Legends of Babylon and Egypt in relation to Hebrew tradition

Legends of Babylon and Egypt in
relation to Hebrew tradition

Project Gutenberg's Legends Of Babylon And Egypt, by Leonard W.
King This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
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Title: Legends Of Babylon And Egypt In Relation To Hebrew
Tradition
Author: Leonard W. King
Release Date: March 28, 2006 [EBook #2030]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LEGENDS
OF BABYLON AND EGYPT ***

Produced by John Bickers; Dagny

LEGENDS OF BABYLON AND EGYPT IN RELATION TO
HEBREW TRADITION

By Leonard W. King, M.A., Litt.D., F.S.A.
Assistant Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British
Museum
Professor in the University of London King's College
First Published 1918 by Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press.
THE BRITISH ACADEMY
THE SCHWEICH LECTURES 1916
PREPARER'S NOTE
This text was prepared from a 1920 edition of the book, hence the
references to dates after 1916 in some places.
Greek text has been transliterated within brackets "{}" using an Oxford
English Dictionary alphabet table. Diacritical marks have been lost.

PREFACE
In these lectures an attempt is made, not so much to restate familiar
facts, as to accommodate them to new and supplementary evidence
which has been published in America since the outbreak of the war. But
even without the excuse of recent discovery, no apology would be
needed for any comparison or contrast of Hebrew tradition with the
mythological and legendary beliefs of Babylon and Egypt. Hebrew
achievements in the sphere of religion and ethics are only thrown into
stronger relief when studied against their contemporary background.
The bulk of our new material is furnished by some early texts, written
towards the close of the third millennium B.C. They incorporate
traditions which extend in unbroken outline from their own period into
the remote ages of the past, and claim to trace the history of man back
to his creation. They represent the early national traditions of the

Sumerian people, who preceded the Semites as the ruling race in
Babylonia; and incidentally they necessitate a revision of current views
with regard to the cradle of Babylonian civilization. The most
remarkable of the new documents is one which relates in poetical
narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the
Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the
corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by
the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But in matter the
Sumerian tradition is more primitive than any of the Semitic versions.
In spite of the fact that the text appears to have reached us in a magical
setting, and to some extent in epitomized form, this early document
enables us to tap the stream of tradition at a point far above any at
which approach has hitherto been possible.
Though the resemblance of early Sumerian tradition to that of the
Hebrews is striking, it furnishes a still closer parallel to the summaries
preserved from the history of Berossus. The huge figures incorporated
in the latter's chronological scheme are no longer to be treated as a
product of Neo-Babylonian speculation; they reappear in their original
surroundings in another of these early documents, the Sumerian
Dynastic List. The sources of Berossus had inevitably been semitized
by Babylon; but two of his three Antediluvian cities find their place
among the five of primitive Sumerian belief, and two of his ten
Antediluvian kings rejoin their Sumerian prototypes. Moreover, the
recorded ages of Sumerian and Hebrew patriarchs are strangely alike. It
may be added that in Egypt a new fragment of the Palermo Stele has
enabled us to verify, by a very similar comparison, the accuracy of
Manetho's sources for his prehistoric period, while at the same time it
demonstrates the way in which possible inaccuracies in his system,
deduced from independent evidence, may have arisen in remote
antiquity. It is clear that both Hebrew and Hellenistic traditions were
modelled on very early lines.
Thus our new material enables us to check the age, and in some
measure the accuracy, of the traditions concerning the dawn of history
which the Greeks reproduced from native sources, both in Babylonia
and Egypt, after the conquests of Alexander had brought the Near East

within the range of their intimate acquaintance. The third body of
tradition, that of the Hebrews, though unbacked by the prestige of
secular achievement, has, through incorporation in the canons of two
great religious systems, acquired an authority which the others have not
enjoyed. In re-examining the sources of all three accounts, so far as
they are affected by the new discoveries, it will be