It can hardly be that the two
civilized peoples of the world in those days were really absolutely
ignorant of each other, but we have no trace of any connection between
them, other than the possible one before the founding of the Egyptian
monarchy.
This early connection, however, is very problematical. We have seen that
there seems to be in early Egyptian civilization an element ultimately
of Babylonian origin, and that there are two theories as to how it
reached Egypt. One supposes that it was brought by a Semitic people of
Arab affinities (represented by the modern Grallas), who crossed the
Straits of Bab el-Man-deb and reached Egypt either by way of the Wadi
Hammamat or by the Upper Nile. The other would bring it across the
Isthmus of Suez to the Delta, where, at Heliopolis, there certainly
seems to have been a settlement of a Semitic type of very ancient
culture. In both cases we should have Semites bringing Babylonian
culture to Egypt. This, as we may remind the reader, was not itself of
Semitic origin, but was a development due to a non-Semitic people,
the Sumerians as they are called, who, so far as we know, were the
aboriginal inhabitants of Babylonia. The Sumerian language was of
agglutinative type, radically distinct both from the pure Semitic idioms
and from Egyptian. The Babylonian elements of culture which the early
Semitic invaders brought with them to Egypt were, then, ultimately of
Sumerian origin.
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