The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos Part 2

In journeying from southern Palestine to Zoan, Jacob and his sons had no very long distance to traverse. Nor had they to pa.s.s through a long tract of Egyptian territory. From the desert, with its roving bands of kindred Bedouin, to the Pharaoh's court at Zoan, was hardly more than a day's journey. There was little fear that the Semitic traveller would meet with insult or opposition from the Egyptian _fellahin_ on the way. The _fellahin_ themselves were doubtless then, as now, mixed with Semitic elements; it was needful to go westward of Zoan in order to find Egyptians of pure blood.

Nor was the land of Goshen, the modern Wadi Tumilat, far from the Hyksos capital. It lay to the south of Zoan, on the banks of a ca.n.a.l whose course is now marked by the Freshwater Ca.n.a.l of Lesseps. The tourist who takes the train from Ismailiyeh to Zagazig traverses the whole length of the land of Goshen. The tradition that here was the territory a.s.signed by Joseph to his brethren lingered long into the Christian centuries, and had been revived by more than one Egyptologist in later years. But the question was finally settled by Dr. Naville, and the excavations he undertook for the Egypt Exploration Fund. In 1883 he disinterred the remains of Pa-Tum, or Pithom, one of the two "store-cities" which the children of Israel were forced to build. The ruins are now known as Tel el-Maskhuteh, "the mound of the Statue," about twelve miles to the south-east of Ismailiyeh, and the monuments discovered there show that the Pharaoh for whom the city was built was Ramses II. There was more than one Pa-Tum, or temple-city of the Sun-G.o.d of the evening, and the Pa-Tum of the eastern Delta is referred to in papyri of the nineteenth dynasty.

Thus, in the eighth year of Meneptah II., an official report speaks of the pa.s.sage of certain Shasu or Bedouin from Edom through the frontier-fortress of Thukut or Succoth, to "the pools of the city of Pa-Tum of Meneptah-hotep-hir-ma, in the district of Thukut."

In 1884 Dr. Naville excavated, at Saft el-Henneh, an ancient mound close to the railway between Zagazig and Tel el-Kebir. His excavations resulted in the discovery that Saft el-Henneh marks the site of the ancient Qesem or Qos (Pha-kussa in the Greek geographers), the capital of the nome of the Egyptian Arabia. Qesem corresponds exactly with Geshem, which represents in the Septuagint the Hebrew Goshen, and points to the fact that the Egyptian Jews, to whom the Greek translation of the Old Testament was due, recognised in the Biblical Goshen the Qeshem of Egyptian geography.

The district immediately around Saft el-Henneh is fertile, but the name of the Egyptian Arabia which it once bore shows unmistakably who its cultivators must have been. They were the Semitic nomads from the East who, like their descendants to-day, occasionally settled on the frontier-lands of Egypt, and became more or less unwilling agriculturists.

But the larger part of them remained shepherds, leading a nomad life with their flocks and camels, and pitching their tents wherever the monotony of the desert was broken by water and vegetation. The Wadi Tumilat, into which the district of Saft el-Henneh opened, was thus eminently suited for the residence of the Hebrew Bedouin. Here they had food for their flocks, plenty of s.p.a.ce for their camping-grounds, and freedom from interference on the part of the Egyptians, while in the background was a fertile district, in close connection with the capital, where those of them who cared to exchange a pastoral for an agricultural life could find rich soil to sow and cultivate.

Hard by Zagazig are the mounds of the ancient Bubastis, and here the excavations carried on by the Egypt Exploration Fund have brought to light remains of the Hyksos Pharaohs, including one of Apopi. Bubastis, therefore, must have been a Hyksos residence, and its temple was adorned by the Hyksos kings. Between Bubastis and Heliopolis stood Pa-Bailos, and of this town Meneptah II. says at Thebes that "the country around was not cultivated, but left as pasture for cattle because of the strangers, having been abandoned since the times of old." What better proof can we have that the Arabian nome was in truth what the land of Goshen is represented to be?

