Legends Of Babylon And Egypt
L >> Leonard W. King >> Legends Of Babylon And Egypt
In Mesopotamia, on the other hand, the floods, which come too late for
the winter crops, are followed by the rainless summer months; and not
only must the flood-water be controlled, but some portion of it must be
detained artificially, if it is to be of use during the burning months
of July, August, and September, when the rivers are at their lowest.
Moreover, heavy rain in April and a warm south wind melting the snow in
the hills may bring down such floods that the channels cannot contain
them; the dams are then breached and the country is laid waste. Here
there is first too much water and then too little.
The great danger from flood in Babylonia, both in its range of action
and in its destructive effect, is due to the strangely flat character
of the Tigris and Euphrates delta.(1) Hence after a severe breach in
the Tigris or Euphrates, the river after inundating the country may
make itself a new channel miles away from the old one. To mitigate the
danger, the floods may be dealt with in two ways--by a multiplication
of canals to spread the water, and by providing escapes for it into
depressions in the surrounding desert, which in their turn become
centres of fertility. Both methods were employed in antiquity; and it
may be added that in any scheme for the future prosperity of the country
they must be employed again, of course with the increased efficiency of
modern apparatus.(2) But while the Babylonians succeeded in controlling
the Euphrates, the Tigris was never really tamed,(3) and whenever it
burst its right bank the southern plains were devastated. We could not
have more suitable soil for the growth of a Deluge story.
(1) Baghdad, though 300 miles by crow-fly from the sea and
500 by river, is only 120 ft. above sea-level.
(2) The Babylonians controlled the Euphrates, and at the
same time provided against its time of "low supply", by
escapes into two depressions in the western desert to the
NW. of Babylon, known to-day as the Habbaniyah and Abu Dis
depressions, which lie S. of the modern town of Ramadi and
N. of Kerbela. That these depressions were actually used as
reservoirs in antiquity is proved by the presence along
their edges of thick beds of Euphrates shells. In addition
to canals and escapes, the Babylonian system included well-
constructed dikes protected by brushwood. By cutting an
eight-mile channel through a low hill between the Habbaniyah
and Abu Dis depressions and by building a short dam 50 ft.
high across the latter's narrow outlet, Sir William
Willcocks estimates that a reservoir could be obtained
holding eighteen milliards of tons of water. See his work
_The Irrigations of Mesopotamia_ (E. and F. N. Spon, 1911),
_Geographical Journal_, Vol. XL, No. 2 (Aug., 1912), pp. 129
ff., and the articles in _The Near East_ cited on p. 97, n.
1, and p. 98, n. 2. Sir William Willcocks's volume and
subsequent papers form the best introduction to the study of
Babylonian Deluge tradition on its material side.
(3) Their works carried out on the Tigris were effective for
irrigation; but the Babylonians never succeeded in
controlling its floods as they did those of the Euphrates. A
massive earthen dam, the remains of which are still known as
"Nimrod's Dam", was thrown across the Tigris above the point
where it entered its delta; this served to turn the river
over hard conglomerate rock and kept it at a high level so
that it could irrigate the country on both banks. Above the
dam were the heads of the later Nahrwan Canal, a great
stream 400 ft. wide and 17 ft. deep, which supplied the
country east of the river. The Nar Sharri or "King's Canal",
the Nahar Malkha of the Greeks and the Nahr el-Malik of the
Arabs, protected the right bank of the Tigris by its own
high artificial banks, which can still be traced for
hundreds of miles; but it took its supply from the Euphrates
at Sippar, where the ground is some 25 ft. higher than on
the Tigris. The Tigris usually flooded its left bank; it was
the right bank which was protected, and a breach here meant
disaster. Cf. Willcocks, op. cit., and _The Near East_,
Sept. 29, 1916 (Vol. XI, No. 282), p. 522.
It was only by constant and unremitting attention that disaster from
flood could be averted; and the difficulties of the problem were and are
increased by the fact that the flood-water of the Mesopotamian rivers
contains five times as much sediment as the Nile. In fact, one of
the most pressing of the problems the Sumerian and early Babylonian
engineers had to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1)
What the floods, if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well
illustrated by the decay of the ancient canal-system, which has been
the immediate cause of the country's present state of sordid desolation.
