Legends of Babylon and Egypt in Relation to Hebrew Tradition

by L. W. King

(1) See Breasted, Anc. Rec., I, pp. 52, 57.
(2) Cf. Hall, Ancient History of the Near East, p. 99 f.

On the top of the new fragment(1) we meet the same band of rectangles as at Palermo,(2) but here their upper portions are broken away, and there only remains at the base of each of them the outlined figure of a royal personage, seated in the same attitude as those on the Palermo stone. The remarkable fact about these figures is that, with the apparent exception of the third figure from the right,(3) each wears, not the Crown of the North, as at Palermo, but the Crown of the South. We have then to do with kings of Upper Egypt, not the Delta, and it is no longer possible to suppose that the predynastic rulers of the Palermo Stele were confined to those of Lower Egypt, as reflecting northern tradition. Rulers of both halves of the country are represented, and Monsieur Gautier has shown,(4) from data on the reverse of the inscription, that the kings of the Delta were arranged on the original stone before the rulers of the south who are outlined upon our new fragment. Moreover, we have now recovered definite proof that this band of the inscription is concerned with predynastic Egyptian princes; for the cartouche of the king, whose years are enumerated in the second band immediately below the kings of the south, reads Athet, a name we may with certainty identify with Athothes, the second successor of Menes, founder of the Ist Dynasty, which is already given under the form Ateth in the Abydos List of Kings.(5) It is thus quite certain that the first band of the inscription relates to the earlier periods before the two halves of the country were brought together under a single ruler.

(1) Cairo No. 1; see Gautier, Mus. Égypt., III, pl. xxiv
f.
(2) In this upper band the spaces are true rectangles, being
separated by vertical lines, not by the hieroglyph for
"year" as in the lower bands; and each rectangle is assigned
to a separate king, and not, as in the other bands, to a
year of a king's reign.
(3) The difference in the crown worn by this figure is
probably only apparent and not intentional; M. Foucart,
after a careful examination of the fragment, concludes that
it is due to subsequent damage or to an original defect in
the stone; cf. Bulletin, XII, ii, p. 162.
(4) Op. cit., p. 32 f.
(5) In Manetho's list he corresponds to {Kenkenos}, the
second successor of Menes according to both Africanus and
Eusebius, who assign the name Athothis to the second ruler
of the dynasty only, the Teta of the Abydos List. The form
Athothes is preserved by Eratosthenes for both of Menes'
immediate successors.

Though the tradition of these remote times is here recorded on a monument of the Vth Dynasty, there is no reason to doubt its general accuracy, or to suppose that we are dealing with purely mythological personages. It is perhaps possible, as Monsieur Foucart suggests, that missing portions of the text may have carried the record back through purely mythical periods to Ptah and the Creation. In that case we should have, as we shall see, a striking parallel to early Sumerian tradition. But in the first extant portions of the Palermo text we are already in the realm of genuine tradition. The names preserved appear to be those of individuals, not of mythological creations, and we may assume that their owners really existed. For though the invention of writing had not at that time been achieved, its place was probably taken by oral tradition. We know that with certain tribes of Africa at the present day, who possess no knowledge of writing, there are functionaries charged with the duty of preserving tribal traditions, who transmit orally to their successors a remembrance of past chiefs and some details of events that occurred centuries before.(1) The predynastic Egyptians may well have adopted similar means for preserving a remembrance of their past history.

(1) M. Foucart illustrates this point by citing the case of
the Bushongos, who have in this way preserved a list of no
less than a hundred and twenty-one of their past kings; op.
cit., p. 182, and cf. Tordey and Joyce, "Les Bushongos", in
Annales du Musée du Congo Belge, sér. III, t. II, fasc. i
(Brussels, 1911).