By a curious coincidence, the Wadi Tumilat, the old land of Goshen, has, in the present century, again been handed over to Bedouin and Syrians, and again been the scene of an Exodus. Mohammed Ali was anxious to establish the culture of the silk-worm in Egypt, and accordingly planted mulberry-trees in the Wadi Tumilat, and settled there a large colony of Syrians and Bedouin. The Bedouin were induced to remain there, partly by the pasturage provided for their flocks, partly by a promise of exemption from taxes and military conscription. When Abbas Pasha became Khedive, however, the promise was forgotten; orders were issued that the free Bedouin of the Wadi Tumilat should be treated like the enslaved _fellahin_, compelled to pay the tax-gatherer, and to see their children driven in handcuffs and with the courbash to serve in the army. But the orders were never carried out. Suddenly, in a single night, without noise or warning, the whole Bedouin population deserted their huts, and with their flocks and other possessions disappeared into the eastern desert.

The Pasha lost his slaves, the culture of the silk-worm ceased, and when the Freshwater Ca.n.a.l was cut not a single mulberry-tree remained.

In the land of Goshen, the Israelitish settlers throve and multiplied. But a time came when a new king arose "which knew not Joseph," and when the descendants of Jacob seemed to the Egyptians a source of danger. Like Abbas Pasha in a later century, the Pharaoh determined to reduce the free-born Israelites into the condition of public slaves, and by every means in his power to diminish their number. The male children were destroyed, the adults compelled to labour at the cities the Egyptian monarch was building in their neighbourhood, and the land in which they lived was surrounded by Egyptian garrisons and controlled by Egyptian officers.

The slaves, however, succeeded in escaping from their "house of bondage."

Under the leaders.h.i.+p of Moses they made their way into the eastern desert, and received, at Sinai and Kadesh-Barnea, the laws which were henceforth to govern them. The army sent to pursue them was swallowed up in the waters of the sea, and the district they had occupied was left desolate.

A variety of reasons had led Egyptologists to the belief that in the Pharaoh of the Oppression we were probably to see Ramses II. Ramses II., the Sesostris and Osymandyas of Greek story, was the third king of the nineteenth dynasty, and one of the most striking figures of Egyptian history. His long reign of sixty-seven years was the evening of Egyptian greatness. With his death the age of Egyptian conquests pa.s.sed away, and the period of decay set in. Like Louis XIV. of France, the _grand monarque_ of ancient Egypt exhausted in his wars the resources and fighting population of his country.

But it was as a builder rather than as a conqueror that Ramses II. was famous. Go where we will in Egypt or Nubia, we find traces of his architectural activity. There is hardly a place where he has not left his name. His whole reign must have been occupied with the construction of cities and temples, or the restoration and enlargement of previously existing ones, and, in spite of its length, it is difficult to understand how so vast an amount of work could have been accomplished in the time.

Much of the work, however, is poor and scamped; it bears, in fact, marks of the feverish haste with which it was carried through. Much of it, on the other hand, is grandiose and striking in its colossal proportions and boldness of design. The shattered granite colossus at the Ramesseum, once nearly sixty feet in height, the fragment of a standing figure of granite found by Professor Flinders Petrie at San, which must originally have been over a hundred feet high, the great hall of columns at Karnak, the temple of Abu-Simbel in Nubia, are all so many witnesses of vast conceptions successfully realised. Abu-Simbel, indeed, where a mountain has been hollowed into a temple, and a cliff carved into the likeness of four sitting figures, each with an unrivalled expression of divine calm upon its countenance, justly claims to be one of the wonders of the world.

Apart from the colossal proportions of so many of them, the buildings of Ramses II. are distinguished by another trait. They were erected to the glory of the Pharaoh rather than of the G.o.ds. It is the name and t.i.tles of Ramses that everywhere force themselves upon our notice, and often const.i.tute the chief decoration of the monument. He must have been vainglorious above all other kings of Egypt, filled with the pride of his own power and the determination that his name should never be forgotten upon the earth.

