The societies meet every two or three weeks, and their work does not differ materially from that of the missionary societies in American seminaries. There is usually an address or paper upon some subject of the history or theory of missions, sometimes by a student, sometimes by a missionary, a professor, or another who is qualified upon the subject. There are two points in which we should see a difference. The first is that these societies interest themselves only in foreign missions, existing side by side with the more popular Students' Gustavus Adolphus Societies, which cultivate what we should call home missions. The other is, that hardly any of the members of these societies offer themselves for the work of foreign missions. That men of university education are needed as missionaries is an idea which gains ground slowly in Germany, and has hardly taken hold at all of the young men in the universities. And just here, it seems to us, lies the immediate work of these societies, and of those who have influence in them. George F. Moore. "ARCHIÆOLOGICAL NOTES. IT was fitting that the sixth International Convention of Orientalists should hold its triennial session at Leyden in September last. The university once boasted names famous in these studies. Such were Drusius, for whom Cambridge and Oxford contended, and Erpenius, the most noted Eastern scholar of his time. We are glad to hear from Professor Francis Brown that three Americans were present in the city where once the Pilgrims sojourned. We trust that at Vienna, in 1886, the number will be tripled. If then America become the host of the Oriental Congress for 1889, there may well be expected to appear some fruits of American archæological scholarship. Meantime the proposition of the "Independent" of a Euphrates expedition is sagacious and patriotic. Fifty thousand dollars invested thus to-day will yield returns to art and letters, to science and religion, exceeding tenfold that investment at a tardier date. Why should not the Metropolitan Museum in New York take the initiative? -At the sixtieth anniversary of the Asiatic Society, held May 21, the Right Hon. Sir Bartle E. Frère in the chair, an interesting eulogy was read by M. Revillout on the great Egyptologist, M. François Joseph Chabas. M. Chabas's name is associated, to the Frenchman, with the decipherment of the obelisk of Luxor; to the Englishman, with the "Travels of an Egyptian" in the "Records of the Past." He was born at Briançon, and died at Versailles at the age of sixty-five. Brought up to business like Schliemann, like Schliemann, too, he had a passionate taste for study, which at the age of thirty-five he was able to gratify by retiring to Chalons-sur-Saône and devoting himself to Egyptology. In four years he published "Notes Explanatory of Two Groups of Hieroglyphs." This swift acquisition was joined to vast productiveness. So valued a worker in his chosen field had he become in twenty years, that at the Oriental Congress of London, 1874, he was appointed member of the international committee for the publication of M. Naville's forthcoming variorum Edition of the Ritual. His "Harris - Papyrus on Magic (published 1861) is still the classic on that theme. M. Revillout says, "Setting aside only Dr. Birch and M. de Rougé, all the Egyptologists of Europe were his pupils." The marvel of his learning was that it was gained during the last half of his life, without travel, from his library of fac-similes, in the seclusion of a provincial town. -M. Naville suggests Pithom. His identification of it with Tel-elMaskhutah hangs fire. On the one hand Lepsius, in a recent number of the "Zeitschrift für Ægyptische Sprache," combats the new discovery that threatens to rob him of his site for Rameses. This on three grounds. (1.) The statements of Antoninus in his "Itinerary" respecting Thoum and of Herodotus respecting Patumos locate Pithom at the west end of Wady Tumilat, and this cannot be the same as Heroopolis twenty-four miles eastward, that is, Tel-el-Maskhutah. (2.) The necessities of the triple worship at Heroopolis to Ra, Rameses, and Tum. There must have been a Pi-Ra, a Pi-Rameses, and a Pi-Tum. But Pi-Ra Heliop olis, and Pi-Tum= Patumos. Hence Tel-el-Maskhutah must be Pi-Rameses, the great frontier city of Rameses II. (3.) The name Heroopolis city of