This civilization, like that of Babylonia, implied a knowledge of metal. It was a civilization of the copper age, and thus stood in sharp contrast to the neolithic culture, such as it was, of “prehistoric” Egypt. Egyptian tradition, it is true, believed that the metal weapons with which the followers of Horus had overcome the stone-defended natives of the country were of iron, but this was because the compilers of the story in its existing form projected the knowledge and usages of their own time back into the past. There is incontrovertible proof that in Egypt, as in Europe, the ages of copper and bronze preceded that of iron. But the tradition was doubtless right in laying stress upon the fact that the invaders were forgers and blacksmiths. It would have been by reason of the superiority of their arms that they succeeded in subduing the valley of the Nile and reducing its inhabitants to serfdom. They were, too, “the followers of Horus,” under the leadership of a single prince who was himself a Horus, that is to say, an incarnate god. Here, again, we find ourselves in the presence of a conception and doctrine of Semitic Babylonia. There, too, as we have seen, the kings were incarnate gods, not only the sons of a divinity, but themselves divine. In Egypt, apart from the Osirian circle, the gods were not men, but animals, and so deeply rooted was this beast-worship in the hearts of the indigenous population that even the “dynastic” civilization, with all its unifying and absorbing power, never succeeded in doing more than in uniting the head of the beast with the body of the man. Even the human Pharaoh was forced to picture himself as a hawk. In Semitic Babylonia on the other hand, as we have seen, the deification of the king flowed naturally from the anthropomorphic conception of the deity; where man was made in the image of God, it was easy to see in him a god on earth. Like the use of copper, therefore, the deification of the king which characterized dynastic Egypt points back to Babylonia.