History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria in the Light of Recent Discovery. L. W. King
of two elements, of conquered “Mediterraneans” and conquering x, so the Egyptian language is evidently compounded of two elements, the one Nilotic, perhaps related in some degree to the Berber dialects of North Africa, the other not x, but evidently Semitic.
(2) Certain elements of the early dynastic civilization, which do not appear in that of the earlier pre-dynastic period, resemble well-known elements of the civilization of Babylonia. We may instance the use of the cylinder-seal, which died out in Egypt in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, but was always used in Babylonia from the earliest to the latest times. The early Egyptian mace-head is of exactly the same type as the early Babylonian one. In the British Museum is an Egyptian mace-head of red breccia, which is identical in shape and size with one from Babylonia (also in the museum) bearing the name of Shargani-shar-ali (i.e. Sargon, King of Agade), one of the earliest Chaldæan monarchs, who must have lived about the same time as the Egyptian kings of the IId-IIId Dynasties, to which period the Egyptian mace-head may also be approximately assigned. The Egyptian art of the earliest dynasties bears again a remarkable resemblance to that of early Babylonia. It is not till the time of the IId Dynasty that Egyptian art begins to take upon itself the regular form which we know so well, and not till that of the IVth that this form was finally crystallized. Under the 1st Dynasty we find the figure of man or, to take other instances, that of a lion, or a hawk, or a snake, often treated in a style very different from that in which we are accustomed to see a man, a lion, a hawk, or a snake depicted in works of the later period. And the striking thing is that these early representations, which differ so much from what we find in later Egyptian art, curiously resemble the works of early Babylonian art, of the time of the patesis of Shirpurla or the Kings Shargani-shar-ali and Narâm-Sin. One of the best known relics of the early art of Babylonia is the famous “Stele of Vultures” now in Paris. On this we see the enemies of Eannadu, one of the early rulers of Shirpurla, cast out to be devoured by the vultures. On an Egyptian relief of slate, evidently originally dedicated in a temple record of some historical event, and dating from the beginning of the Ist Dynasty (practically contemporary, according to our latest knowledge, with Eannadu), we have an almost exactly similar scene of captives being cast out into the desert, and devoured by lions and vultures. The two reliefs are curiously alike in their clumsy, naïve style of art. A further point is that the official represented on the stele, who appears to be thrusting one of the bound captives out to die, wears a long fringed garment of Babylonish cut, quite different from the clothes of the later Egyptians.
(3) There are evidently two distinct and different main strata in the fabric of Egyptian religion. On the one hand we find a mass of myth and religious belief of very primitive, almost savage, cast, combining a worship of the actual dead in their tombs—which were supposed to communicate and thus form a veritable “underworld,” or, rather, “under-Egypt”—with veneration of magic animals, such as jackals, cats, hawks, and crocodiles. On the other hand, we have a sun and sky worship of a more elevated nature, which does not seem to have amalgamated with the earlier fetishism and corpse-worship until a comparatively late period. The main seats of the sun-worship were at Heliopolis in the Delta and at Edfu in Upper Egypt. Heliopolis seems always to have been a centre of light and leading in Egypt, and it is, as is well known, the On of the Bible, at whose university the Jewish lawgiver Moses is related to have been educated “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.” The philosophical theories of the priests of the Sun-gods, Râ-Harmachis and Turn, at Heliopolis seem to have been the source from which sprang the monotheistic heresy of the Disk-Worshippers (in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty), who, under the guidance of the reforming King Akhunaten, worshipped only the disk of the sun as the source of all life, the door in heaven, so to speak, through which the hidden One Deity poured forth heat and light, the origin of life upon the earth. Very early in Egyptian history the Heliopolitans gained the upper hand, and the Râ-worship (under the Vth Dynasty, the apogee of the Old Kingdom) came to the front, and for the first time the kings took the afterwards time-honoured royal title of “Son of the Sun.” It appears then as a more or less foreign importation into the Nile valley, and bears most undoubtedly a Semitic impress. Its two chief seats were situated, the one, Heliopolis, in the North on the eastern edge of the Delta—just where an early Semitic settlement from over the desert might be expected to be found—the other, Edfu, in the Upper Egyptian territory south of the Thebaïd, Koptos, and the Wadi Ham-mamat, and close to the chief settlement of the earliest kings and the most ancient capital of Upper Egypt.
(4) The custom of burying at full length was evidently introduced into Egypt by the second, or x race. The Neolithic Egyptians buried in the cramped position. The early Babylonians buried at full length, as far as we know. On the same “Stele of Vultures,” which has already been mentioned, we see the burying at full length of dead warriors. [* See illustration.] There is no trace of any early burial in Babylonia in the cramped position. The tombs at Warka (Erech) with cramped bodies in pottery coffins are of very late date. A further point arises with regard to embalming. The Neolithic Egyptians did not embalm the dead. Usually their cramped bodies are found as skeletons. When they are mummified, it is merely owing to the preservative action of the salt in the soil, not to any process of embalming. The second, or x race, however, evidently introduced the custom of embalming as well as that of burial at full length and the use of coffins. The Neolithic Egyptian used no box or coffin, the nearest approach to this being a pot, which was inverted over the coiled up body. Usually only a mat was put over the body.
Now it is evident that Babylonians and Assyrians, who buried the dead at full length in chests, had some knowledge of embalming. An Assyrian king tells us how he buried his royal father:—
“Within the grave, the secret place,
In kingly oil, I gently laid him.
The grave-stone marketh his resting-place.
With mighty bronze I sealed its entrance,
And I protected it with an incantation.”
The “kingly oil” was evidently used with the idea of preserving the body from decay. Salt also was used to preserve the dead, and Herodotus says that the Babylonians buried in honey, which was also used by the Egyptians. No doubt the Babylonian method was less perfect than the Egyptian, but the comparison is an interesting one, when taken in connection with the other points of resemblance mentioned above.
We find, then, that an analysis of the Egyptian language reveals a Semitic element in it; that the early dynastic culture had certain characteristics which were unknown to the Neolithic Egyptians but are closely parallelled in early Babylonia; that there were two elements in the Egyptian religion, one of which seems to have originally belonged to the Neolithic people, while the other has a Semitic appearance; and that there were two sets of burial customs in early Egypt, one, that of the Neolithic people, the other evidently that of a conquering race, which eventually prevailed over the former; these later rites were analogous to those of the Babylonians and Assyrians, though differing from them in points of detail. The conclusion is that the x or conquering race was Semitic and brought to Egypt the Semitic elements in the Egyptian religion and a culture originally derived from that of the Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia, the non-Semitic parent of all Semitic civilizations.
The question now arises, how did this Semitic people reach Egypt? We have the choice of two points of entry: First, Heliopolis in the North, where the Semitic sun-worship took root, and, second, the Wadi Hamma-mat in the South, north of Edfu, the southern centre of sun-worship, and Hierakonpolis (Nekheb-Nekhen), the capital of the Upper Egyptian kingdom which existed before the foundation of the monarchy. The legends which seem to bring the ancestors of the Egyptians from the Red Sea coast have already been mentioned. They are closely connected with the worship of the Sky and Sun god Horus of Edfu. Hathor, his nurse, the “House of Horus,” the centre of whose worship was at Dendera, immediately opposite the mouth of the Wadi Hammamat, was said to have come from Ta-neter, “The Holy Land,” i.e. Abyssinia or the Red Sea coast, with the company or paut of the gods. Now the Egyptians always seem to have