In dealing with the question of origins, science is constantly confronted with the problem of unity or polygeneity. Has language one origin or many; are the various races of mankind traceable to one ancestor or to several? Do the older civilizations presuppose the same primeval starting-point, or were there independent centres of culture which grew up unknown to one another in different parts of the world? Under the influences of theology the belief long prevailed that they were all sprung from the same source; of late the tendency has been in an opposite direction. While the biologist has inclined to a belief in the unity of species, the anthropologist has seen reason to maintain the diversity of origin in culture.

The two earliest civilizations with which we are acquainted were those of Babylonia and Egypt. To a certain extent the conditions under which they both arose were similar. They grew up alike on the banks of great rivers and in a warm, though not tropical, climate. They rested, moreover, on organized systems of agriculture, which again had been made possible by irrigation engineering. In Babylonia the first settlers had found a plain which was little more than a swamp, over which the swollen streams of the Euphrates and Tigris wandered at will during the annual period of inundation, and which needed engineering works on a large scale before it could be made habitable. The rivers had to be confined within their channels by means of embankments, and canals had to be cut in order to draw off the surplus supply of water and regulate its distribution to the land. While the swamp was thus being made possible for habitation, the population must have lived on the edge of the desert plateau which bordered it, and have there developed a civilization which not only produced the engineers and their science, but also the concentrated authority which enabled the science to be utilized.

In Egypt it was the banks and delta of the Nile which took the place of the Babylonian plain. Recent discoveries have shown that in the prehistoric age, when the natives still lived in the desert and led a pastoral life, all this was a morass, the haunt of beasts of prey and venomous reptiles. But here again the swamp was rendered habitable by engineering works similar to those of primeval Babylonia. The swamp was transformed into fertile fields, the annual flood of the river was regulated, and an elaborate network of canals and embankments spread over the country. The pastoral nomads of the neolithic age became agriculturists, or were employed in constructing and repairing the works of irrigation, or in erecting monumental buildings for their rulers. There is evidence of the same centralized government, the same directing brain and organizing force that there is in primitive Babylonia.

Is it possible that two systems of engineering science, so similar in their objects, their methods and their results, should have been invented independently in two different countries? There are scholars who answer in the negative. But the possibility cannot be denied, since an even more elaborate system of irrigation was invented in China without any suggestion, as far as we know, from outside. The geographical conditions of Babylonia and Egypt, moreover, resemble one another, and the question of draining the swamps and regulating the overflow of the rivers once raised, the answer to it seems fairly obvious. By itself, therefore, the fact that the cultures of ancient Babylonia and Egypt alike rested on a similar system of irrigation engineering would be no proof of their common origin.

In some respects the problem which the Babylonian engineers were called upon to solve was more difficult than that which faced the Egyptians. The Nile is fed by the rains and melting snows of Abyssinia and Central Africa, and its annual inundation takes place in the later summer months. The Euphrates and Tigris flow from the north, from the highlands of Armenia, and are at their fullest in the spring. Their overflow accordingly comes just before the summer heats, when agriculture is difficult or impossible, whereas in Egypt the period of inundation ushers in the most favourable time of the year for the growth of the crops. What the Babylonian engineers had to do was not only to drain off the overflow, but also to store it for use at least six months later. With them it was a question of storage as well as of regulation.

Those then, who believe that the engineering sciences of the Babylonians and Egyptians were no independent inventions are bound to see in Babylonia their original home. It would have been here that the great problems were solved, the practical application of which to the needs of Egypt would have been a comparatively simple matter. On the chronological side there would be no difficulties in such a view. Old as was the civilization of Egypt, the excavations in Babylonia have made it clear that the civilization of Babylonia was at least equally old. At Nippur the American excavators claim to have found inscribed remains which reach back for nearly ten thousand years, and though the data upon which this calculation is based may be disputable, it is certain that the earliest monuments met with are of immense age. And it must be remembered that they belong to a time when the early pictorial writing had already passed into a cursive script, and the plain of Babylonia had been a land of cultivated fields for unnumbered generations.

But by itself, I repeat, the practical identity of engineering science in primeval Babylonia and Egypt is no proof that it had been learnt by the one from the other. If we are to fall back on the old belief which brought the civilized population of Egypt from the plain of Shinar, it must be for reasons which are supported by archæological facts. If such archæological facts exist, the parallel systems of irrigation engineering will be additional evidence; alone, they prove nothing.

At the outset we are met by a fact which personally I find it hard to explain away. The hieroglyphic script of Egypt has little in common with the primitive pictorial characters of Babylonia. Objects and ideas like “the sun,” “man,” “number one,” will be represented by the same pictures or symbols all the world over, and consequently the fact that in both Babylonian and Egyptian writing the sun is denoted by a circle and the moon by a crescent is of no significance whatsoever. But when we turn to less obvious symbols there is comparatively little similarity between the two forms of script. The ideograph of “god,” for example, is a star in Babylonia, a stone axe and its shaft in Egypt; “life” is represented by a flowering reed in the one case, by a knotted girdle in the other. It is true that Professor Hommel and others have pointed to a few coincidences like those between the Egyptian symbol for “foreign land” and the Babylonian ideograph of “country,” or between the Egyptian and Babylonian signs for “city,” “place,” but such coincidences are rare.[92] As a rule, as soon as we leave the more obvious conventions of pictorial writing little or no connection can be traced between the pictorial characters of Egypt and those of Babylonia. As a whole the two graphic systems stand apart.

Nevertheless I am bound to add that it is only as a whole that they do so. With all the general unlikeness there is a curious similarity in a few—a very few—instances which it is difficult to interpret as merely the result of accident. The round circle with lines inside it which denotes “a city” in Egyptian might be explained from the circular villages which still characterize Central Africa; but then how is it that the ideograph for “place” in the pictorial script of Babylonia had precisely the same form? That the word for “country” should be denoted in the Babylonian script by the picture of three mountain peaks may be due to the fact that to the Babylonian “country” and “mountain” were the same; but such an explanation fails us in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyph of “foreign land,” where the three peaks appear again, since the hieroglyph for “mountain” in Egyptian has but two. The picture of a seat, and a seat, too, of peculiar shape, represents “place” in Egyptian; in Babylonian the same picture represents “city,” thus inverting the ideographic signification of the picture which in Egyptian and Babylonian has respectively the meanings of “city” and “place.” Between the primitive Babylonian picture of a “ship” and the boats depicted in the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, again, the resemblance is very exact, and Professor Hommel has pointed out to me a curious likeness between the original form of the Babylonian ideograph for “a personal name” and the ka-sign with the Horus-hawk above it within which the names of the earliest Pharaohs are inscribed.[93] Indeed the learned and ingenious Munich Professor has made out a list of even more striking coincidences, where the characters agree not only in sense but also in the phonetic values attached to them.[94]

Here, however, we trench on another question, the philological position of the Egyptian language. Egyptian scholars to-day are practically unanimous in believing it to belong, more or less remotely, to the Semitic family of speech. The Berlin school of Egyptologists, who under the guidance of Professor Erman have made Egyptian grammar a special subject of investigation, are largely responsible for the dominance of this belief. I ought to be the last person in the world to protest against it, seeing that I maintained it years ago when the patronage of the Berlin Egyptologists had not yet made it fashionable. At the same time I confess that I cannot follow the Berlin philologists to the extent to which they would have us go. For them the old Egyptian language is not related to the Semitic family of speech “more or less remotely,” but very closely indeed. Indeed in their hands it becomes itself a Semitic language, and as a logical consequence the Egyptian script is metamorphosed into one of purely Semitic invention. But while admitting that Egyptian grammar is Semitic in the sense in which English grammar is Teutonic, the comparative philologist is bound to add that it contains much which cannot be reduced to a Semitic pattern. The structure, moreover, is not on the whole Semitic, neither is a large part of its vocabulary. And among the words in the lexicon which have Semitic affinities there are a good many which are better explained as the result of borrowing than as belonging to the original stratum of the language. In some cases they are demonstrably words which have been introduced into the Egyptian language at a late date; in other cases it seems possible to regard them as loan-words from Semitic Babylonian which entered the language at a “pre-dynastic” epoch. Thus, qemḳu, “the wheaten loaf” which was used for offerings, is the Hebrew qemakh, the Babylonian qêmu, and may have been brought into Egypt along with the wheat which was first cultivated in Babylonia and still grows wild on the banks of the Euphrates. To what an early period the importation of the cereal must be referred is shown by its occurrence in the prehistoric graves of Upper Egypt.[95]

When all allowances are made, however, the fact remains that the Egyptian language as we know it was related to the Semitic family of speech. It stood to the latter as an elder sister, or rather as the sister of the parent-language which the existing Semitic dialects presuppose. It was not like the so-called Hamitic dialects of Eastern Africa, which are African languages Semitized, but it was itself of the same stock as Hebrew or Semitic Babylonian. It represents, however, a form of language at an earlier stage of development than are any of those which we call Semitic, and it has, moreover, been largely influenced and modified by foreign languages, which we may term African. So extensive has this influence been that the Semitic element has been even more disguised in it than the Teutonic element is disguised in modern English. In leaving the soil of Asia the language of Egypt took upon it an African dress.

Now though language can prove but little as regards race, it can prove a great deal as regards history. A mixed language means a mixed history, and indicates an intimate contact between the populations who spoke the languages which are represented in it. Egyptian grammar would not have been Semitic if those who imposed it upon the natives of the Nile had not been of Semitic descent, or at all events had not come from a region where the language was Semitic. Nor would this grammar have been modified by foreign admixture if a part of those who learned to use it had not previously been accustomed to some other form of speech. And since we know of no Semitic languages in Africa which were not brought from Asia, we are justified in concluding that the Semitic element in the Egyptian language was of Asiatic origin.