That the decay was gradual was not the fault of the rivers, but was
due to the sound principles on which the old system of control had been
evolved through many centuries of labour. At the time of the Moslem
conquest the system had already begun to fail. In the fifth century
there had been bad floods; but worse came in A.D. 629, when both rivers
burst their banks and played havoc with the dikes and embankments. It
is related that the Sassanian king Parwiz, the contemporary of Mohammed,
crucified in one day forty canal-workers at a certain breach, and yet
was unable to master the flood.(2) All repairs were suspended during the
anarchy of the Moslem invasion. As a consequence the Tigris left its
old bed for the Shatt el-Hai at Kut, and pouring its own and its
tributaries' waters into the Euphrates formed the Great Euphrates Swamp,
two hundred miles long and fifty broad. But even then what was left of
the old system was sufficient to support the splendour of the Eastern
Caliphate.
(1) Cf. _Letters of Hammurabi_, Vol. III, pp. xxxvi ff.; it
was the duty of every village or town upon the banks of the
main canals in Babylonia to keep its own section clear of
silt, and of course it was also responsible for its own
smaller irrigation-channels. While the invention of the
system of basin-irrigation was practically forced on Egypt,
the extraordinary fertility of Babylonia was won in the
teeth of nature by the system of perennial irrigation, or
irrigation all the year round. In Babylonia the water was
led into small fields of two or three acres, while the Nile
valley was irrigated in great basins each containing some
thirty to forty thousand acres. The Babylonian method gives
far more profitable results, and Sir William Willcocks
points out that Egypt to-day is gradually abandoning its own
system and adopting that of its ancient rival; see _The Near
East_, Sept. 29, 1916, p. 521.
(2) See Le Strange, _The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate_, p.
27.
The second great blow to the system followed the Mongol conquest, when
the Nahrwan Canal, to the east of the Tigris, had its head swept away
by flood and the area it had irrigated became desert. Then, in about
the fifteenth century, the Tigris returned to its old course; the Shatt
el-Hai shrank, and much of the Great Swamp dried up into the desert
it is to-day.(1) Things became worse during the centuries of Turkish
misrule. But the silting up of the Hillah, or main, branch of the
Euphrates about 1865, and the transference of a great part of its stream
into the Hindiyah Canal, caused even the Turks to take action. They
constructed the old Hindiyah Barrage in 1890, but it gave way in 1903
and the state of things was even worse than before; for the Hillah
branch then dried entirely.(2)
(1) This illustrates the damage the Tigris itself is capable
of inflicting on the country. It may be added that Sir
William Willcocks proposes to control the Tigris floods by
an escape into the Tharthar depression, a great salt pan at
the tail of Wadi Tharthar, which lies 14 ft. below sea level
and is 200 ft. lower than the flood-level of the Tigris some
thirty-two miles away. The escape would leave the Tigris to
the S. of Samarra, the proposed Beled Barrage being built
below it and up-stream of "Nimrod's Dam". The Tharthar
escape would drain into the Euphrates, and the latter's
Habbaniyah escape would receive any surplus water from the
Tigris, a second barrage being thrown across the Euphrates
up-stream of Fallujah, where there is an outcrop of
limestone near the head of the Sakhlawiyah Canal. The
Tharthar depression, besides disposing of the Tigris flood-
water, would thus probably feed the Euphrates; and a second
barrage on the Tigris, to be built at Kut, would supply
water to the Shatt el-Hai. When the country is freed from
danger of flood, the Baghdad Railway could be run through
the cultivated land instead of through the eastern desert;
see Willcocks, _The Near East_, Oct. 6, 1916 (Vol. XI, No.
283), p. 545 f.
(2) It was then that Sir William Willcocks designed the new
Hindiyah Barrage, which was completed in 1913. The Hindiyah
branch, to-day the main stream of the Euphrates, is the old
low-lying Pallacopas Canal, which branched westward above
Babylon and discharged its waters into the western marshes.
In antiquity the head of this branch had to be opened in
high floods and then closed again immediately after the
flood to keep the main stream full past Babylon, which
entailed the employment of an enormous number of men.
Alexander the Great's first work in Babylonia was cutting a
new head for the Pallacopas in solid ground, for hitherto it
had been in sandy soil; and it was while reclaiming the
marshes farther down-stream that he contracted the fever
that killed him.
From this brief sketch of progressive disaster during the later
historical period, the inevitable effect of neglected silt and flood, it
will be gathered that the two great rivers of Mesopotamia present a very
strong contrast to the Nile. For during the same period of misgovernment
and neglect in Egypt the Nile did not turn its valley and delta into
a desert. On the Tigris and Euphrates, during ages when the earliest
dwellers on their banks were struggling to make effective their first
efforts at control, the waters must often have regained the upper hand.
