The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 2

One of the most fundamental of the beliefs which the Pharaonic Egyptians brought with them was that in the divine origin of certain individuals.

The prince who led them was not only the son of a G.o.d or G.o.ddess, he was an incarnation of the G.o.d himself. The belief is one of the many facts which link the Pharaonic civilisation with the culture of primitive Babylonia. In Babylonia also the king was divine. One of the early kings of Ur calls himself the son of a G.o.ddess, just as Besh does at Nekhen; and the great conquerors of primeval Asia, Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin, give themselves the t.i.tle of "G.o.d" in their inscriptions; while Naram-Sin is even invoked during his lifetime as "the G.o.d of the city of Agade" or Akkad. For many generations the Babylonian kings continued to receive divine honours while they were still alive; and it was not until after the conquest of Babylonia by a tribe of half-civilised foreigners from the mountains of Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the reigning king ceased to be a G.o.d. Like the doctrine of the divine right of kings in England, which could not survive the fall of the Stuarts, the doctrine of the divine nature of the monarch did not survive in Babylonia the fall of the native dynasties.

In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to be invoked as a G.o.d after his death. Chapels and priests were consecrated to his memory, and stated sacrifices and offerings made to him. It was not necessary that the deified prince should be the supreme sovereign, it was sufficient if he were the head of a feudal princ.i.p.ality. Thus, while Dungi, the supreme sovereign of Babylonia, receives in his inscriptions the t.i.tle of "G.o.d,"

his va.s.sal Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city of Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult lasted for many centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in race, but most of the Babylonian kings who were thus deified were Semites. It is therefore possible that the deification of the ruler was of Semitic origin, and only adopted from them by the older Sumerian population, as in the case of Gudea; it is also possible that it was one of the consequences of that fusion of the two races, Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later population and culture of Babylonia. However this may be, the apotheosis of the Babylonian king during his lifetime can be traced back as far as Sargon and Naram-Sin, 3800 B.C. Sargon incorporated Palestine, "the land of the Amorites," as it was then called, into his empire, while Naram-Sin extended his conquests to Magan or the Sinaitic Peninsula, thus bringing the arms and civilisation of Babylonia to the very doors of Egypt. The precise nature of the connection which existed between the Babylonian and the Egyptian belief in the divinity of the ruler must be left to future research.

In the Egyptian mind, at all events, it was a belief that was deeply implanted. The Pharaoh was a G.o.d upon earth. Like the Incas of Peru, he belonged to the solar race, and the blood which flowed in his veins was the ichor of the G.o.ds. The existence of a similar belief in Peru shows how easy it was for such a belief to grow up in regard to the leader of a conquering people who brought with them a higher culture and the arts of life. But it presupposes religious conceptions which, though characteristic of Babylonia, are directly contrary to those which seem to underlie the religion of Egypt. Among the Babylonians the G.o.ds a.s.sumed human forms; man had been made in the likeness of the G.o.ds, and the G.o.ds therefore were of human shape. The converse, however, was the case in Egypt. Here the G.o.ds, with few exceptions, were conceived of as brute beasts. Horus was the hawk, Nekheb the vulture, Uazit of Buto the deadly uraeus snake.

There is only one way of explaining the anomaly. The conception of the G.o.ds which made them men must have come from outside, and been imposed upon a people whose G.o.ds were the brute beasts. It must have been the Pharaonic invaders from Asia to whom the leader they followed was an incarnate G.o.d. Hence it was just this leader and no other who was clothed with divinity. Hence, too, it was that the older worship of animals was never really harmonised with the worship of the Pharaoh. The inner contradiction which existed between the new religious conceptions remained to the end, in spite of all the efforts of the priestly colleges to make them agree. Religious art might represent the G.o.d with the head of a beast or bird and the body of a man, the sacred books might teach that the deity is unconfined by form, and so could pa.s.s at will from the body of a man into that of a beast; but all such makeshifts could not hide the actual fact. Between the deity who is human and the deity who is b.e.s.t.i.a.l no true reconciliation is possible.

