On the other hand, so far as, we can judge, there was no reflex action of Egypt upon Babylonia. The seal-cylinder was never superseded there by the scarab; indeed the only scarabs yet found in the Mesopotamian region are memorials of the Egyptian conquests of the Eighteenth dynasty. Neither the hieroglyphs nor the hieratic of Egypt made their way eastward into Asia, a fact which is somewhat remarkable when we remember over how wide an area the more complicated cuneiform spread. It was Europe that was affected by Egypt rather than Asia. Before Egypt laid claim to Palestine, Babylonian culture had already taken too firm a hold of Western Asia to be dislodged, and in Babylonia itself Egyptian influences are hard to find. In the age of Khammu-rabi, we meet with a few proper names which may contain the name of the Sun-god Ra, as well as with the name of Anupum or Anubis on a stone cylinder, and the hieroglyphic character _nefer_, “good,” is affixed to a legal document.[107] But this merely proves that in a period when the Babylonian Empire reached to the confines of Egypt, there were Egyptians settled in Babylon for the purpose of trade. A more curious example of possible Egyptian influence is one to which I have drawn attention in my lectures on the _Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia_.[108] Thoth, the Egyptian god of literature, was accompanied by four apes, who sang hymns to the rising and setting sun. Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and the origin of these companions of Thoth has been cleared up by an inscription in a tomb at Assuan. Here we learn that in the age of the Old Empire, expeditions were sent by the Pharaohs into the Sudan--the home of the apes of Thoth--in order to bring back from “the land of the gods” Danga dwarfs who could “dance the dances of the gods.” In the eyes of the Egyptians, it would seem, there was little difference between the ape and the Danga dwarf; the one was a dwarf-like ape, the other an ape-like man. But they alone could perform correctly the dances that were held in honour of certain gods, and which are already depicted on the prehistoric vases of Egypt.[109] Closely allied to the Danga dwarfs and the apes of Thoth are the Khnumu or Patæki of Memphis, the followers of Ptah, who were also dwarfs with bowed legs. Now dwarfs of precisely the same form are found on early Babylonian seal-cylinders where they are associated sometimes with the goddess Istar, sometimes with an ape and the god Sin.[110] The Babylonian name of the dwarf was the Sumerian Nu-gidda, an indication that his association with the deity went back to Sumerian times. We may conclude that, like the Danga dwarf of Egypt, he, too, performed dances in honour of the gods.