of the Nile, and the identity of the irrigation machines which have been in continuous use in both lands for thousands of years.

It may, indeed, be admitted that no one of these facts is, of itself, sufficient to demonstrate that the culture and the engineering science of Egypt were Babylonian in origin; but, when they are all found to point in the same direction, the argument based on them has a cumulative force that is quite unassailable. Dr. Sayce gives judgment in a single sentence when he declares “it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Semitic-speaking people who brought the science of irrigation and the art of writing to the banks of the Nile came, like the wheat they cultivated, from the Babylonian plain.”[531]

Those, however, who are interested in this fascinating theory, which ascribes to Babylonia not only Egyptian civilization but also the ancestors of the historical Egyptians, should read the remarkable work on the subject by Professor Hommel—a work[532] of profound scholarship and one which has convinced many of the most eminent Orientalists that there can no longer be any doubt that the civilization and culture of Egypt came originally from Babylonia.

But interesting as are the discoveries respecting the cultural relations between the two countries in question, no notice of Babylonia would be complete without some reference to her contributions to the science of astronomy. Here we have more positive information than has hitherto been available regarding the primeval intercourse between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile. As one might expect, however, in dealing with subjects carrying us back into the mists of antiquity, we find that the question of Babylonian astronomy is one that is deeply involved in myth and legend, but such myths and legends as help to corroborate the findings of historians and archæologists concerning the labors of the astronomers of old Chaldea.

Even in the question regarding the origin of astronomy, as in that concerning the beginnings of civil engineering in Egypt, we note the same old debate among the learned as to who were the more ancient astronomers, the Egyptians or the Babylonians. The people of the Nileland boasted that Hermes or Osiris was the founder of their astronomical system, while the Chaldeans, that is the Babylonians, claimed that the first astronomer was Belus,[533] the son of Nimrod, who was the grandson of Noah and the reputed builder of the Tower of Babel. This tower, often confused with the tower of Bel described by Herodotus, was, according to Chaldean legend, the first astronomical observatory.

It was not, however, thousands of years before the Christian era, as certain writers would have us believe, that Chaldean astronomy became an exact science. This was not possible and for a very simple reason—the absence of a strict chronology to which the Chaldean observers of the heavens did not attain until 747 B. C., when they adopted what is known as the era of Nabonnassar. Previously there could be no certainty regarding the calculation of time. Not, indeed, until the first recorded eclipse, March 21, 721 B. C., was astronomy raised to the dignity of an exact science.

In fact, during the first twenty or thirty centuries of Mesopotamian history [writes the distinguished Belgian savant, Franz Cumont] nothing is found but empirical observations, intended chiefly to indicate omens, and the rudimentary knowledge which these observations display is hardly in advance of that of the Egyptians, the Chinese or the Aztecs.[534]

It is only during the last quarter of a century that we have been able to determine the advances made by astronomy at different periods of Babylonian history and we owe this knowledge almost entirely to the persistent labors of three Jesuits, Fathers Epping, Kugler, and Straszmaier.[535] By a long and careful study of the cuneiform inscriptions bearing on astronomy, many of which they have deciphered, interpreted, and published, they have, for the first time, put the history of Babylonian astronomy on a firm, scientific basis. And they have at the same time completely dissipated the poetical fancy of “Chaldean shepherds discovering the causes of eclipses while watching their flocks” and the oft repeated fable that it was Babylonian astronomers who discovered the precession of the equinoxes—an achievement that was due to the genius of Hipparchus of Nicæa.

Thanks, however, to the researches of the three savants named, it must now be conceded that certain discoveries which have hitherto been attributed to Hipparchus should be credited to the astronomers of Babylonia. Among these were discoveries regarding the inequalities of the lengths of the seasons, the methods of determining in advance the phenomena of the five known planets, the duration of their synodic revolutions, and the dates of the phases and eclipses of the moon. In a remarkable cuneiform inscription, dated as early as 523 B. C., is given what is practically a monthly ephemeris not only of the sun and moon and eclipses but also the more notable phenomena of the planets. With reason does Father Kugler consider this “the oldest known document of the scientific astronomy of the Chaldeans.” And so greatly is he impressed by the marvelous astronomical tables which were constructed by the priest astronomers of Babylonia that he declares: