Legends of Babylon and Egypt in relation to Hebrew tradition | Page 6

And
his suggestion that two of the boats, flat-bottomed and with high curved
ends, seem only to have navigated the Tigris and Euphrates,(1) will
hardly command acceptance. But there is no doubt that the heroic
personage upon the other face is represented in the familiar attitude of
the Babylonian hero Gilgamesh struggling with lions, which formed so
favourite a subject upon early Sumerian and Babylonian seals. His
garment is Sumerian or Semitic rather than Egyptian, and the mixture
of human and bird elements in the figure, though not precisely
paralleled at this early period, is not out of harmony with
Mesopotamian or Susan tradition. His beard, too, is quite different from
that of the Libyan desert tribes which the early Egyptian kings adopted.
Though the treatment of the lions is suggestive of proto-Elamite rather
than of early Babylonian models, the design itself is unmistakably of
Mesopotamian origin. This discovery intensifies the significance of
other early parallels that have been noted between the civilizations of

the Euphrates and the Nile, but its evidence, so far as it goes, does not
point to Syria as the medium of prehistoric intercourse. Yet then, as
later, there can have been no physical barrier to the use of the
river-route from Mesopotamia into Syria and of the tracks thence
southward along the land-bridge to the Nile's delta.
(1) Op. cit., p. 32.
In the early historic periods we have definite evidence that the eastern
coast of the Levant exercised a strong fascination upon the rulers of
both Egypt and Babylonia. It may be admitted that Syria had little to
give in comparison to what she could borrow, but her local trade in
wine and oil must have benefited by an increase in the through traffic
which followed the working of copper in Cyprus and Sinai and of silver
in the Taurus. Moreover, in the cedar forests of Lebanon and the north
she possessed a product which was highly valued both in Egypt and the
treeless plains of Babylonia. The cedars procured by Sneferu from
Lebanon at the close of the IIIrd Dynasty were doubtless floated as
rafts down the coast, and we may see in them evidence of a regular
traffic in timber. It has long been known that the early Babylonian king
Sharru-kin, or Sargon of Akkad, had pressed up the Euphrates to the
Mediterranean, and we now have information that he too was fired by a
desire for precious wood and metal. One of the recently published
Nippur inscriptions contains copies of a number of his texts, collected
by an ancient scribe from his statues at Nippur, and from these we
gather additional details of his campaigns. We learn that after his
complete subjugation of Southern Babylonia he turned his attention to
the west, and that Enlil gave him the lands "from the Upper Sea to the
Lower Sea", i.e. from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
Fortunately this rather vague phrase, which survived in later tradition,
is restated in greater detail in one of the contemporary versions, which
records that Enlil "gave him the upper land, Mari, Iarmuti, and Ibla, as
far as the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountains".(1)
(1) See Poebel, Historical Texts (Univ. of Penns. Mus. Publ., Bab. Sect.,
Vol. IV, No. 1, 1914), pp. 177 f., 222 ff.
Mari was a city on the middle Euphrates, but the name may here

signify the district of Mari which lay in the upper course of Sargon's
march. Now we know that the later Sumerian monarch Gudea obtained
his cedar beams from the Amanus range, which he names Amanum and
describes as the "cedar mountains".(1) Doubtless he felled his trees on
the eastern slopes of the mountain. But we may infer from his texts that
Sargon actually reached the coast, and his "Cedar Forest" may have
lain farther to the south, perhaps as far south as the Lebanon. The
"Silver Mountains" can only be identified with the Taurus, where silver
mines were worked in antiquity. The reference to Iarmuti is interesting,
for it is clearly the same place as Iarimuta or Iarimmuta, of which we
find mention in the Tell el-Amarna letters. From the references to this
district in the letters of Rib-Adda, governor of Byblos, we may infer
that it was a level district on the coast, capable of producing a
considerable quantity of grain for export, and that it was under
Egyptian control at the time of Amenophis IV. Hitherto its position has
been conjecturally placed in the Nile Delta, but from Sargon's reference
we must probably seek it on the North Syrian or possibly the Cilician
coast. Perhaps, as Dr. Poebel suggests, it was the plain of Antioch,
along the lower course and at the mouth of the Orontes. But his further
suggestion that the term is used by Sargon