Those then, who believe that the engineering sciences of the Babylonians and Egyptians were no independent inventions are bound to see in Babylonia their original home. It would have been here that the great problems were solved, the practical application of which to the needs of Egypt would have been a comparatively simple matter. On the chronological side there would be no difficulties in such a view. Old as was the civilization of Egypt, the excavations in Babylonia have made it clear that the civilization of Babylonia was at least equally old. At Nippur the American excavators claim to have found inscribed remains which reach back for nearly ten thousand years, and though the data upon which this calculation is based may be disputable, it is certain that the earliest monuments met with are of immense age. And it must be remembered that they belong to a time when the early pictorial writing had already passed into a cursive script, and the plain of Babylonia had been a land of cultivated fields for unnumbered generations. But by itself, I repeat, the practical identity of engineering science in primeval Babylonia and Egypt is no proof that it had been learnt by the one from the other. If we are to fall back on the old belief which brought the civilized population of Egypt from the plain of Shinar, it must be for reasons which are supported by archæological facts. If such archæological facts exist, the parallel systems of irrigation engineering will be additional evidence; alone, they prove nothing. At the outset we are met by a fact which personally I find it hard to explain away. The hieroglyphic script of Egypt has little in common with the primitive pictorial characters of Babylonia. Objects and ideas like “the sun,” “man,” “number one,” will be represented by the same pictures or symbols all the world over, and consequently the fact that in both Babylonian and Egyptian writing the sun is denoted by a circle and the moon by a crescent is of no significance whatsoever. But when we turn to less obvious symbols there is comparatively little similarity between the two forms of script. The ideograph of “god,” for example, is a star in Babylonia, a stone axe and its shaft in Egypt; “life” is represented by a flowering reed in the one case, by a knotted girdle in the other. It is true that Professor Hommel and others have pointed to a few coincidences like those between the Egyptian symbol for “foreign land” and the Babylonian ideograph of “country,” or between the Egyptian and Babylonian signs for “city,” “place,” but such coincidences are rare.[92] As a rule, as soon as we leave the more obvious conventions of pictorial writing little or no connection can be traced between the pictorial characters of Egypt and those of Babylonia. As a whole the two graphic systems stand apart.