The official creed itself was an artificial amalgamation of two different currents of belief. The Babylonian race was mixed; Sumerian and Semite had gone to form it in days before history began. Its religion, therefore, was equally mixed; the religious conceptions of the Sumerian and the Semite differed widely, and it was the absorption of the Sumerian element by the Semitic which created the religion of later days. It is Semitic in its general character, but in its general character alone. In details it resembles the religions of the other Semitic nations of Western Asia only in so far as they have been influenced by it. The Sumerian had no conception of what we mean by a god. The supernatural powers he worshipped or feared were spirits of a material nature. Every object had its _zi_, or “spirit,” which accompanied it like a shadow, but unlike a shadow could act independently of the object to which it belonged. The forces and phenomena of nature were themselves “spirits;” the lightning which struck the temple, or the heat which parched up the vegetation of spring, were as much “spirits” as the _zi_, or “spirit,” which enabled the arrow to reach its mark and to slay its victim. When contact with the Semites had introduced the idea of a god among the Sumerians, it was still under the form of a spirit that their powers and attributes were conceived. The Sumerian who had been unaffected by Semitic teaching spoke of the “spirit of heaven” rather than of the god or goddess of the sky, of the “spirit of Ea” rather than of Ea himself, the god of the deep. Man, too, had a _zi_, or “spirit,” attached to him; it was the life which gave him movement and feeling, the principle of vitality which constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the _zi_ was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the bird to fly. The _zi_ of the Sumerians was thus a counterpart of the _ka_, or “double,” of Egyptian belief. The description given by Egyptian students of the _ka_ would apply equally to the _zi_ of Sumerian belief. They both belong to the same level of religious thought; indeed, so closely do they resemble one another that the question arises whether the Egyptian belief was not derived from that of ancient Sumer.