heroes. is the same as an Egyptian word meaning "great of the strong ones "found on the site under discussion. From another point of view Rev. L. Dickerman, May 2, before the American Oriental Society, brings forward eight forcible objections to M. Naville's hypothesis. He presses the difficulty of finding a city near and rich enough to answer to Rameses, and to furnish gold for the golden calf. He asks why, if the buildings at Tel-el-Maskhutah were erected by Hebrews, were the bricks with the cartouche of Rameses I. without straw? He ends with the 66 query, granting that the fragment of a limestone statue belonged to the priest of Tum and his Pithom-temple was Succoth, how does that prove that the place where it was found was Pithom-Succoth, that the priest never lived anywhere but here, that his statue had never been carried from one place to another, when the obelisk in New York has been twice removed?" Mr. Dickerman's paper has won praise from so high an authority as Dr. Birch. On the other hand, R. S. Poole of the British Museum, in the "Academy" of September 22, argues against Lepsius that his Egyptian epithet belongs to a king, not a place, and that ar (storehouse) refers to a city not of the fortress kind. He sees no difficulty in two Pithoms twenty-four miles apart, One could be specially designated as in parallel cases. Miss Amelia B. Edwards favors the same identification, as do Ebers and Maspero. M. Naville himself, in the "Academy" of October 6, calls attention to the fact that inscriptions are an authority no less weighty than Herodotus, and that monuments of every period from Rameses II. to Ptolemy Philadelphus are at Tel-el-Maskhutah. Pi-tum, or Ha-Tum (abode of the temple of Tum), or Thuku-Succoth, or both together, are common. The naos is dedicated to the god Tum-Harmakhis (Hormakku = the sun on the meridian), and contains a sphynx with human head. Succoth is also inscribed. So "good recorder of Pi-Tum, chief of the prophets of Tum, first prophet of Succoth," is a specimen of several inscriptions putting Pithom and Succoth together, names which Lepsius does not deny to be identical. M. Naville says, also, (1) the place is great as a storecity, insignificant as a town; (2) the name Pi-Rameses never occurs; (3) a Pithom at either extremity of the nome is proved; (4) if Maskhutah be Rameses and Tel-Abu-Suleiman be Succoth, then the Israelites, in the first march from Rameses to Succoth, journeyed twenty-two miles -- from east to west, turning their backs on the Red Sea. He bespeaks patience and promises fuller proofs. The Christian public will accord him, doubtless, a fair hearing, and meantime reserve its decision. -Another Frenchman, M. Perrot, gives us a glimpse of Egypt and Chaldæa together. This in his paper before the Académie des Inscriptions of April 20 and 27, 1883. It is entitled "Art Comparison of Egypt and Chaldæa." and is understood to be the concluding chapter of volume ii. of the "Histoire de l'Art dans l'Antiquité," MM. Perrot and Chipiez, Paris. M. Perrot contrasts the land of the Euphrates with the land of the Nile to the disadvantage of the former in architecture. If equal in dimensions and in splendor, the temples of Chaldæa fell below those of Egypt in nobility. They lacked the sovereign and mysterious beauty of their rivals. The terraced towers might astonish by their bulk and please by their color. Yet they bore the seeds of their own decay in their very materials. Beside the majestic piles of Karnak they were colossal improvisations. -M. Sarzec's late discoveries at Tel-Lo, in Southern Babylonia, furnish M. Perrot with a basis for a like antithesis between the sculpture of the two peoples. To be sure the balance is somewhat more even. Egypt shows purer lines and a greater delicacy and grace. Here is the unrivaled serenity of attitude and feature, whether in figurine or colossus. Chaldæa, on the other hand, excels in power of action and energy of model. The great qualities of force and fire are here in higher degree. More frankly anthropomorphic, too, is her Pantheon, undisfigured by head of hawk and crocodile that make hideous the Egyptian deities. But when we look at fidelity of likeness the scale turns the other way. The funeral customs of the Nile demanded good portraiture. Hence royal statues recognizable even by the foreigner