HONEST--CROSS MY HEART!
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1. When it came to convincing us of their age, the Egyptians were highly successful. Their conservative culture, which changed only slightly over the course of centuries, coupled with an absolute god-king monarchy, easily persuaded Greek visitors like Solon and Herodotus that they were older than everybody else, and Mesopotamian historians like Berosus failed to produce enough evidence to back their claims. The Greeks passed Egypt's claim to us, and we took it as gospel truth until a century after the first translation of hieroglyphics.
It took the diggings of Sir Leonard Woolley and others in southern Iraqi cities like Ur and Eridu to give us a more balanced, less biased picture of the Bronze Age world. Nowadays when one compares Mesopotamia and Egypt, one finds that because the typical Egyptian found life easier than his Mesopotamian counterpart, he was less inclined to change/modernize his tools & ideas.
Consequently Egypt remained at a chalcolithic level of technology all the way to the end of the Old Kingdom (approx. 2200 B.C.), long after Mesopotamia switched over to using bronze implements.
2. The Jewish calendar of today is the same one used by the ancient Mesopotamians, and the fourth month still bears the Semitic name of Dumuzi, Tammuz. The prophet Ezekiel also notes a group of women in Jerusalem "mourning for Tammuz" in Ezek. 8:14; this refers to the legend that claims Dumuzi died and went to the underworld for six months of every year, causing the world to become cold and lifeless (fall and winter) until he came back.