Under such conditions the story of a great flood in the past would not
be likely to die out in the future; the tradition would tend to gather
illustrative detail suggested by later experience. Our new text
reveals the Deluge tradition in Mesopotamia at an early stage of
its development, and incidentally shows us that there is no need to
postulate for its origin any convulsion of nature or even a series of
seismic shocks accompanied by cyclone in the Persian Gulf.
If this had been the only version of the story that had come down to us,
we should hardly have regarded it as a record of world-wide catastrophe.
It is true the gods' intention is to destroy mankind, but the scene
throughout is laid in Southern Babylonia. After seven days' storm,
the Sun comes out, and the vessel with the pious priest-king and his
domestic animals on board grounds, apparently still in Babylonia, and
not on any distant mountain, such as Mt. Nisir or the great mass of
Ararat in Armenia. These are obviously details which tellers of the
story have added as it passed down to later generations. When it
was carried still farther afield, into the area of the Eastern
Mediterranean, it was again adapted to local conditions. Thus
Apollodorus makes Deucalion land upon Parnassus,(1) and the
pseudo-Lucian relates how he founded the temple of Derketo at Hierapolis
in Syria beside the hole in the earth which swallowed up the Flood.(2)
To the Sumerians who first told the story, the great Flood appeared to
have destroyed mankind, for Southern Babylonia was for them the
world. Later peoples who heard it have fitted the story to their own
geographical horizon, and in all good faith and by a purely logical
process the mountain-tops are represented as submerged, and the ship,
or ark, or chest, is made to come to ground on the highest peak known to
the story-teller and his hearers. But in its early Sumerian form it is
just a simple tradition of some great inundation, which overwhelmed
the plain of Southern Babylonia and was peculiarly disastrous in its
effects. And so its memory survived in the picture of Ziusudu's solitary
coracle upon the face of the waters, which, seen through the mists of
the Deluge tradition, has given us the Noah's ark of our nursery days.
(1) Hesiod is our earliest authority for the Deucalion Flood
story. For its probable Babylonian origin, cf. Farnell,
_Greece and Babylon_ (1911), p. 184.
(2) _De Syria dea_, 12 f.
Thus the Babylonian, Hebrew, and Greek Deluge stories resolve
themselves, not into a nature myth, but into an early legend, which has
the basis of historical fact in the Euphrates Valley. And it is probable
that we may explain after a similar fashion the occurrence of tales of
a like character at least in some other parts of the world. Among races
dwelling in low-lying or well-watered districts it would be surprising
if we did not find independent stories of past floods from which few
inhabitants of the land escaped. It is only in hilly countries such
as Palestine, where for the great part of the year water is scarce and
precious, that we are forced to deduce borrowing; and there is no doubt
that both the Babylonian and the biblical stories have been responsible
for some at any rate of the scattered tales. But there is no need
to adopt the theory of a single source for all of them, whether in
Babylonia or, still less, in Egypt.(1)
(1) This argument is taken from an article I published in
Professor Headlam's _Church Quarterly Review_, Jan., 1916,
pp. 280 ff., containing an account of Dr. Poebel's
discovery.
I should like to add, with regard to this reading of our new evidence,
that I am very glad to know Sir James Frazer holds a very similar
opinion. For, as you are doubtless all aware, Sir James is at present
collecting Flood stories from all over the world, and is supplementing
from a wider range the collections already made by Lenormant, Andree,
Winternitz, and Gerland. When his work is complete it will be possible
to conjecture with far greater confidence how particular traditions or
groups of tradition arose, and to what extent transmission has taken
place. Meanwhile, in his recent Huxley Memorial Lecture,(1) he has
suggested a third possibility as to the way Deluge stories may have
arisen.
(1) Sir J. G. Frazer, _Ancient Stories of a Great Flood_
(the Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1916), Roy. Anthrop. Inst.,
1916.
Stated briefly, it is that a Deluge story may arise as a popular
explanation of some striking natural feature in a country, although to
the scientific eye the feature in question is due to causes other than
catastrophic flood. And he worked out the suggestion in the case of
the Greek traditions of a great deluge, associated with the names of
Deucalion and Dardanus. Deucalion's deluge, in its later forms at
any rate, is obviously coloured by Semitic tradition; but both Greek
stories, in their origin, Sir James Frazer would trace to local
conditions--the one suggested by the Gorge of Tempe in Thessaly, the
other explaining the existence of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. As
he pointed out, they would be instances, not of genuine historical
traditions, but of what Sir James Tyler calls "observation myths".