It is not strange, therefore, that Ramses II. should be the most prominent figure in ancient Egyptian history. His name and the shattered relics of his architectural triumphs force themselves upon the attention of the traveller wherever he goes. His long reign, moreover, was a period of great literary activity, and a considerable portion of the literary papyri which have survived to us was written during his lifetime. He was, furthermore, the last of the conquering Pharaohs; the last of the Theban monarchs whose rule was obeyed from the mountains of Lebanon and the plateau of the Hauran to the southern frontiers of Ethiopia. With his death the empire, which had been founded by the military skill and energy of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, began to pa.s.s away. His son and successor, Meneptah, had to struggle for bare existence against an invasion of barbarian hordes, and the sceptre dropped from the feeble hands of Seti II., who next followed, into those of rival kings. The nineteenth dynasty ended in the midst of civil war and foreign attack: for a while Egypt submitted to the rule of a Syrian stranger, and when Setnekht, the founder of the twentieth dynasty, restored once more the native line of kings, he found a ruined and impoverished country, scarcely able to protect itself from hostile a.s.sault.

But the age of the twentieth dynasty was still distant when Jacob and his sons journeyed into Egypt, or even when his descendants, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Moses, succeeded in escaping from the land of their slavery.

Before that age arrived more than one revolution was destined to pa.s.s over the valley of the Nile, which had momentous consequences for the foreign settlers in Goshen. The Hyksos were driven back into Asia, and a united Egypt once more obeyed the rule of a native Pharaoh.

But the centre of power had been s.h.i.+fted from the north to the south.

Memphis and Zoan had to make way for Thebes, and it is probable that the monarchs of the eighteenth dynasty, under whom Egypt recovered its independence, had Nubian blood in their veins. A new life was breathed into the ancient kingdom of Menes, and for the first time in its history Egypt became a great military power. The war was transferred from the Delta to Asia itself; Canaan and Syria were conquered, and an Egyptian empire established, which extended as far as the Euphrates. With this empire in Asia, however, came Asiatic influences, ideas, and beliefs. The Pharaohs intermarried with the royal families of Asia, and little by little their court became semi-Asiatic. Then followed reaction and counter-revolution. A new king arose-the founder of the nineteenth dynasty-"who knew not Joseph," representing the national antagonism to the Asiatic foreigner and his religious faith. For a while the Asiatic was proscribed; and the expulsion of the stranger and his religion, which Arabi endeavoured to effect in our time, was successfully effected in the troublous days which saw the fall of the eighteenth dynasty. In this war against the hated Asiatic the Israelites were involved; their children were destroyed lest they should multiply, and they themselves were degraded into public slaves. We have now to trace the events which led to such a result, and to show how the political history of Egypt was the ultimate cause of the Israelitish Exodus.

CHAPTER II. THE AGE OF MOSES.

On the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and a.s.siout, the traveller from Cairo to a.s.souan pa.s.ses a line of mounds which are known by the name of Tel el-Amarna. _Tel_ is the name given to the artificial mounds which cover the remains of ancient cities, while _el-Amarna_ denotes the Bedouin tribe of Beni-Amran whose descendants inhabit the district in which the line of mounds is found. Between the mounds and the Nile is a fertile strip of bank, green with corn in the winter and spring, and shaded with groves of lofty palms. On the other side of them is a tawny desert plain, shut in by an amphitheatre of hills.

The limestone cliffs of the latter are broken in three places, where ravines lead through them to the Arabian plateau beyond. The central ravine is short and rugged; that to the north, however, though its lofty walls of rock seem at times almost to meet, eventually carries the explorer by a slow ascent into the heart of the Arabian desert. About three miles from its mouth, and in a side-valley, the tomb has lately been discovered of the founder of the city, of which the mounds of Tel el-Amarna are now the sole representatives. The tomb is worthy of the monarch for whom it was intended. In the distant solitude of the desert gorge, it is cut deep into the solid rock. Steps first convey the visitor downwards to the huge door of the sepulchre. Within is a broad sloping pa.s.sage, to the right of which are the sculptured chambers in which the body of one of the Pharaoh's daughters once rested, while at the end of it is a vast columned hall, within which the sarcophagus of the Pharaoh himself was placed.