But we can go yet a step further. Where two languages are brought into close contact, the general rule is that that of the stronger race prevails. The conqueror is less likely to learn the language of the conquered than the conquered are to learn the language of their masters. On the other hand, the negro slave in America became English-speaking, whereas the English emigrant wherever he goes preserves the language of his fathers. It is only where a conquering caste brings no women with it that it is likely to lose its language.

When, therefore, we find that Old Egyptian is an Africanized Semitic language, we have every right to infer that it is because invaders brought it with them from Asia who were Semites either by race or by language. In other words, Egypt must have been occupied in prehistoric days by a people who came from the Semitic area in Asia.

The days were prehistoric, but of the invasion itself history preserved a tradition. On the walls of the temple of Edfu it is recounted how the followers of Horus, the totem guide and patron deity of the first kings of Upper Egypt, made their way across the eastern desert to the banks of the Nile, and there, with the help of their weapons of metal, subjugated the older inhabitants of the valley. Battle after battle was fought as the invaders slowly pushed their way down the Nile to the Delta, establishing a forge and a sanctuary of Horus on every spot where a victory had been gained.[96] The story has come down to us under a disguise of euhemeristic mythology, but the tradition it embodies has been strikingly confirmed by modern discovery. The “dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians, that is to say, who founded the Egyptian monarchy and to whom we owe the great monuments of Egypt, were immigrants from the east.

The culture of these “dynastic” Egyptians was built up on two solid foundations, the engineering skill which made Egypt a land of agriculture, and a system of writing which made the organization of the government possible. The culture was at once agricultural and literary, and this alone marked it off from the culture of neolithic (or “prehistoric”) Egypt, which belonged to the desert rather than to the banks and delta of the river, and which knew nothing of writing. Now we have seen that there was one other country in the world in which a similar form of culture had come into existence. In Babylonia too we have a civilization which has as its basis the training of rivers for the purpose of irrigation and the use of a pictorial script. The civilization of Babylonia was, it is true, Sumerian at its outset, but in time it became Semitic, and expressed itself in a Semitic tongue. 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.

There are two archæological facts connected with the early culture of “dynastic” Egypt which seem to me to prove at any rate some kind of intercourse with Babylonia. No building-stone exists in the Babylonian plain; it was therefore the natural home of the art of building in brick, and since every pebble was of value it was also the natural birthplace of the gem-cutter. Nowhere else could the use of clay as a writing material have suggested itself, or that of the inscribed stone cylinder which left its impression behind it when rolled over the clay. Wherever we have the clay tablet and the seal-cylinder we have evidence of Babylonian influence.

Now recent discoveries have shown that the culture of the early dynastic period of Egypt is distinguished from that of later times by the employment of clay and the stone seal-cylinder. Neither the one nor the other could have originated in the country itself, for Upper Egypt (where all authenticated discoveries of early seal-cylinders have been made) is a land of stone, and the river-silt, which is mixed with sand, is altogether unsuited for the purpose of writing. When the Egyptians of the Eighteenth dynasty corresponded in Babylonian cuneiform with their subjects and allies in Asia, the clay upon which they wrote was brought from a distance. Moreover, the stone seal-cylinder of the early dynasties is an exact reproduction of the early seal-cylinder of Babylonia. Substitute cuneiform characters for the hieroglyphs and there is practically no difference between them in many cases. It is difficult to believe that such an identity of form is the result of accident, more especially when we find that, as Egyptian civilization advanced, the seal-cylinder became less and less like its Babylonian original, and finally disappeared from use altogether. That is to say, as the culture of the people was further removed from its first starting-point, and therefore more national, an object which never had any natural basis in the physical conditions of the country grew more and more of an anomaly, and was eventually superseded, first by the “button-seal” and then by the scarab. I see no other explanation of this than that it was originally introduced from Babylonia, and maintained itself so long in an alien atmosphere only because it was bound up with a culture which had come from the same region of the world. The seal-cylinder of the early Egyptian dynasties seems to me, apart from everything else, to prove the existence of some kind of “prehistoric” intercourse between the civilizations of the Euphrates and the Nile. And in this intercourse the influences came from Babylonia to Egypt, not from Egypt to Babylonia.