A third story of a great flood, regarded in Greek tradition as the
earliest of the three, he would explain by an extraordinary inundation
of the Copaic Lake in Boeotia, which to this day is liable to great
fluctuations of level. His new theory applies only to the other two
traditions. For in them no historical kernel is presupposed, though
gradual erosion by water is not excluded as a cause of the surface
features which may have suggested the myths.
This valuable theory thus opens up a third possibility for our analysis.
It may also, of course, be used in combination, if in any particular
instance we have reason to believe that transmission, in some vague
form, may already have taken place. And it would with all deference
suggest the possibility that, in view of other evidence, this may have
occurred in the case of the Greek traditions. With regard to the theory
itself we may confidently expect that further examples will be found in
its illustration and support. Meanwhile in the new Sumerian Version I
think we may conclude that we have recovered beyond any doubt the
origin of the Babylonian and Hebrew traditions and of the large group of
stories to which they in their turn have given rise.
LECTURE III -- CREATION AND THE DRAGON MYTH; AND THE PROBLEM OF
BABYLONIAN PARALLELS IN HEBREW TRADITION
In our discussion of the new Sumerian version of the Deluge story we
came to the conclusion that it gave no support to any theory which
would trace all such tales to a single origin, whether in Egypt or in
Babylonia. In spite of strong astrological elements in both the Egyptian
and Babylonian religious systems, we saw grounds for regarding the
astrological tinge of much ancient mythology as a later embellishment
and not as primitive material. And so far as our new version of the
Deluge story was concerned, it resolved itself into a legend, which had
a basis of historical fact in the Euphrates Valley. It will be obvious
that the same class of explanation cannot be applied to narratives of
the Creation of the World. For there we are dealing, not with legends,
but with myths, that is, stories exclusively about the gods. But where
an examination of their earlier forms is possible, it would seem to
show that many of these tales also, in their origin, are not to be
interpreted as nature myths, and that none arose as mere reflections of
the solar system. In their more primitive and simpler aspects they
seem in many cases to have been suggested by very human and terrestrial
experience. To-day we will examine the Egyptian, Sumerian, and
Babylonian myths of Creation, and, after we have noted the more striking
features of our new material, we will consider the problem of foreign
influences upon Hebrew traditions concerning the origin and early
history of the world.
In Egypt, as until recently in Babylonia, we have to depend for our
knowledge of Creation myths on documents of a comparatively late period.
Moreover, Egyptian religious literature as a whole is textually corrupt,
and in consequence it is often difficult to determine the original
significance of its allusions. Thanks to the funerary inscriptions and
that great body of magical formulae and ritual known as "The Chapters
of Coming forth by Day", we are very fully informed on the Egyptian
doctrines as to the future state of the dead. The Egyptian's intense
interest in his own remote future, amounting almost to an obsession, may
perhaps in part account for the comparatively meagre space in the extant
literature which is occupied by myths relating solely to the past. And
it is significant that the one cycle of myth, of which we are fully
informed in its latest stage of development, should be that which gave
its sanction to the hope of a future existence for man. The fact that
Herodotus, though he claims a knowledge of the sufferings or "Mysteries"
of Osiris, should deliberately refrain from describing them or from
even uttering the name,(1) suggests that in his time at any rate some
sections of the mythology had begun to acquire an esoteric character.
There is no doubt that at all periods myth played an important part in
the ritual of feast-days. But mythological references in the earlier
texts are often obscure; and the late form in which a few of the stories
have come to us is obviously artificial. The tradition, for example,
which relates how mankind came from the tears which issued from Ra's eye
undoubtedly arose from a play upon words.
(1) Herodotus, II, 171.
