Joseph Campbell Occidental Mythology, (NY, 1964)
1. Sargon’s birth: "Sargon am I, the mighty king, monarch of Agade. My mother was of lowly birth; my father I knew not; the brother of my father is a mountain dweller; and my city, Azupirana, lies on the bank of the Euphrates.
My lowly mother conceived and bore me in secrecy; placed me in a basket of rushes; sealed it with bitumen, and set me in the river, which, however, did not engulf me. The river bore me up. And it carried me to Akku, the irrigator, who took me from the river, raised me as his son, made of me a gardener; and while I was a gardener, then goddess Ishtar loved me. The I ruled the kingdom..." (p.73)
2. Moses’ birth: EXODUS 2:1-4: Now a man from the house of Levi [we read] went and took to wife a daughter of Levi. The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could hide him no longer she took for him a basket made of bulrushes and daubed it with bitumen and pitch; and she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds at the river's brink. And his sister stood at a distance, to know what would be done to him...
3. "[T]he legend of Moses' birth is obviously modeled on the earlier birth story of Sargon of Agade (c.2350 BC), and is clearly not of Egypt, since in Egypt bitumen or pitch was not used before Ptolemaic times, when it was introduced from Palestine (127).
The name Moses itself is Egyptian. It is the normal word for "child" and occurs among the names, for example, of the pharoahs of Dynasty XVIII....the idea that an Egyptian princess could have thought the word to be Hebrew shows that the story-tellers do not always think their problems through: And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharoah's daughter, and he became her son; and she named him Moses [Hebrew Mosheh], for she said, "Because I drew him out [Hebrew mashah] of the water" (128).
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