Legends of Babylon and Egypt in relation to Hebrew tradition | Page 9

of
Tahpanhes is represented on the Cairo monument, an Egyptian stele in
the form of a naos with the winged solar disk upon its frieze. He stands
on the back of a lion and is clothed in Asiatic costume with the high
Syrian tiara crowning his abundant hair. The Syrian workmanship is
obvious, and the Syrian character of the cult may be recognized in such
details as the small brazen fire-altar before the god, and the sacred
pillar which is being anointed by the officiating priest. But the god

holds in his left hand a purely Egyptian sceptre and in his right an
emblem as purely Babylonian, the weapon of Marduk and Gilgamesh
which was also wielded by early Sumerian kings.
(1) Müller, op. cit., p. 30 f., pl. 40. Numismatic evidence exhibits a
similar readiness on the part of local Syrian cults to adopt the veneer of
Hellenistic civilization while retaining in great measure their own
individuality; see Hill, "Some Palestinian Cults in the Graeco-Roman
Age", in Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. V (1912).
The Elephantine papyri have shown that the early Jews of the Diaspora,
though untrammeled by the orthodoxy of Jerusalem, maintained the
purity of their local cult in the face of considerable difficulties. Hence
the gravestones of their Aramaean contemporaries, which have been
found in Egypt, can only be cited to illustrate the temptations to which
they were exposed.(1) Such was the memorial erected by Abseli to the
memory of his parents, Abbâ and Ahatbû, in the fourth year of Xerxes,
481 B.C.(2) They had evidently adopted the religion of Osiris, and
were buried at Saqqârah in accordance with the Egyptian rites. The
upper scene engraved upon the stele represents Abbâ and his wife in
the presence of Osiris, who is attended by Isis and Nephthys; and in the
lower panel is the funeral scene, in which all the mourners with one
exception are Asiatics. Certain details of the rites that are represented,
and mistakes in the hieroglyphic version of the text, prove that the
work is Aramaean throughout.(3)
(1) It may be admitted that the Greek platonized cult of Isis and Osiris
had its origin in the fusion of Greeks and Egyptians which took place in
Ptolemaic times (cf. Scott- Moncrieff, Paganism and Christianity in
Egypt, p. 33 f.). But we may assume that already in the Persian period
the Osiris cult had begun to acquire a tinge of mysticism, which,
though it did not affect the mechanical reproduction of the native texts,
appealed to the Oriental mind as well as to certain elements in Greek
religion. Persian influence probably prepared the way for the Platonic
exegesis of the Osiris and Isis legends which we find in Plutarch; and
the latter may have been in great measure a development, and not, as is
often assumed, a complete misunderstanding of the later Egyptian cult.

(2) C.I.S., II. i, tab. XI, No. 122.
(3) A very similar monument is the Carpentras Stele (C.I.S., II., i, tab.
XIII, No. 141), commemorating Taba, daughter of Tahapi, an
Aramaean lady who was also a convert to Osiris. It is rather later than
that of Abbâ and his wife, since the Aramaic characters are transitional
from the archaic to the square alphabet; see Driver, _Notes on the
Hebrew Text of the Books of Samuel_, pp. xviii ff., and Cooke, North
Semitic Inscriptions, p. 205 f. The Vatican Stele (op. cit. tab. XIV. No.
142), which dates from the fourth century, represents inferior work.
If our examples of Semitic art were confined to the Persian and later
periods, they could only be employed to throw light on their own epoch,
when through communication had been organized, and there was
consequently a certain pooling of commercial and artistic products
throughout the empire.(1) It is true that under the Great King the
various petty states and provinces were encouraged to manage their
own affairs so long as they paid the required tribute, but their horizon
naturally expanded with increase of commerce and the necessity for
service in the king's armies. At this time Aramaic was the speech of
Syria, and the population, especially in the cities, was still largely
Aramaean. As early as the thirteenth century sections of this interesting
Semitic race had begun to press into Northern Syria from the middle
Euphrates, and they absorbed not only the old Canaanite population but
also the Hittite immigrants from Cappadocia. The latter indeed may for
a time have furnished rulers to the vigorous North Syrian principalities
which resulted from this racial combination, but the Aramaean element,
thanks to continual reinforcement, was numerically dominant, and their
art may legitimately be regarded as in great measure a Semitic product.
Fortunately we have recovered examples of sculpture which prove that
tendencies already noted in the Persian period were at