The use of brick in early Egypt points in the same direction. While Babylonia was a land of clay, Upper Egypt was a land of stone, and it was as unnatural to invent the art of brick-making in the latter country as it was natural to do so in the former. To this day the Nubians build their cottages of stone; so too do the Bedâwîn squatters on the east bank of the Nile; it is only where the population is Egyptian and the influence of the old Egyptian civilization is still dominant that brick is employed. Under the Old Empire the Egyptian Pharaohs built even the temples of the gods of brick; it was but gradually that the brick was superseded by stone. It was the same also in Assyria; here too, in a land of stone, brick was at first the sole building material, and even the great brick platforms which the marshy soil of Babylonia had necessitated continued to be laid. But Assyrian culture was confessedly Babylonian in origin, and the brick edifice was therefore a characteristic of it. It was only by degrees that Assyrian architecture emancipated itself from its early traditions, and at first timidly, then more boldly, superseded the brick by stone. The example of Assyria throws light on that of Egypt, and as the Assyrian employment of brick was due to the Babylonian origin of its civilization, it is permissible to infer that the Egyptian employment of brick was also due to the same cause. Once more we may repeat that there was early intercourse between Egypt and Babylonia—the land of the brick-maker—and that in this intercourse the prevailing influences came from the east.

Such, then, is the conclusion to which the most recent research leads us. The “dynastic” Egyptians, the Egyptians of history, spoke a language which is related to those of the Semitic family; their first kingdoms, so far as we know, were in Upper Egypt, and tradition brought them across the eastern desert to the banks of the Nile. The culture which they possessed was characterized by Babylonian features, and was therefore due either wholly or in part to intercourse with Babylonia. The fact that the use of the seal-cylinder—which, by the way, bore the Semitic name of khetem—should have lingered in the valley of the Nile to the very beginnings of the Middle Empire, is an indication that the period of its introduction could not have been very remote. The earliest historical monuments which have been revealed to us by modern excavation may not, after all, be many centuries later than the time when the culture of Babylonia found its way to the Nile.

Indeed, there is a fact which indicates that this is the case, and that the literary culture of Babylonia had been imported into the valley of the Nile at a time when Egypt was divided into independent kingdoms. At an early epoch an ingenious system of official chronology had been invented in Babylonia. The years were named there after the chief events that had occurred in each of them, among these the accession or death of a king being naturally prominent. At the death of a king a list was drawn up of his regnal years, with their characteristic events, and such lists were from time to time combined into longer chronicles. The Babylonians were preeminently a commercial people, and for purposes of trade it was necessary that contracts and other legal documents should be dated accurately, and that in case of a dispute the date should be easily ascertained. Now an exactly similar system of dating had been adopted in Egypt before the age of the First historical dynasty. A pre-Menic monument dated in this way has been discovered at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt, and the same method of reckoning time is found on ivory tablets that have been disinterred at Abydos. The method lasted down to the age of the Fifth dynasty, since the Museum of Palermo contains the fragment of a stone from Heliopolis, on which the chronology of the Egyptian kings is given from Menes onward, each year being named after the event or events from which it had received its official title. The successive reigns are divided from one another as in the Babylonian lists, and the height of the Nile in each year is further added—a note which naturally is of Egyptian origin. It is, therefore, interesting to observe that it is added as a note, independent of the event which gave its name to the year. Nothing could prove more clearly the foreign origin of the whole system of chronology, since, had it been of native invention, the height of the Nile, on which the prosperity of the country depended, would have been the first event to be recorded. After the fall of the Old Empire this ancient Babylonian method of dating seems to have passed out of use like the Babylonian seal-cylinder; at all events we find no further traces of it. It was, in short, an exotic which never took kindly to Egyptian soil.

Did the “dynastic” Egyptians bring this method of dating with them, or did they borrow it after their settlement in Egypt? The second supposition is very difficult to entertain, for intimate trade relations between Babylonia and Upper (or Lower)[97] Egypt in the pre-Menic age appear to be out of the question, and are unsupported by any known facts. And literary correspondence, such as was carried on in the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, seems equally out of the question. How, then, did the Egyptians come to learn the peculiar Babylonian system of chronology unless the founders of the culture of which it formed a portion had originally brought it with them from the east?

The same question is raised by the existence in early Egypt of an artistic motif which had its origin in Babylonia. This is what is usually known as the heraldic position of the figures of men and animals. An example of it is found on the famous “palette” of Nar-Buzau discovered by Mr. Quibell at Hierakonpolis,[98] where the hybrid monsters whose necks form the centre of the slate are heraldically arranged. In this case the design is known to be Babylonian, since M. Heuzey has pointed out a Babylonian seal-cylinder on which the two monsters recur. Nar-Buzau is made the immediate predecessor of Menes by Professor Petrie on grounds to which every archæologist must assent; but an even better example of the heraldic design is met with on a great isolated rock of sandstone near El-Kab which was quarried in the time of the Old Empire. Here the ownership and opening of the quarry are denoted by an elaborate sculpture of the Pharaoh, who is duplicated, his two forms being figured as seated back to back, with a column between them, while the winged solar disk of Edfu, with the royal uræi on either side of the orb, spreads its wings above them. Each of the royal forms holds a sceptre, but that on the left has no head-dress, whereas that on the right wears a skull-cap, above which is the solar orb with the uræus serpent issuing from it.[99] In front of the latter is an altar consisting of a bowl on a stand, loaves of bread and a cup and jar of wine (with the customary handles for suspension) being engraved above the bowl along with a series of perpendicular lines which in this instance cannot (as has been suggested) represent the fringes of a mat. In front of the figure on the left is another altar, of different shape, the place of the bowl being taken by a flat top, above which are six upright lines and a flat cake. Precisely the same altar with the same objects above it are engraved on a broken seal-cylinder of ivory found by Dr. Reisner at Naga’ ed-Dêr, which I understand from the discoverer to be of the age of the First dynasty. When, therefore, was it that the heraldic design in art was introduced into Egypt from its Babylonian birthplace? In any case it would seem to have been before the foundation of the united monarchy.