On the other hand, traces of myth, scattered in the religious literature
of Egypt, may perhaps in some measure betray their relative age by the
conceptions of the universe which underlie them. The Egyptian idea that
the sky was a heavenly ocean, which is not unlike conceptions current
among the Semitic Babylonians and Hebrews, presupposes some thought and
reflection. In Egypt it may well have been evolved from the probably
earlier but analogous idea of the river in heaven, which the Sun
traversed daily in his boats. Such a river was clearly suggested by the
Nile; and its world-embracing character is reminiscent of a time when
through communication was regularly established, at least as far south
as Elephantine. Possibly in an earlier period the long narrow valley, or
even a section of it, may have suggested the figure of a man lying prone
upon his back. Such was Keb, the Earth-god, whose counterpart in the
sky was the goddess Nut, her feet and hands resting at the limits of
the world and her curved body forming the vault of heaven. Perhaps still
more primitive, and dating from a pastoral age, may be the notion that
the sky was a great cow, her body, speckled with stars, alone visible
from the earth beneath. Reference has already been made to the dominant
influence of the Sun in Egyptian religion, and it is not surprising
that he should so often appear as the first of created beings. His orb
itself, or later the god in youthful human form, might be pictured as
emerging from a lotus on the primaeval waters, or from a marsh-bird's
egg, a conception which influenced the later Phoenician cosmogeny. The
Scarabaeus, or great dung-feeding beetle of Egypt, rolling the ball
before it in which it lays its eggs, is an obvious theme for the early
myth-maker. And it was natural that the Beetle of Khepera should
have been identified with the Sun at his rising, as the Hawk of Ra
represented his noonday flight, and the aged form of Attun his setting
in the west. But in all these varied conceptions and explanations of the
universe it is difficult to determine how far the poetical imagery of
later periods has transformed the original myths which may lie behind
them.
As the Egyptian Creator the claims of Ra, the Sun-god of Heliopolis,
early superseded those of other deities. On the other hand, Ptah of
Memphis, who for long ages had been merely the god of architects and
craftsmen, became under the Empire the architect of the universe and is
pictured as a potter moulding the world-egg. A short poem by a priest of
Ptah, which has come down to us from that period, exhibits an attempt to
develop this idea on philosophical lines.(1) Its author represents
all gods and living creatures as proceeding directly from the mind and
thought of Ptah. But this movement, which was more notably reflected in
Akhenaton's religious revolution, died out in political disaster, and
the original materialistic interpretation of the myths was restored with
the cult of Amen. How materialistic this could be is well illustrated
by two earlier members of the XVIIIth Dynasty, who have left us vivid
representations of the potter's wheel employed in the process of man's
creation. When the famous Hatshepsut, after the return of her expedition
to Punt in the ninth year of her young consort Thothmes III, decided to
build her temple at Deir el-Bahari in the necropolis of Western Thebes,
she sought to emphasize her claim to the throne of Egypt by recording
her own divine origin upon its walls. We have already noted the
Egyptians' belief in the solar parentage of their legitimate rulers,
a myth that goes back at least to the Old Kingdom and may have had its
origin in prehistoric times. With the rise of Thebes, Amen inherited the
prerogatives of Ra; and so Hatshepsut seeks to show, on the north side
of the retaining wall of her temple's Upper Platform, that she was the
daughter of Amen himself, "the great God, Lord of the sky, Lord of
the Thrones of the Two Lands, who resides at Thebes". The myth was no
invention of her own, for obviously it must have followed traditional
lines, and though it is only employed to exhibit the divine creation of
a single personage, it as obviously reflects the procedure and methods
of a general Creation myth.
(1) See Breasted, _Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Sprache_,
XXXIX, pp. 39 ff., and _History of Egypt_, pp. 356 ff.
This series of sculptures shared the deliberate mutilation that all
her records suffered at the hands of Thothmes III after her death, but
enough of the scenes and their accompanying text has survived to render
the detailed interpretation of the myth quite certain.(1) Here, as in a
general Creation myth, Amen's first act is to summon the great gods
in council, in order to announce to them the future birth of the great
princess. Of the twelve gods who attend, the first is Menthu, a form of
the Sun-god and closely associated with Amen.(2) But the second deity
is Atum, the great god of Heliopolis, and he is followed by his cycle of
deities--Shu, "the son of Ra"; Tefnut, "the Lady of the sky"; Keb,
"the Father of the Gods"; Nut, "the Mother of the Gods"; Osiris, Isis,
Nephthys, Set, Horus, and Hathor. We are here in the presence of cosmic
deities, as befits a projected act of creation. The subsequent scenes
exhibit the Egyptian's literal interpretation of the myth, which
necessitates the god's bodily presence and personal participation.
Thoth mentions to Amen the name of queen Aahmes as the future mother of
Hatshepsut, and we later see Amen himself, in the form of her husband,
Aa-kheperka-Ra (Thothmes I), sitting with Aahmes and giving her the
Ankh, or sign of Life, which she receives in her hand and inhales
through her nostrils.(3) God and queen are seated on thrones above a
couch, and are supported by two goddesses. After leaving the queen, Amen
calls on Khnum or Khnemu, the flat-horned ram-god, who in texts of
all periods is referred to as the "builder" of gods and men;(4) and he
instructs him to create the body of his future daughter and that of her
_Ka_, or "double", which would be united to her from birth.