To the Semite, however, I believe I have shown in my Lectures on Babylonian religion,[90] we must ascribe an important theological conception. In historical Babylonia the gods were conceived of in the form of man. Man was created in the image of God because the gods themselves were men. But the conception cannot be traced back further than the age when the Sumerians and Semites came into contact with one another. In pre-Semitic Sumer there are no anthropomorphic gods. We hear, instead, of the _zi_ or “spirit,” a word properly signifying “life” which manifested itself in the power of motion. All things that moved were possessed of life, and there was accordingly a “life” or “spirit” of the water as well as of man or beast. In place of the divine “lord of heaven” whom the Semites adored there was “a spirit of heaven”; in place of Ea, the later Babylonian god of the deep, there was “a spirit of the abyss.” Sumerian theology, in fact, was still on the level of animism, and the inventors of the script represented the idea of “god” by the picture of a star. Vestiges of the old animism can still be detected even in the later cult: by the side of the human gods an Assyrian prayer invokes the mountains, the rivers and the winds, and from time to time we come across a worship of deified towns. It was the town itself that was divine, not the deity to whom its chief temple was dedicated. So, again, the god or goddess continued to be symbolized by some sacred animal or object whose figure appears upon seals and boundary-stones, and in some cases we learn that the Sumerian prototypes of the later Babylonian divinities bore such names as “the gazelle,” “the antelope” or “the bull.” With the advent of the Semite all is changed. The gods have become men and women with intensified powers and the gift of immortality, but in all other respects they live and act like the men and women of this nether world. Like them, too, they are born and married, and the court of the early prince finds its counterpart in the divine court of the supreme Bel, or “Lord.” The Semitic god of Babylon was “lord of gods” and men, of heaven and earth; Assur of Assyria was “king of the gods” and lord of “the heavenly hosts.” It was natural that, corresponding with this lord of the heavenly hosts, there should be a lord of the hosts of earth, and that as the divine king was clothed in the attributes of man, the human king should take upon him the divine nature. Like the Pharaohs of Egypt or the emperors of Rome, the early kings of Semitic Babylonia were deified. And the deification took place during their lifetime,--in fact, so far as we can judge, upon their accession to the throne. In the eyes of their subjects they were incarnate deities, and in their inscriptions they give themselves the title of god. One of them is even called “the god” of Akkad, his capital.[91]