In Babylonia itself, as we have seen, tradition looked seaward, towards the Persian Gulf, for the elements of its civilization. At any rate the seaport of Eridu was the gateway through which the culture of Babylonia was believed to have passed. Here on the shores of the sea the culture-god of Sumer had his home; here trade sprang up, and the sailors and merchants of Eridu came into contact with men of other lands and other habits. Is it possible to discover a connection between Eridu and primeval Egypt?

I believe that it is, though in making the attempt we are of course treading upon precarious ground. There are certain curious coincidences, one of which, since it goes to the heart of Sumerian and Egyptian religion, is necessarily of considerable weight. But they are all, it must be remembered, more in the nature of indications and possibilities than of ascertained facts.

Eridu meant in Sumerian “the good city.” Memphis (Men-nofer), “the good place,” the name of the first capital of united Egypt, had the same signification. In the case of Eridu the name had something to do with the fact that the city was the seat of Ea, the god of beneficent spells and incantations, who had given the arts and sciences to man, and was ever ready to heal those that were sick. The son and vice-gerent of Ea, who carried his commands to earth and spent his time in curing diseases and raising “the dead to life,” was Asari, “the prince,” who was usually entitled Mulu-dugga, “the good” or “beneficent one.” The character and attributes of Asari are thus the same as those of the Egyptian Osiris, who was also known as Ati, “the prince,” and was commonly addressed as Un-nofer, “the good being.” Unlike most of the Egyptian deities, Osiris had the same human form as Asari of Eridu, and the resemblance between the names of Asari and Osiris—Asar in Egyptian—is rendered more striking by the remarkable fact that they are both represented by two ideographs or hieroglyphs of precisely the same shape and signification.[100] It does not appear possible to ascribe such a threefold identity to mere coincidence. And the theory of coincidence becomes still more improbable when we remember that while the story of Osiris centres in his death and resurrection, one of the chief offices of the Sumerian Asari was to “raise the dead to life.” Nowhere else in Babylonian literature, whether Sumerian or Semitic, do we find any reference to a resurrection; the Semitic Babylonians, indeed, did not look forward to a future life at all, or if they did, it was to a shadowy existence in a subterranean land of darkness “where all things are forgotten.” It is only in connection with Asari that we hear of a possibility that the dead may live again.

Other resemblances between the theologies of Eridu and primitive Egypt have been pointed out. Professor Hommel believes that in the Egyptian deity Nun, the heavenly ocean, we must see a Sumerian god Nun, who also represented the celestial abyss. However this may be, an old formula, torn from its context, which has been introduced into the Pyramid texts of the Pharaoh Pepi I., takes us back not only to the cosmology of Eridu but to the literary form in which it had been expressed. Pepi, it is said, “was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not, the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was no death.” The words are almost a repetition of those with which the Babylonian epic of the creation begins: “At that time the heaven above was not known by name, the earth beneath was not named ... at that time the gods had not appeared, any one of them”; and they are also a distant echo of the commencement of the cosmological legend of Sumerian Eridu: “At that time no holy house, no house of the gods in a holy place had been built, no reed had grown, no tree had been planted.”[101]

The testimony of philological archæology, if I may use such a term, is supplemented by that of archæological discovery. Sumerian Babylonia and early dynastic Egypt are alike characterized by vases of hard stone, many of which have the same forms. Examples of some of them will be found in de Morgan’s Recherches sur les Origines de l’Égypte, ii. p. 257, where Jéquier observes that analogues to the Egyptian vases have been disinterred by de Sarzec at Tello in Southern Babylonia, “the shape and execution of which are exactly like” those discovered in Egypt, “the only difference being that the one are ornamented with hieroglyphics, and the others with a cuneiform inscription; apart from this they are identical in make.” The most remarkable instance of identity, however, is the design on the palette of the pre-Menic Pharaoh Nar-Buzau to which attention was first called by Professor Heuzey.[102] On this we have a representation of two lions set face to face in the Babylonian fashion, and with long serpentine necks which are interlaced so as to enclose a circle. Precisely the same representation is met with on an early Babylonian seal-cylinder from Tello.

