Identifier: archaeologyofcun00sayc (find matches)
Title: The archæology of the cuneiform inscriptions
Year: 1908 (1900s)
Authors: Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry), 1845-1933 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (Great Britain). General Literature Committee
Subjects: Cuneiform writing Civilization, Assyro-Babylonian Assyria -- Antiquities
Publisher: London : Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge New York : E. S. Gorham
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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,has its counterpart in the Egyptian day of twenty-four hours, twelve of which were reckoned to the dayand the other twelve to the night. Since a list of thethirty-six decans or zodiacal stars has recently beenfound on a coffin of the time of the Twelfth Dynasty2 itis possible that this distinctively Babylonian inventionmay also go back to the age of the first Egyptiandynasties. At all events one of the chief stars in thePyramid texts is the Bull of heaven, a translationof the Sumerian Gudi-bir, or Bull of Light, thename given to the planet Jupiter in its relation tothe ecliptic. In primitive Babylonian astronomy thezodiacal sign of the Bull ushered in the year. It may be that some of these evidences of Baby-lonian influence are referable to contact betweenBabylonia and Egypt in the age that immediatelypreceded the foundation of the united Egyptian 1 Nature, August 9, 1883, p. 341. 2 Daressy, Le Cercueil dEmsaht, in the Annates du Serviceiles Antiquitds de PEgypte, 1899, i. pp. 79-90.
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SITTING STATUE OF GUDEA. (To face p. 122. BABYLONIAN AND EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION 123 monarchy rather than to that still earlier age whenthe dynastic settlers first settled in the valley ofthe Nile. But at present we do not know how such acontact could have taken place. Upper Egypt andnot the Delta was the seat of the first Pharaohs withtheir Horus-hawk totem, and at the remote periodwhen the future civilization of the country was beingdeveloped under their fostering care it is difficult tobelieve that Babylonian soldiers or traders had madetheir way to the shores of the Mediterranean, muchless to the deserts of the Sayyid. For the present, atall events, where we have clear proof of the depend-ence of early Egyptian culture upon that of theBabylonians we have no alternative but to ascribe itto the Semitic emigrants or invaders to whom thehistorical civilization of Egypt was primarily due.1This civilization, like that of Babylonia, implied a 1 I have called Upper Egypt the seat of the fir

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