Some Egyptians in Babylonia

Abstract

In 1932 Sidney Smith published an article on ‘An Egyptian in Babylonia’ indicating a link between Egypt and Dēr where a brick inscription and drawing of the Amarna period was discovered. This interest in the relation between Egypt and her neighbours has long characterized his writings so that it would seem appropriate to publish here some fragmentary texts which offer evidence of Egyptian presence in Babylonia in the Neo-Babylonian period.The Assyrian royal annals and administrative texts show that Egyptian prisoners were taken to Nineveh and Calah following the campaigns of Sargon II, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal in Palestine and the Delta. However, when compared with the Neo-Assyrian evidence, scant though it is, even less is known of Egypt's contacts with Babylonia in the second half of the first millennium B.C. The Babylonian Chronicle gives some notice of the military encounter between the two powers in the Middle Euphrates area, culminating in the heavy defeat of the Egyptian army by Nebuchadrezzar II at Carchemish in the late spring of 605 B.C, the survivors being picked up in the Hamath plain. The same source tells how the Egyptians had recovered sufficiently to inflict a damaging reverse on the Babylonians when they tried to invade four years later. It is not yet clear when, and how far, the Babylonians were able to revenge this defeat.