Years ago I noticed the general likeness presented by the seated statues of Tello to those of the Third Egyptian dynasty,[103] and suggested that both belonged to the same school of sculpture. A little earlier Professor Flinders Petrie had demonstrated that the standard of measurement marked upon the plan of the city which one of the Tello figures holds in his lap is the same as the standard of measurement of the Egyptian pyramid-builders, the cubit, namely, of 20·63, which is quite different from the later Assyro-Babylonian cubit of 21·6.[104] Still more convincing, perhaps, is the Babylonian division of the year into twelve months of thirty days each, which was already known in Egypt in the age of the early dynasties. The Babylonian week of five and ten days reappears in the Egyptian week of ten days, while the division of the day into twelve “double hours,” six belonging to the day and six to the night, has its counterpart in the Egyptian day of twenty-four hours, twelve of which were reckoned to the day and the other twelve to the night. Since a list of the thirty-six decans or zodiacal stars has recently been found on a coffin of the time of the Twelfth Dynasty[105] it is possible that this distinctively Babylonian invention may also go back to the age of the first Egyptian dynasties. At all events one of the chief stars in the Pyramid texts is “the Bull of heaven,” a translation of the Sumerian Gudi-bir, or “Bull of Light,” the name given to the planet Jupiter in its relation to the ecliptic. In primitive Babylonian astronomy the zodiacal sign of the Bull ushered in the year.

It may be that some of these evidences of Babylonian influence are referable to contact between Babylonia and Egypt in the age that immediately preceded the foundation of the united Egyptian monarchy rather than to that still earlier age when the “dynastic” settlers first settled in the valley of the Nile. But at present we do not know how such a contact could have taken place. Upper Egypt and not the Delta was the seat of the first Pharaohs with their Horus-hawk totem, and at the remote period when the future civilization of the country was being developed under their fostering care it is difficult to believe that Babylonian soldiers or traders had made their way to the shores of the Mediterranean, much less to the deserts of the Sayyîd. For the present, at all events, where we have clear proof of the dependence of early Egyptian culture upon that of the Babylonians we have no alternative but to ascribe it to the Semitic emigrants or invaders to whom the historical civilization of Egypt was primarily due.[106]

This civilization, like that of Babylonia, implied a knowledge of metal. It was a civilization of the copper age, and thus stood in sharp contrast to the neolithic culture, such as it was, of “prehistoric” Egypt. Egyptian tradition, it is true, believed that the metal weapons with which the followers of Horus had overcome the stone-defended natives of the country were of iron, but this was because the compilers of the story in its existing form projected the knowledge and usages of their own time back into the past. There is incontrovertible proof that in Egypt, as in Europe, the ages of copper and bronze preceded that of iron. But the tradition was doubtless right in laying stress upon the fact that the invaders were forgers and blacksmiths. It would have been by reason of the superiority of their arms that they succeeded in subduing the valley of the Nile and reducing its inhabitants to serfdom. They were, too, “the followers of Horus,” under the leadership of a single prince who was himself a Horus, that is to say, an incarnate god. Here, again, we find ourselves in the presence of a conception and doctrine of Semitic Babylonia. There, too, as we have seen, the kings were incarnate gods, not only the sons of a divinity, but themselves divine. In Egypt, apart from the Osirian circle, the gods were not men, but animals, and so deeply rooted was this beast-worship in the hearts of the indigenous population that even the “dynastic” civilization, with all its unifying and absorbing power, never succeeded in doing more than in uniting the head of the beast with the body of the man. Even the human Pharaoh was forced to picture himself as a hawk. In Semitic Babylonia on the other hand, as we have seen, the deification of the king flowed naturally from the anthropomorphic conception of the deity; where man was made in the image of God, it was easy to see in him a god on earth. Like the use of copper, therefore, the deification of the king which characterized dynastic Egypt points back to Babylonia.

It must not be supposed, however, that because certain elements and leading characteristics in the civilization of historical Egypt indicate that the Semitic-speaking race to whom it was mainly due came originally from Babylonia, there are no elements in it which can be derived from elsewhere. On the contrary, there is much that is native to Egypt itself. Even the script shows but comparatively few traces of a Babylonian origin. If the “dynastic” Egyptians came from Babylonia, they must have very considerably modified and developed the seeds of culture which they brought with them. And in Egypt they found a neolithic culture which had already made considerable progress. The indigenous population possessed the same artistic sense as the palæolithic European of the Solutrian and Magdalenian epochs, with whom perhaps it was contemporaneous, and under the direction of its dynastic conquerors this sense was trained and educated until the Egyptians of history became one of the most artistic peoples of the old world.