after generations. No similar motive urged the Chaldæan chisel. Chaldæa was preeminent as a sculptor of dogs and lions, whose bodies were seen under the sunlight and free from trappings. Egypt was master as a sculptor of men and women, the muscular modeling of whose flesh and the undulating lines of whose forms no cumbrous drapery hid. For the want of study of the nude, Assyrian sculpture is a blighted bud. For the cultivation of it, all Egypt is a people of statues, emerging from the very tomb. -French discoveries in Babylonia are beginning to excite English jealousy. It appears that the English firman under which Mr. Hormuzd Rassam worked has expired. The French firman has been renewed and enlarged. Aboo-Hubba and other sites partially explored by Mr. Rassam, are to be visited by a French savant, with possible power to anticipate English work and break the completeness of English collections there. Should this occur the French might possibly forgive the British Museum for their possession of the Rosetta Stone. -Meantime Mr. W. S. C. Boscawen, who has furnished a translation of the twelth Izdubar legend in volume ix., and of the Tower of Babel in volume vii. of the " Records of the Past," has written the London “Mail" (Times) of August 3, 1883, a letter spurring the jaded English interest in Assyriological exploration. He deprecates the unfinished state of the exeavations at Aboo-Hubba. Here Mr. Rassam has restored the remains of a city founded 3800 years before Christ. The discovery of the Nabonidus inscription, and of fragments of sculpture like those found by M. Sarzec at Tel-Lo, shows we have here a city most ancient in a land of 66 ancient cities. Everything indicates that the site has been free from violent disturbance, and may yield other invaluable records. Sargon I. was the Romulus of Chaldæa. From his inscription is but a step to the rise of Semitic power in North Babylonia. This usurper king compiled the first great collection of Babylonian literature, and specially the huge astronomical work in seventy tablet volumes, known as the Illumination of Bel." These works were in the library attached to the temple of his divine protectress, and in the city Agadhe, the Hebrew Akkad, one of the quarters of Sippara. At Aboo-Hubba one hundred chambers of the edifice have been uncovered, two of which are record rooms. From these were obtained several thousand contract, fiscal, and legal tablets extending over the late Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empire, and on into the time of the Seleucidæ. -Mr. Boscawen specializes two points of interest as respects Sephar vaim and Cutha, from which Samaria was colonized. One is an inscription of Nabu-Abaddidin (B. C. 880), furnishing a code of sacrificial ritual and a series of annual festivals for the temple of the Sun-god, so closely resembling the Jewish Levitical law, that it points the reason why the Samaritans became so soon converts to Judaism. The second is drawn from Tel-Ibrahim, the ancient Kutu, the Cutha of the Bible. This was one of the chief necropoli of Babylonia. Its temple was dedicated to Nergal, the lion-headed death-god of the Babylonians, and seems likely to throw light on the vexed question of the Babylonian disposition of the dead. The foregoing appeal to the British public ends with an outlook toward more Eastern exploration still. This is on the ground of the Sarzec statues and the historical and mythological inscriptions, telling of the Akkadian emigrants' journey to the plains of Shinar, through the provinces of Khuzistan and Kurdistan. Here Sir Henry Rawlinson is quoted as saying, "Layard, in his paper on Khuzistan, mentions twelve places in Elymais where cuneiform inscriptions are either known or are believed to exist, yet of this grand collection we have only two short and sadly copied specimens from Mal-Amir and Kul-Faroun." What a field does Elymais present to an enterprising archæologist. -Sir Henry Rawlinson's acceptance of the approximate date of 3800 B. C. for Sargon the Great should not be forgotten. In a letter to the "Athenæum" of December 9, 1882, the substance of which is printed in the "Independent" of January 18, 1883, he gives the grounds for adopting this immense, and, at first sight, improbable chronology. Our readers will recall the discovery of the Nabonidus