Moreover, the new text furnishes fresh proof of the general accuracy of Manetho, even when dealing with traditions of this prehistoric age. On the stele there is no definite indication that these two sets of predynastic kings were contemporaneous rulers of Lower and Upper Egypt respectively; and since elsewhere the lists assign a single sovereign to each epoch, it has been suggested that we should regard them as successive representatives of the legitimate kingdom.(1) Now Manetho, after his dynasties of gods and demi-gods, states that thirty Memphite kings reigned for 1,790 years, and were followed by ten Thinite kings whose reigns covered a period of 350 years. Neglecting the figures as obviously erroneous, we may well admit that the Greek historian here alludes to our two pre-Menite dynasties. But the fact that he should regard them as ruling consecutively does not preclude the other alternative. The modern convention of arranging lines of contemporaneous rulers in parallel columns had not been evolved in antiquity, and without some such method of distinction contemporaneous rulers, when enumerated in a list, can only be registered consecutively. It would be natural to assume that, before the unification of Egypt by the founder of the Ist Dynasty, the rulers of North and South were independent princes, possessing no traditions of a united throne on which any claim to hegemony could be based. On the assumption that this was so, their arrangement in a consecutive series would not have deceived their immediate successors. But it would undoubtedly tend in course of time to obliterate the tradition of their true order, which even at the period of the Vth Dynasty may have been completely forgotten. Manetho would thus have introduced no strange or novel confusion; and this explanation would of course apply to other sections of his system where the dynasties he enumerates appear to be too many for their period. But his reproduction of two lines of predynastic rulers, supported as it now is by the early evidence of the Palermo text, only serves to increase our confidence in the general accuracy of his sources, while at the same time it illustrates very effectively the way in which possible inaccuracies, deduced from independent data, may have arisen in quite early times.

(1) Foucart, loc. cit.

In contrast to the dynasties of Manetho, those of Berossus are so imperfectly preserved that they have never formed the basis of Babylonian chronology.(1) But here too, in the chronological scheme, a similar process of reduction has taken place. Certain dynasties, recovered from native sources and at one time regarded as consecutive, were proved to have been contemporaneous; and archaeological evidence suggested that some of the great gaps, so freely assumed in the royal sequence, had no right to be there. As a result, the succession of known rulers was thrown into truer perspective, and such gaps as remained were being partially filled by later discoveries. Among the latter the most important find was that of an early list of kings, recently published by Père Scheil(2) and subsequently purchased by the British Museum shortly before the war. This had helped us to fill in the gap between the famous Sargon of Akkad and the later dynasties, but it did not carry us far beyond Sargon's own time. Our archaeological evidence also comes suddenly to an end. Thus the earliest picture we have hitherto obtained of the Sumerians has been that of a race employing an advanced system of writing and possessed of a knowledge of metal. We have found, in short, abundant remains of a bronze-age culture, but no traces of preceding ages of development such as meet us on early Egyptian sites. It was a natural inference that the advent of the Sumerians in the Euphrates Valley was sudden, and that they had brought their highly developed culture with them from some region of Central or Southern Asia.

(1) While the evidence of Herodotus is extraordinarily
valuable for the details he gives of the civilizations of
both Egypt and Babylonia, and is especially full in the case
of the former, it is of little practical use for the
chronology. In Egypt his report of the early history is
confused, and he hardly attempts one for Babylonia. It is
probable that on such subjects he sometimes misunderstood
his informants, the priests, whose traditions were more
accurately reproduced by the later native writers Manetho
and Berossus. For a detailed comparison of classical
authorities in relation to both countries, see Griffith in
Hogarth's Authority and Archaeology, pp. 161 ff.
(2) See Comptes rendus, 1911 (Oct.), pp. 606 ff., and
Rev. d'Assyr., IX (1912), p. 69.

The newly published Nippur documents will cause us to modify that view. The lists of early kings were themselves drawn up under the Dynasty of Nîsin in the twenty-second century B.C., and they give us traces of possibly ten and at least eight other "kingdoms" before the earliest dynasty of the known lists.(1) One of their novel features is that they include summaries at the end, in which it is stated how often a city or district enjoyed the privilege of being the seat of supreme authority in Babylonia. The earliest of their sections lie within the legendary period, and though in the third dynasty preserved we begin to note signs of a firmer historical tradition, the great break that then occurs in the text is at present only bridged by titles of various "kingdoms" which the summaries give; a few even of these are missing and the relative order of the rest is not assured. But in spite of their imperfect state of preservation, these documents are of great historical value and will furnish a framework for future chronological schemes. Meanwhile we may attribute to some of the later dynasties titles in complete agreement with Sumerian tradition. The dynasty of Ur-Engur, for example, which preceded that of Nîsin, becomes, if we like, the Third Dynasty of Ur. Another important fact which strikes us after a scrutiny of the early royal names recovered is that, while two or three are Semitic,(2) the great majority of those borne by the earliest rulers of Kish, Erech, and Ur are as obviously Sumerian.