(1) Cf. Sumer and Akkad, pp. 322 ff.; and for a full discussion of the points of resemblance between the early Babylonian and Egyptian civilizations, see Sayce, The Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, chap. iv, pp. 101 ff.

The latter line of contact is suggested by an interesting piece of evidence that has recently been obtained.  A prehistoric flint knife, with a handle carved from the tooth of a hippopotamus, has been purchased lately by the Louvre,(1) and is said to have been found at Gebel el-’Arak near Naga’ Hamadi, which lies on the Nile not far below Koptos, where an ancient caravan-track leads by Wadi Hammamat to the Red Sea.  On one side of the handle is a battle-scene including some remarkable representations of ancient boats.  All the warriors are nude with the exception of a loin girdle, but, while one set of combatants have shaven heads or short hair, the others have abundant locks falling in a thick mass upon the shoulder.  On the other face of the handle is carved a hunting scene, two hunters with dogs and desert animals being arranged around a central boss.  But in the upper field is a very remarkable group, consisting of a personage struggling with two lions arranged symmetrically.  The rest of the composition is not very unlike other examples of prehistoric Egyptian carving in low relief, but here attitude, figure, and clothing are quite un-Egyptian.  The hero wears a sort of turban on his abundant hair, and a full and rounded beard descends upon his breast.  A long garment clothes him from the waist and falls below the knees, his muscular calves ending in the claws of a bird of prey.  There is nothing like this in prehistoric Egyptian art.

     (1) See Benedite, “Le couteau de Gebel al-’Arak”, in
     Foundation Eugene Piot, Mon. et.  Mem., XXII. i. (1916).

Perhaps Monsieur Benedite is pressing his theme too far when he compares the close-cropped warriors on the handle with the shaven Sumerians and Elamites upon steles from Telloh and Susa, for their loin-girdles are African and quite foreign to the Euphrates Valley.  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