The Pharaoh had been named by his father, Amenophis III., after himself, but Amenophis IV. had not long mounted the throne before he gave himself a new name, and was henceforth known as Khu-n-Aten, "the Glory of the Solar Disk." The change of name was the outward sign and token of a religious revolution. The king publicly renounced the ancient religion of Egypt, of which he was the official representative, and declared himself a convert to an Asiatic form of faith. The very name of Amon, the supreme G.o.d of Thebes and of the royal family to which Khu-n-Aten belonged, was proscribed, and erased from the monuments wherever it occurred. In the temples and tombs and quarries alike it was defaced; even the name of the king's own father, which contained it, was not spared. When the arm of the persecutor was thus extended to the written and sculptured monument, we cannot suppose that the adherents of the ancient cult would be treated with a gentle hand.

It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes were at open war. But the priesthood proved too strong for the king. He quitted the capital of his fathers and built himself a new city farther north. It is the site of this city which is now covered by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna.

Towards the northern side of it rose the palace of the Pharaoh, whose ruins have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie. It was one of the most gorgeous edifices ever erected by man. The walls and columns were inlaid with gold and bronze and stones of various colours, and adorned with statuary and painting. Even the floors were frescoed; and, if we may judge from the one discovered by Professor Petrie, the art was of the highest order. The plants and animals and fish depicted on it are drawn with a perfection and a truthfulness to nature which seem to belong to the nineteenth century of our era rather than to the fifteenth century before Christ.

The public offices of the government adjoined the palace, and around it were the houses of the n.o.bles and officers of the court. They too reflected the gay and brilliant adornment of the royal palace, and their walls were enlivened by frescoes, which represented the scenes of every-day life. Among the public offices was the archive-chamber, to which the doc.u.ments of state had been transferred from Thebes, as well as the foreign office, where scribes were busily engaged in correspondence with the governors of the Asiatic provinces of the empire and the princes of foreign states.

In the centre of the city rose the great temple of Aten, the solar disk, the new object of the Pharaoh's adoration. Though the name was Egyptian, the deity and his cult were alike of Asiatic origin. The Aten, in fact, to whom the temple had been reared, was the Asiatic Baal. He was the Sun-G.o.d, whose visible manifestation was the solar disk. But it was a Sun-G.o.d who was not only supreme over all other G.o.ds; they were absorbed into him, and existed only in so far as he endowed them with divine life. It is thus that Aten-Ra, the solar disk of the Sun-G.o.d, is addressed by the Pharaoh's queen: "Thou disk of the Sun, thou living G.o.d, there is none other beside thee! Thou givest health to the eyes through thy beams, Creator of all things!" One of Khu-n-Aten's officers, on the walls of his tomb, speaks in similar terms: "Thou, O G.o.d, who in truth art the living one, standest before the two eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth."

The new faith of Egypt was a combination of the wors.h.i.+p of Baal with the philosophic conceptions which had gathered round the wors.h.i.+p of the Egyptian Sun-G.o.d, Ra, at Heliopolis. The wors.h.i.+p of Baal had lost its grossness, and been refined into a form of monotheism. But the monotheism was essentially pantheistic; there was, indeed, but one G.o.d to whom adoration was paid, but he was universally diffused throughout nature. The personal character of the Asiatic Baal seems to have disappeared in the Aten wors.h.i.+p of Egypt.

Along with the new religion came a new style of art. Asiatic artists and workmen manufactured the variegated gla.s.s and bright-coloured porcelain of Tel el-Amarna, or discarded the conventionalism of Egyptian art in their delineation of animal and vegetable life, while architecture branched out in new directions, and the sculptor exaggerated the peculiarities of the king's personal appearance. Every effort, in fact, was made to break away from the past, and from the mannerisms and traditions of Egyptian art.

That art had been closely a.s.sociated with the ancient religion of the country, and with the change of religion came a change in all things else.

The causes of the change can now in great measure be traced. To some extent it was due to the character of the king himself. A plaster cast of his face, taken immediately after death, has been found by Professor Petrie, and is an eloquent witness of what the man himself was like. It is the face of a philosopher and a mystic, of one whose interest lay rather in the problems of religious belief than in the affairs of state. In studying it we feel that the man to whom it belonged was destined to be a religious reformer.