We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh back to Asia, and the Asiatic element in the Egyptian population. The Pharaonic conquerors of the valley of the Nile were those "followers of Horus" who worshipped their leader as a G.o.d. It was a G.o.d in human form who had led them to victory, and Horus accordingly continued to be represented as a man, even though the symbolism of the hieroglyphs united with the creed of the prehistoric races of Egypt in giving him the head of a hawk.

At first the ruler of each of the small kingdoms into which prehistoric Egypt was divided, was honoured as a G.o.d, like Gudea in Babylonia. When the kingdoms became, first, va.s.sal princ.i.p.alities under a paramount lord, and then nomes, the old tradition was still maintained. Divine t.i.tles were given to the nomarchs even in the later times of the united monarchy, and after their death worship continued to be paid to them.(13) Christian writers tell us how at Anabe particular individuals were regarded as G.o.ds, to whom offerings were accordingly brought; and Ptah, the tutelary deity of Memphis, was pictured as a man in the wrappings of a mummy, while to Anhur of This the human figure was a.s.signed.

With the coalescence of the smaller princ.i.p.alities into two kingdoms, the deification of the ruler was confined within narrower bounds. But for that very reason it became more absolute and intense. The supreme sovereign, the Pharaoh as we may henceforth call him, was a veritable G.o.d on earth.

To his subjects he was the source, not only of material benefits, but of spiritual blessings as well. He was "the good G.o.d," the beneficent dispenser of all good things.(14) The power of life and death was in his hand, and rebellion against him was rebellion against the G.o.ds. The blood that flowed in his veins was the same as that which flowed in the veins of the G.o.ds; it was even communicated to him from time to time by his divine brethren; and the bas-reliefs of a later age, when the traditional belief had become little more than a symbolical allegory, still depict him with his back towards the statue of the G.o.d, who is transfusing the ichor of heaven through his veins.(15)

Menes, the king of Upper Egypt, first united under one sceptre the two kingdoms of the Nile. The divinity which had hitherto been shared between the Pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt now pa.s.sed in all it fulness to him.

He became the visible G.o.d of Egypt, just as Sargon or Naram-Sin was the visible G.o.d of Akkad. All the attributes of divinity belonged to him, as they were conceived of by his subjects, and from him they pa.s.sed to his successors. Legitimacy of birth was reckoned through the mother, and through the mother accordingly the divine nature of the Pharaoh was handed on. Only those who had been born of a princess of the royal family could be considered to possess it in all its purity; and where this t.i.tle was wanting, it was necessary to a.s.sume the direct intervention of a G.o.d. The mother of Amon-hotep III. was of Asiatic origin; we read, therefore, on the walls of the temple of Luxor, that he was born of a virgin and the G.o.d of Thebes. Alexander, the conqueror of Egypt, was a Macedonian; it was needful, accordingly, that he should be acknowledged as a son by the G.o.d of the oasis of Ammon.(16)

But such consequences of the old Egyptian belief in the incarnation of the deity in man are leading us away into a field of investigation which will have to be traversed in a future lecture. For the present, it is sufficient to keep two facts steadily before the mind: on the one side, the old Egyptian belief in the divinity of the brute beast; on the other, the equally old belief in the divinity of man. The two beliefs are not really to be harmonised one with the other; they were, in fact, derived from different elements in the Egyptian population; but, with his usual conservative instinct and avoidance of abstract thought, the Egyptian of later days co-ordinated them together, and closed his eyes to their actual incompatibility.

Lecture III. The Imperishable Part Of Man And The Other World.

It has sometimes been a.s.serted by travellers and ethnologists, that tribes exist who are absolutely without any idea of G.o.d. It will usually be found that such a.s.sertions mean little more than that they are without any idea of what we mean by G.o.d: even the Zulus, who saw in a reed the creator of the world,(17) nevertheless believed that the world had been created by a power outside themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race of man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in a power of the kind, or in a world which is separate from the visible world around us; statements to the contrary generally rest on ignorance or misconception.

The very fact that the savage dreams, and gives to his dreams the reality of his waking moments, brings with it a belief in what, for the want of a better term, I will call "another world."

This other world, it must be remembered, is material, as material as the "heavenly Jerusalem" to which so many good Christians have looked forward even in our own day. The savage has no experience of anything else than material existence, and he cannot, therefore, rise to the conception of what we mean by the spiritual, even if he were capable of forming so abstract an idea. His spiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not only to be interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols, but identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The Latin _anima_ meant "breath" before it meant "the soul."