But it is noticeable that throughout the historical period whenever the civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia came into contact, it was Egypt that was influenced rather than Asia. The tradition of the earliest ages was thus carried on; the stream of influence flowed from the east, and Herodotus was justified in assigning Egypt to Asia rather than to Africa. It was, in fact, Asia with an African colouring. In the days of the Eighteenth dynasty, when Egypt for the first and last time possessed an Asiatic empire, the eastern influence is very marked. The script itself became Babylonian, the correspondence of the Government with its own officials in Canaan was conducted in the Babylonian language and the Babylonian syllabary, and there are indications that even the official memoranda of the campaigns of Thothmes III. were drawn up in cuneiform characters. The clay tablets of Babylonia were imitated in Upper Egypt, where hieroglyphic and hieratic characters were somewhat awkwardly impressed upon them, and the language was filled with Semitic loan-words. The fashionable author of the age of the Nineteenth dynasty interlarded his style not only with Semitic words, but even with Semitic phrases. It is true that the Semitic words and phrases are Canaanite; but Canaan had long been a province of Babylonia, and it was because it was permeated with Babylonian culture and used the Babylonian script, that the foreign words and phrases were introduced into the literary language of Egypt.

On the other hand, so far as, we can judge, there was no reflex action of Egypt upon Babylonia. The seal-cylinder was never superseded there by the scarab; indeed the only scarabs yet found in the Mesopotamian region are memorials of the Egyptian conquests of the Eighteenth dynasty. Neither the hieroglyphs nor the hieratic of Egypt made their way eastward into Asia, a fact which is somewhat remarkable when we remember over how wide an area the more complicated cuneiform spread. It was Europe that was affected by Egypt rather than Asia. Before Egypt laid claim to Palestine, Babylonian culture had already taken too firm a hold of Western Asia to be dislodged, and in Babylonia itself Egyptian influences are hard to find. In the age of Khammu-rabi, we meet with a few proper names which may contain the name of the Sun-god Ra, as well as with the name of Anupum or Anubis on a stone cylinder, and the hieroglyphic character nefer, “good,” is affixed to a legal document.[107] But this merely proves that in a period when the Babylonian Empire reached to the confines of Egypt, there were Egyptians settled in Babylon for the purpose of trade. A more curious example of possible Egyptian influence is one to which I have drawn attention in my lectures on the Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia.[108] Thoth, the Egyptian god of literature, was accompanied by four apes, who sang hymns to the rising and setting sun. Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and the origin of these companions of Thoth has been cleared up by an inscription in a tomb at Assuan. Here we learn that in the age of the Old Empire, expeditions were sent by the Pharaohs into the Sudan—the home of the apes of Thoth—in order to bring back from “the land of the gods” Danga dwarfs who could “dance the dances of the gods.” In the eyes of the Egyptians, it would seem, there was little difference between the ape and the Danga dwarf; the one was a dwarf-like ape, the other an ape-like man. But they alone could perform correctly the dances that were held in honour of certain gods, and which are already depicted on the prehistoric vases of Egypt.[109] Closely allied to the Danga dwarfs and the apes of Thoth are the Khnumu or Patæki of Memphis, the followers of Ptah, who were also dwarfs with bowed legs. Now dwarfs of precisely the same form are found on early Babylonian seal-cylinders where they are associated sometimes with the goddess Istar, sometimes with an ape and the god Sin.[110] The Babylonian name of the dwarf was the Sumerian Nu-gidda, an indication that his association with the deity went back to Sumerian times. We may conclude that, like the Danga dwarf of Egypt, he, too, performed dances in honour of the gods.

The extraordinary resemblance of form between the Egyptian and Babylonian sacred dwarfs, as represented in art, raises the question whether the Babylonian dwarf was not an importation from Egypt, since the ape with which he was confounded was a native of the Sudan. This was the view to which I was long inclined, but there are certain considerations which make it difficult to be accepted. The Khnumu of Memphis were not the only dwarfs who were represented by the Egyptian artists. Still better known was Bes, who became a special favourite in the Roman period, when he was made a sort of patron of childbirth. But Bes, it was remembered, had come to Egypt from the southern lands of Somali and Arabia, like the goddess Hathor or the god Horus. Hathor is, I believe, the Babylonian Istar, who has passed to Egypt through her South Arabian name of Athtar; however this may be, Ptah of Memphis, whose followers were the Khnumu dwarfs, bears a Semitic name, and must therefore be of Semitic derivation. He belongs, that is to say, to the Egyptians of the dynastic stock, and is accordingly one of the few Egyptian divinities who is depicted in human form. On the other hand, the Sumerian dwarf Nu-gidda is the companion of Istar.

On the Egyptian side, therefore, the dwarfs of Ptah are associated with a god who has come from Asia, while the dwarf Bes was confessedly of foreign extraction. On the Babylonian side the dwarf Nu-gidda was the associate of Istar, the counterpart of Hathor, and of Sin, the Moon-god, who was adopted by the people of Southern Arabia, and whose name was carried as far as Mount Sinai on the borders of Egypt. All this suggests that the sacred dwarf came to the valley of the Nile from Babylonia and Arabia like the name of Ptah, the creator of the world. In this case it would have come with the dynastic Egyptians before the age of history begins.