But this destiny was a.s.sisted by the training and education which Khu-n-Aten had received. His mother, Teie, bore a foremost part in the introduction of the cult of Aten. She must have been a woman of strong character, and her influence over her son must also have been great. If, as is probable, Khu-n-Aten was very young when he ascended the throne, the religious reform he endeavoured to effect must have been in great measure his mother's work. That she had aroused deep feelings of hatred among the adherents of the older creed may be gathered from the condition of Khu-n-Aten's tomb. Though the body of the Pharaoh was despoiled, and the sarcophagus in which it rested shattered into fragments, they had nevertheless been deposited in the sepulchre that had been constructed to receive them. But no trace of the queen-mother's mummy has been met with, and the corridor in the royal tomb, which seems to have been excavated for her, has never been finished, any more than the two or three tombs which were cut in the immediate neighbourhood. After the death of her son, Queen Teie seems to have found no protector from the vengeance of her enemies.

It is probable that Teie was of Asiatic birth, though no certain proof of it has yet been found. Her husband, Amenophis III., was fond of connecting himself by marriage with the royal houses of Asia, and more than one of the wives who occupied a secondary rank in the Pharaoh's household were of Asiatic extraction. His own mother had been an Asiatic princess, the daughter of the king of Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament.

From Mitanni also had come two of his own wives, as well as the wife of his son and successor, Amenophis IV. (Khu-n-Aten).

There is little room for wonder that, with their Asiatic proclivities and half-Asiatic descent, the later Pharaohs of the eighteenth dynasty should have surrounded themselves with Asiatic officials and courtiers. The conquest of Western Asia by Thothmes III. had brought Asiatic fas.h.i.+ons into Egypt. Thothmes himself, on the walls of his temple at Karnak, shows the spirit of an Asiatic rather than of an Egyptian conqueror. The inscriptions engraved upon them differ wholly from those which usually adorn the walls of an Egyptian temple. There are no praises or lists of the G.o.ds, no description of the offerings made to them, no interminable catalogue of the empty t.i.tles of the Pharaoh; we have, on the contrary, a business-like account of his campaigns, much of it copied from the memoranda of the scribes who accompanied the army on its march. It reads like an inscription on the walls of an a.s.syrian palace rather than one belonging to an Egyptian temple. It is, in fact, unique, the solitary example of a historical text which the great monuments of Egypt have bequeathed to us. It is, of itself, an eloquent testimony to the influence which Asia had already acquired in the valley of the Nile.

The conquests of Thothmes III. placed the northern boundary of the Egyptian empire at the banks of the Euphrates. The kingdoms to the east, including a.s.syria, offered tribute to the Egyptian monarch, and those of northern Syria and eastern Asia Minor paid him homage. Farther south, Palestine, Phnicia, and the land of the Amorites, which lay to the north of Palestine, became Egyptian provinces, garrisoned by Egyptian troops and administered by Egyptian officers. Even the country beyond the Jordan, Bashan and the Hauran, formed part of the Egyptian empire.

In many cases the native princes were left to manage the affairs of their several states, like the protected princes of modern India, but they were controlled by "commissioners" sent from the valley of the Nile. More frequently their place was taken by Egyptian governors, a very considerable number of whom, however, were of Canaanitish descent. This, indeed, is one of the most remarkable facts connected with the Egyptian empire in Asia; it was governed for the Pharaoh by natives rather than by Egyptians. But this was not all. Under Khu-n-Aten Egypt itself was invaded by the Asiatic stranger. The high places about the court were filled with foreigners whose names proclaim their Canaanitish origin; even the Vizier was called Dudu, the Biblical Dodo, to which the name of David is akin.

The adherents of the cult of Aten who gathered round the Pharaoh at Tel el-Amarna seem largely to have belonged to Asia instead of Egypt.

Even the official language and writing were of Asiatic derivation. The language was that of Babylonia, the script was the cuneiform syllabary of the same country. The Babylonian script and language were used from the banks of the Euphrates to those of the Nile. They were the common medium of intercourse throughout the civilised world. It is in these that an Egyptian official writes to his master, and it is again in these that the reply is sent from the Egyptian foreign office.