This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual has lingered long in the human mind; indeed, it is questionable whether, as long as we are human, we shall ever shake ourselves wholly free from it. The greater is naturally its dominance the further we recede in history. There is "another world," but it is a world strangely like our own.

Closely connected with this conception of "another world" is the conception which man forms concerning his own nature. There are few races of mankind among whom we do not find in one shape or another the belief in a second self. Sometimes this second self is in all respects a reflection and image of the living self, like the images of those we see in our dreams; and it is more than probable that dreams first suggested it.

Sometimes it is a mere speck of grey vapour, which may owe its origin to the breath which issues from the mouth and seems to forsake it at death, or to the misty forms seen after nightfall by the savage in the gloom of the forest and by the edge of the mora.s.s. At times it is conceived of as a sort of luminous gas or a phosph.o.r.escent flash of light, such as is emitted by decaying vegetation in a damp soil. Or, again, it may be likened to the bird that flies to heaven, to the b.u.t.terfly which hovers from flower to flower, or even to insects like the gra.s.shopper which hop along the ground. But however it may be envisaged, it is at once impalpable and material, something that can be perceived by the senses and yet eludes the grasp.

The Egyptian theory of the nature of man in the historical age of the nation was very complicated. Man was made up of many parts, each of which was capable of living eternally. The belief in his composite character was due to the composite character of the people as described in the last lecture, added to that conservative tendency which prevented them from discarding or even altering any part of the heritage of the past. Some at least of the elements which went "to the making of man" were derived from different elements in the population. They had been absorbed, or rather co-ordinated, in the State religion, with little regard to their mutual compatibility and with little effort to reconcile them. Hence it is somewhat difficult to distinguish them all one from another; indeed, it is a task which no Egyptian theologian even attempted; and when we find the list of them given in full, it is doubtless to secure that no component part of the individual should be omitted, the name of which had been handed down from the generations of old.

There were, however, certain component parts which were clearly defined, and which occupied an important place in the religious ideas of Egypt.

Foremost amongst these was the _Ka_ or "Double." Underneath the conception of the Ka lay a crude philosophy of the universe. The Ka corresponded with the shadow in the visible world. Like the shadow which cannot be detached from the object, so, too, the Ka or Double is the reflection of the object as it is conceived of in the mind. But the Egyptian did not realise that it was only a product of the mind. For him it was as real and material as the shadow itself; indeed, it was much more material, for it had an independent existence of its own. It could be separated from the object of which it was the facsimile and presentment, and represent it elsewhere.

Nay, more than this, it was what gave life and form to the object of which it was the image; it const.i.tuted, in fact, its essence and personality.

Hence it was sometimes interchanged with the "Name" which, in the eyes of the Egyptian, was the essence of the thing itself, without which the thing could not exist. In a sense the Ka was the spiritual reflection of an object, but it was a spiritual reflection which had a concrete form.

The "ideas" of Plato were the last development of the Egyptian doctrine of the Ka. They were the archetypes after which all things have been made, and they are archetypes which are at once abstract and concrete. Modern philosophers have transformed them into the thoughts of G.o.d, which realise themselves in concrete shape. But to the ancient Egyptian the concrete side of his conception was alone apparent. That the Ka was a creation of his own mind never once occurred to him. It had a real and substantial existence in the world of G.o.ds and men, even though it was not visible to the outward senses. Everything that he knew or thought of had its double, and he never suspected that it was his own act of thought which brought it into being.

It was symbolism again that was to blame. Once more the symbol was confused with that for which it stood, and the abstract was translated into the concrete. The abstract idea of personality became a substantial thing, to which all the attributes of substantial objects were attached.

Like the "Name," which was a force with a concrete individuality of its own, the Ka was as much an individual ent.i.ty as the angels of Christian belief.

Between it and the object or person to which it belonged, there was the same relation as exists between the conception and the word. The one presupposed the other. Until the person was born, his Ka had no existence; while, on the other hand, it was the Ka to which his existence was owed.

