Myths of Babylonia and Assyria eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 560 pages of information about Myths of Babylonia and Assyria.

Myths of Babylonia and Assyria eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 560 pages of information about Myths of Babylonia and Assyria.

During the early dynasties this skull with alien traits was confined chiefly to the Delta region and the vicinity of Memphis, the city of the pyramid builders.  It is not improbable that the Memphite god Ptah may have been introduced into Egypt by the invading broad heads.  This deity is a world artisan like Indra, and is similarly associated with dwarfish artisans; he hammers out the copper sky, and therefore links with the various thunder gods—­Tarku, Teshup, Adad, Ramman, &c, of the Asian mountaineers.  Thunderstorms were of too rare occurrence in Egypt to be connected with the food supply, which has always depended on the river Nile.  Ptah’s purely Egyptian characteristics appear to have been acquired after fusion with Osiris-Seb, the Nilotic gods of inundation, earth, and vegetation.  The ancient god Set (Sutekh), who became a demon, and was ultimately re-exalted as a great deity during the Nineteenth Dynasty, may also have had some connection with the prehistoric Hatti.

Professor Elliot Smith, who has found alien traits in the mummies of the Rameses kings, is convinced that the broad-headed folks who entered Europe by way of Asia Minor, and Egypt through the Delta, at the close of the Neolithic Age, represent “two streams of the same Asiatic folk".[284] The opinion of such an authority cannot be lightly set aside.

The earliest Egyptian reference to the Kheta, as the Hittites were called, was made in the reign of the first Amenemhet of the Twelfth Dynasty, who began to reign about 2000 B.C.  Some authorities, including Maspero,[285] are of opinion that the allusion to the Hatti which is found in the Babylonian Book of Omens belongs to the earlier age of Sargon of Akkad and Naram-Sin, but Sayce favours the age of Hammurabi.  Others would connect the Gutium, or men of Kutu, with the Kheta or Hatti.  Sayce has expressed the opinion that the Biblical Tidal, identified with Tudkhul or Tudhula, “king of nations”, the ally of Arioch, Amraphel, and Chedor-laomer, was a Hittite king, the “nations” being the confederacy of Asia Minor tribes controlled by the Hatti.  “In the fragments of the Babylonian story of Chedor-laomer published by Dr. Pinches”, says Professor Sayce, “the name of Tid^{c}al is written Tudkhul, and he is described as King of the Umman Manda, or Nations of the North, of which the Hebrew Goyyim is a literal translation.  Now the name is Hittite.  In the account of the campaign of Rameses II against the Hittites it appears as Tid^{c}al, and one of the Hittite kings of Boghaz-Koei bears the same name, which is written as Dud-khaliya in cuneiform.[286]

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
Myths of Babylonia and Assyria from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.