The fact is a very surprising one, but recent discoveries have tended to explain it. At a very remote epoch Babylonian armies had made their way to the west, and Palestine was a province of Babylonia long before it became a province of Egypt. The long-continued and deep-seated influence of Babylonia brought to it the culture and civilisation of the Babylonian cities. The Babylonian system of writing formed a very important element in this ancient culture, and, along with the language of which it was the expression, took deep root in Western Asia. How long it continued to be employed there may be gathered from the fact that each district of Western Asia developed its own peculiar form of cuneiform script.

All this we have learned from a discovery made in 1887 in the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. Among the ruins of the foreign office of Khu-n-Aten, which adjoined the royal palace, the _fellahin_ found a collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform or wedge-shaped characters. They turned out to be the foreign correspondence of Khu-n-Aten and his father. When Khu-n-Aten quitted Thebes he took with him the archives of his father, and to these were subsequently added the official letters which he himself received.

Altogether, about three hundred tablets were discovered. But no one was on the spot who could appreciate their value, and, owing to a series of deplorable accidents, several of them were injured or destroyed before they fell into European hands. Eighty-two found their way to the British Museum, more than 160 fragments are at Berlin, the Gizeh Museum possesses 56, and a few are in the hands of private individuals.

The tablets have thrown a new and unexpected light on the history of the past. To find that the language and script of Babylonia were the common medium of literary and official intercourse throughout Western Asia in the century before the Exodus was sufficiently startling; it was much more startling to find that this early period was emphatically a literary era.

Letters pa.s.sed to and fro along the high-roads upon the most trifling subjects, and a constant correspondence was maintained between the court of the Pharaoh and the most distant parts of Western Asia. The Bedouin chiefs beyond the Jordan send letters protesting their loyalty to the Egyptian monarch, and declaring that their forces were at his disposal; the va.s.sal-king of Jerusalem begs for help from Egypt to protect him against his personal enemies; the governors of Phnicia and the land of the Amorites describe the threatening att.i.tude of the Hitt.i.tes in the north; the king of Mitanni or Aram-Naharaim dwells with pride on his relations.h.i.+p to the ruler of the Egyptian empire; while the kings of a.s.syria and Babylonia ask that gold may be sent them from Egypt, where it is as plentiful as "the dust," or discuss questions of international policy or commercial interest. We are suddenly transported to a world much like our own;-a world in which education is widely spread, where schools and scholars abound, and libraries and archive-chambers exist.

The nature of the cuneiform system of writing would of itself indicate that schools were numerous. It was a system which was extraordinarily difficult to learn. Unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, no a.s.sistance was afforded to the memory by any resemblance between the characters and external objects; like the Chinese characters of to-day, they consisted merely of groups of conventionally arranged lines or wedges. Like the Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, the number of characters was extremely large, and each character not only represented more than one phonetic value, but it could also be used ideographically to express ideas. Thus the same character may not only represent the phonetic values _kur_, _mat_, _nat_, _lat_, _sat_, and _gin_; it may also denote the ideas of "country," "mountain," and "conquest." But this was not all. The original picture-writing out of which the cuneiform syllabary developed, had been invented by the primitive non-Semitic population of Chaldaea, from whom it had been afterwards adopted and adapted by their Semitic successors.

Accordingly, whole groups of characters which denoted a particular word in Sumerian-the non-Semitic language of ancient Chaldaea-were taken over by the Semites and used by them to denote the same word, though, of course, with a totally different p.r.o.nunciation. In Sumerian, for example, _mer-sig_ signified "trousers," but though the two characters _mer_ and _sig_ continued to be written in Semitic times in order to express the word, the p.r.o.nunciation attached to them was _sarbillu_, the modern Arabic _s.h.i.+rwal_.

The pupil, therefore, who wished to learn the cuneiform syllabary at all thoroughly was compelled to know something of the old Sumerian language of Chaldaea. It was far more necessary in his case than a knowledge of Latin would be in our own. Moreover, it was necessary for him to learn the various forms which the same cuneiform character a.s.sumed in different countries or at different periods in the same country. These various forms were very numerous, and they often differed more than black letter differs from ordinary modern type.

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 a.s.sist the learner in making his way through the legend.

This mythological text is not the only one which 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 a.s.syrian 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.' "