But once it had come into being the Ka was immortal, like the word which, once formed, can exist independently of the thought which gave it birth.

As soon as it left the body, the body ceased to live, and did not recover life and consciousness until it was reunited with its Ka. But while the body remained thus lifeless and unconscious, the Ka led an independent existence, conscious and alive.

This existence, however, was, in a sense, quite as material as that of the body had been upon earth. The Ka needed to be sustained by food and drink.

Hence came the offerings which were made to the dead as well as to the G.o.ds, each of whom had his Ka, which, like the human Ka, was dependent on the food that was supplied to it. But it was the Ka of the food and the Ka of the drink upon which the Ka of man or G.o.d was necessarily fed. Though at first, therefore, the actual food and drink were furnished by the faithful, the Egyptians were eventually led by the force of logic to hold that models of the food and drink in stone or terra-cotta or wood were as efficacious as the food and drink themselves. Such models were cheaper and more easily procurable, and had, moreover, the advantage of being practically imperishable. Gradually, therefore, they took the place of the meat and bread, the beer and wine, which had once been piled up in the dead man's tomb, and from the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty onwards we find terra-cotta cakes, inscribed with the name and t.i.tles of the deceased, subst.i.tuted for the funerary bread.

The same idea as that which led to the manufacture of these sham offerings had introduced statues and images into the tomb at an early date. In the tombs of the Third and Fourth and following Dynasties, statues have been found of a very high order of art. No effort has been spared to make them speaking likenesses of the men and women in whose tombs they were placed; even the eyes have been made lifelike with inlaid ivory and obsidian.

Usually, too, the statues are carved out of the hardest, and therefore the most enduring, of stone, so that, when the corpse of the dead was shrivelled beyond recognition, his counterpart in stone still represented him just as he was in life. But the statue had its Ka like the man it represented, and if the likeness were exact, the Ka of the statue and the Ka of the man would be one and the same. Hence the Ka could find a fitting form in which to clothe itself whenever it wished to revisit the tomb and there nourish itself on the offerings made to the dead by the piety of his descendants. And even if the mummy perished, the statue would remain for the homeless Ka.(18)

It was probably on this account that we so often find more than one statue of the dead man in the same tomb. The more numerous the statues, the greater chance there was that one at least of them would survive down to the day when the Ka should at last be again united to its body and soul.

And the priests of Heliopolis discovered yet a further reason for the practice. From time immemorial Ra the sun-G.o.d had been invoked there under the form of his seven birdlike "souls" or spirits, and double this number of Kas was now ascribed to him, each corresponding with a quality or attribute which he could bestow upon his worshippers.(19) Symbols already existed in the hieroglyphics for these various qualities, so that it was easy to regard each of them as having a separate and concrete existence, and so being practically a Ka.

The funerary statue and the ideas connected with it seem to have been characteristic of Memphis and the school of theology which existed there.

At all events, no similar statues have been discovered at Abydos in the tombs of the first two (Thinite) dynasties; they make their appearance with the rise of Memphite influence under the Third Dynasty. And with the disappearance of the old Memphite empire, they too tend to disappear. The disturbed condition of Egypt after the fall of the Sixth Dynasty was not favourable to art, and it was probably difficult to find artists any longer who could imitate with even approximate accuracy the features of the dead.

But under the Theban dynasties another kind of image becomes prominent.

This was the Ushebti or "Respondent," hundreds of which may be seen in most museums. They are usually small figures of blue or green porcelain, with a mattock painted under each arm, and a basket on the back. The name and t.i.tles of the deceased are generally inscribed upon them, and not unfrequently the 6th chapter of the Egyptian funerary ritual or Book of the Dead. The chapter reads as follows: "O these _ushebtis_, whatever be the work it is decreed the Osirified one must do in the other world, let all hindrances to it there be smitten down for him, even as he desires!

Behold me when ye call! See that ye work diligently every moment there, sowing the fields, filling the ca.n.a.ls with water, carrying sand from the West to the East. Behold me when ye call!"