But, on the other hand, there is the ape, and the ape is figured along with the dwarf on the Babylonian seals, It is true that the ape is equally foreign to Egypt and Babylonia, but the Sudan is nearer Egypt than Southern Arabia is to Babylonia. The actual date and path of migration, therefore, of the sacred dwarf must be left undecided. Whether he was brought to Egypt at the dawn of history, or whether he travelled to Babylonia in the historical age remains doubtful. All we can be sure of is that the sacred dwarfs of Babylonia and Egypt were originally one and the same, and that they testify to an intercourse between the two countries of which all literary record has been lost.[111]

The same verdict must be given in the case of another point, not only of resemblance, but of identity, between ancient Egypt and Babylonia. This is the shadûf or contrivance for drawing water from a falling river for the sake of irrigation. The shadûf, which is still used in Upper Egypt, can be traced back pictorially to the time of the Eighteenth dynasty, but the basin system of irrigation with which it was connected was already of immemorial antiquity. It is a simple yet most effective invention, and on that account perhaps the less likely to have been independently invented, for it is always the obvious which remains longest unnoticed. In the modern shadûf a long pole is laid across a beam which is supported at either end upon other poles or on pillars of brick or mud; it is kept in place by thongs and is heavily weighted at one end, while at the other end a bucket or skin is attached to it by means of a rope. The shadûf of the Eighteenth dynasty was supported sometimes, as to-day, on a cross-beam, sometimes on a column of mud, and the bucket was of triangular form with two handles to which the rope was tied. Representations of it from Theban tombs will be found in Maspero’s Dawn of Civilization, p. 764, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s Ancient Egyptians, plates 38 and 356. Precisely the same machine is represented on a bas-relief found by Layard in the palace of Kûyunjik at Nineveh,[112] the only difference being that the shadûf-worker stands upon a platform of brick instead of on the bank itself, and that the pillar upon which the pole is supported seems to be built of bricks rather than of mud. The machine, however, is identical in both its Egyptian and its Assyrian form. That the bas-relief should have been found in Assyria and not in Babylonia is a mere accident. Like almost everything else in Assyrian culture, the invention was of Babylonian origin, and, in fact, formed part of the system of irrigation which made the plain of Babylonia habitable. Herodotus, who calls the machine a κηλωνεῖον, describes it as being used as in Egypt, and for the same reason, since the river did not rise to the actual level of the cultivated ground, which, like that of Egypt, was divided into a number of basins.[113]

The palace of Kûyunjik belongs to the last age of Assyrian history. But the shadûf in Babylonia went back to the Sumerian period, as we know from the references to it in the lexical tablets. It was called dulâtum in Semitic Babylonian, the pole or poles being kakritum, and the bucket zirqu or zirqatum (Sumerian sû),[114] and an old Sumerian collection of agricultural precepts describes how the irrigator “fixes up the shadûf, hangs up the bucket and draws water.”[115] The “irrigator” was naturally an important personage in early Babylonia, and legend averred that the famous Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic Empire, had been rescued as a child from a watery grave, and brought up by one. In both Babylonia and Egypt the shadûf was closely associated with a system of irrigation which went back to the dawn of their several histories.

What explanation must we give of its identity in the two countries? There are three possibilities. In the first place, it may have been invented independently on the banks of both the Euphrates and the Nile. Similar conditions tend to produce similar results. But against this is the fact that the shadûf was not the only kind of irrigating machine that was suggested by the nature of the two rivers and the lands through which they flowed. In modern Egypt, besides the shadûf there are the saqia, or water-wheel, and an irrigating contrivance which is in use in the Delta. The water-wheel, we know, was a Babylonian invention which was imported into Egypt in comparatively recent times; the irrigating contrivance of the Delta, which consists of a bucket suspended on a rope swung by two men who stand facing each other, is a primitive instrument which might have been invented anywhere. Its survival is due to the fact that in the flat marshes of the Delta, the shadûf, though saving labour, is not necessary, and it therefore continued to be employed there after the shadûf was known. But this implies that the shadûf was not the oldest instrument for raising the water of the Nile.

Then there is the second possibility that the shadûf was borrowed by Egypt from Babylonia or by Babylonia from Egypt in historical times. In Babylonia, however, we can trace its history back to the Sumerian epoch, and in both countries it was intimately connected with a system of irrigation the origin of which must be sought in the prehistoric age, and which was probably carried from the valley of the Euphrates to that of the Nile. There remains the third possibility that it came to Egypt along with the system of irrigation itself.

It is always easier to ask questions than to answer them, in archæology as in other things. There are many details connected with the early relationship between the civilizations of Babylonia and Egypt which must be left to future research to discover. But of that relationship there can now be little question in the minds of those who are accustomed to deal with inductive evidence. There was intercourse in the prehistoric age between the two countries, and the civilizing influences, like the wheat and the language, came from the lands which bordered on the Euphrates. Civilized man made his way from the east, and dwelt in primeval days “in the land of Shinar.”[116]