cylinder, by H. Rassam, on the site of Sippara, the Biblical Sepharvaim, and its decipherment by T. G. Pinches of the British Museum. Nabonidus, the last native king of Babylon, the inveterate antiquary, unearthed thirty-two feet below the surface the inscription on the foundation-stone of the Temple of the Sun, a memorial tablet of Naram Sin, son of Sargina, which he said had not been seen by mortal eye for 3200 years. H. Rawlinson, a sober and cautious judge, accepts the figures. (1.) From the allusions in royal inscriptions to intervals of 60 to 1600 years, as if notorious. (2.) Because Berosus, in presence of the documents, after classifying the dynasties to 2400 B. C., names 86 kings of one line, extending from the Median Conquest to the Flood. Now, allowing 20 years to a reign, we have 20 × 86=1720 years, which, added to 2400, Sir gives us 4120 B. C., a still older date than that in question. (3.) The Flood was an accepted historical epoch, and Sargina is named in close connection with it. The fact that he was deified later does not disprove his historic personality. For this is put beyond doubt by the summary of events on an astrological tablet, by Nabonidus's discovery at the Temple of the Sun, by an inscription of an alabaster vase found by the French in 1852, but lost in the Tigris afterward. - The subject of the Deluge is revived further by a review of the second edition of Schrader's masterly "Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament" (Giessen, 1883). This appears in the October number of the "Studien und Kritiken," from the pen of Gustav Rösch. The writer calls attention to the far closer connection between the Biblical narrative and the Chaldæan legend than Berosus had given some to suppose. The Hebrew knowledge of this legend by no means dates from the exile. Noah is already a well-known personage in Ezekiel and the second Isaiah. 66 -Even more, however, has the publication, by Dr. Paul Haupt, of the cuneiform narrative of the Deluge, in the same book, furnished the Assyriologist with facts of fascinating moment. No reader of it will wish to lessen Schrader's prefatory praise of the piercing insight and comprehensive learning of his coadjutor. On the contrary, he will be grateful that the last 'Hebrew Student," now the "Old Testament Student," Chicago, contains an article on the same theme, from the same pen, and that Johns Hopkins University has now this brilliant investigator giving instruction to American students in Hebrew, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Sumero-Akkadian. The coming of such a scholar to our shores is an educational event of the happiest omen. Another German, Friedrich Delitzsch, has been enriching the "Athenæum" with a series of seven papers, beginning May 5, 1883, on the Importance of Assyriology to Hebrew Lexicography." He is severe in his strictures on the ninth edition of Gesenius's dictionary for its forcing Arabic meanings into Hebrew words, and for its slighting of Assyriological derivations and discoveries. According to him, the Rem of Job xxxix. 9, 10, is not the corresponding Arabic word antilope leucoryx. "This animal's home is only in the sands of Arabia and Africa. The Rem is the Ri-mu of the cuneiform inscriptions. He is the strong-horned, fierce-looking, wild bull, skilled in climbing mountains, whose colossal and formidable likeness was placed by the Assyrian kings before the entrance of their palaces, to ward off and terrify the approaching enemy." The Hebrew names for the months Dr. Delitzsch would have no longer saddled with Sanskrit, Persian, or even Hebrew etymologies. Of Babylonian origin, let them show their parentage. "Nisan, in Babylonian nisānu, the name of the first month, means, doubtless, start,' 'beginning,' from nisu, which is also the meaning of Tishri, in Babylonian, Tishrītu, the first month of the second half of the year. Iyyar in Babylonian, Airu, Aru, means the bright month'; Adar-in Babylonian, Addaru, February-March, is the dull, gloomy month,' that time being specially rainy in Babylonia. The rainy season commences in Tebet, i. e., December-January, the month of rain-showers, according to Sennacherib's graphic account (Sennacherib, iv. 75), for Tēbētu means the sinking in water' from tibu." Two of the writer's many Scriptural revisions are of special 6 |