The chapter explained what the _ushebti_-figures were intended for. Before the dead man, justified though he had been by faith in Osiris and his own good deeds, could be admitted to the full enjoyment of the fields of paradise, it was necessary that he should show that he was worthy of them by the performance of some work. He was therefore called upon to cultivate that portion of them which had been allotted to him, to till the ground and water it from the heavenly Nile. Had he been a peasant while on earth, the task would have been an easy one; had he, on the contrary, belonged to the wealthier cla.s.ses, or been unaccustomed to agricultural labour, it would have been hard and irksome. Thanks to the doctrine of the Ka, however, means were found for lightening the obligation. The relatives of the dead buried with him a number of _ushebti_-figures, each of which represented a fellah with mattock and basket, and their Kas, it was believed, would, with the help of the sacred words of the Ritual, a.s.sist him in his work. Sometimes, to make a.s.surance doubly sure, the images were broken; thus, as it were, putting an end to their earthly existence, and setting their Kas free.

When once the tomb was closed and the mummy hidden away in the recesses, it was necessary to find a way by which the Ka could enter the abode of the dead, and so eat and drink the food that had been deposited there. For it must be remembered that the Ka from its very nature was subject to the same limitations as the person whom it represented. If there was no door it could not enter. Where it differed from the living person was in its existing in a world in which what are shams and pictures to us were so many concrete realities. Consequently all that was needed in order to allow the Ka free entrance into the tomb was to paint a false door on one of its walls; the Ka could then pa.s.s in and out through the Ka of the door, and so rejoin its mummy or its statue when so it wished.

This false door, in front of which the offerings to the dead were originally laid, must go back to a primitive period in Egyptian history.

Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that it is presupposed by the so-called Banner name of the Egyptian Pharaohs.(20) Ever since the first days of hieroglyphic decipherment, it has been known that besides the name or names given to the Pharaoh at birth, and commonly borne by him in life, he had another name not enclosed in a cartouche, but in something that resembled a banner, and was surmounted by the hawk of the G.o.d Horus. It actually represented, however, not a banner, but the panel above the false door of a tomb, and the name written within it was the name of the Ka of the Pharaoh rather than of the Pharaoh himself. It was accordingly the name by which he was known after death, the name inscribed on the objects buried in his tomb, and also the name under which he was worshipped whether in this life or in the next. As the Horus or deified leader who had subjugated the older inhabitants of Egypt and founded the Pharaonic dynasties, it was right and fitting that he should be known by the name of his Ka. It was not so much the Pharaoh that was adored by his subjects, as the Ka of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was G.o.d because the blood of Horus flowed in his veins.

The earliest monuments of the Pharaohs yet discovered give almost invariably only the Ka-name of the king. The fact is doubtless due in great measure to their general character. With few exceptions they consist of tombstones and other sepulchral furniture. But the objects found in the foundations of the temple of Nekhen are also examples of the same fact.

The fusion was not yet complete, at all events in the south, between the Pharaoh as man and the Pharaoh as G.o.d; it was his Ka that was divine, rather than the bodily husk in which it sojourned for a time.

The Ka accordingly occupies a prominent place in the names of the Pharaohs of the Old Empire, while the sacred art of the temples continued the ancient tradition down to the latest times. Horus and the Nile-G.o.ds, for instance, present the Ka of Amon-hotep III. along with the infant prince to the G.o.d of Thebes; and at Soleb the same Pharaoh is represented as making offerings to his own double.(21) Indeed, it is not unfrequent to find the king and his Ka thus separated from one another and set side by side; and at times the Ka becomes a mere symbol, planted like a standard at the monarch's back.

It was the Ka, therefore, which in the early days of Egyptian religious thought was more especially a.s.sociated with the divine nature of the king.

The a.s.sociation of ideas was a.s.sisted by the fact that the G.o.ds, like men, had each his individual Ka. And in the older period of Egyptian history the Ka of the G.o.d and not the G.o.d himself was primarily the object of worship. The sacred name of Memphis was ?a-ka-Pta?, "the temple of the Ka of Pta?," which appears as _Khikuptakh_ in the Tel el-Amarna letters, and from which the Greeks derived their _Aiguptos_, "Egypt." Even in the last centuries of Egyptian independence the prayers addressed to the bull-G.o.d Apis are still made for the most part to his Ka.

The Ka, in fact, was conceived of as the living principle which inspired both G.o.ds and men. Its separation from the body meant what we call death, and life could return only when the two were reunited. That reunion could take place only in the other world, after long years had pa.s.sed and strange experiences had been undergone by the disembodied Ka. The 105th chapter of the Book of the Dead contains the words with which on the day of resurrection the Ka was to be greeted. "Hail," says the dead man, "to thee who wast my Ka during life! Behold, I come unto thee, I arise resplendent, I labour, I am strong, I am hale, I bring grains of incense, I am purified thereby, and I thereby purify that which goeth forth from thee." Then follow the magical words by which all evil was to be warded off: "I am that amulet of green felspar, the necklace of the G.o.d Ra, which is given unto them that are on the horizon. They flourish, I flourish, my Ka flourishes even as they, my duration of life flourishes even as they, my Ka has abundance of food even as they. The scale of the balance rises, Truth rises high unto the nose of the G.o.d Ra on the day on which my Ka is where I am (?). My head and my arm are restored to me where I am (?). I am he whose eye seeth, whose ears hear; I am not a beast of sacrifice. The sacrificial formulae for the higher ones of heaven are recited where I am."

As might be expected, the Ka is often represented with the symbol of life in its hands. At the same time, it is important to remember that, though under one aspect the Ka was identical with the principle of life, in the mind of the Egyptian it was separate from the latter, just as it was separate from consciousness and from the divine essence. These were each of them independent ent.i.ties which were possessed by the Ka just as they were possessed by its human counterpart. Life, consciousness, and relationship to the G.o.ds were all attributes of the Ka, but they were attributes, each of which had a concrete and independent existence of its own.

At the outset, doubtless, the Ka was practically identical with the vital principle. Primitive man does not distinguish as we do between the animate and the inanimate. He projects his own personality into the things he sees about him, and ascribes to them the same motive forces as those which move himself. He knows of only one source of movement and activity, and that source is life. The stars which travel through the firmament, the arrow that flies through the air, are either alive or else are directed and animated by some living power. Movement, in fact, implies life, and the moving object, whatever it may be, is a living thing.

The old belief or instinct is still strong in the child. He revenges himself upon the ball or stone that has struck him as though it too were a living being. In the Mosaic law it is laid down that "if an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned"; and similar penalties were enforced against animals which had injured man, not only in the Middle Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig was burned at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in 1266, for having devoured a child; and in 1389 a horse was brought to trial at Dijon for the murder of a man, and condemned to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an action was brought against the ants who had burrowed under the foundations of a monastery, and, after counsel had been heard on both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banishment by the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the Protestant chapel at La Roch.e.l.le was first scourged for having abetted heresy, then catechised and made to recant, and finally baptized.(22)

The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than the orthodox theologians of La Roch.e.l.le. For them, too, action must have implied life, and the distinction between object and subject had not yet been realised.

Hence the belief that objects as well as persons had each its Ka, a belief which was strengthened by the fact that they all alike cast shadows before them, as well as the further belief that the nature of the Ka was in either case the same. Hence it was, moreover, that the _ushebti_-figures and other sepulchral furniture were broken in order that their Kas might be released from them, and so accompany the Ka of the dead man in his wanderings in the other world. As life and the power of movement deserted the corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka was separated from it, so too the Ka of the _ushebti_ pa.s.sed out of it when its form was mutilated by breakage. The life that was in it had departed, as it were, into another world.

It is even possible that the very word _Ka_ had originally a connection with a root signifying "to live." At any rate, it was identical in spelling with a word which denoted "food"; and that the p.r.o.nunciation of the two words was the same, may be gathered from the fact that the Egyptian bas-reliefs sometimes represent the offerings of food made to the dead or to the G.o.ds inside the arms of the symbol of the Ka(23). When we remember that _vivande_ is nothing more than the Latin _vivenda_, "the things on which we live," there arises at least the possibility of an etymological connection between the double and the principle of life which it once symbolised.(24)

Now, in my Hibbert Lectures on the _Religion of the Ancient Babylonians_, I pointed out that the early Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia held a belief which is almost precisely the same as that of the Egyptians in regard to the Ka. In Babylonia also, everything had its Zi or "double,"