There would be this difference, then: the settlers along the rivers really would begin to lead settled lives, like the people who tilled the soil in Egypt, but beyond those limits there would be wanderers, with their cattle--wanderers for the most part of the same race as the settlers, but growing more and more distinct and divided from them in manners and feelings as time went on and they lived such different lives. I spoke of these Babylonians having just the same puzzles presented to their minds by what we call "the {57} forces of Nature" as the Egyptians had, but said that they answered them a little differently. The Egyptians, as we saw, tried three different kinds of answer. They made a great god of the sun, they made a great god of Osiris, who was originally just the god of one place (like many others), and they made gods of all sorts of animals. Now, trying to understand the religion of the ancient Babylonians, we may rule out entirely all idea of animal worship--that is to say, the third kind of answer which the Egyptians made to their puzzles. It does not seem to have been thought of by the Babylonians at all. Let us forget those sacred cats and crocodiles of the Nile. [Sidenote: Osiris and Ra] And then, having cast them aside, we may see a very remarkable likeness between the other guesses that the two peoples made, and the way in which they tried to work the different guesses in with one another. For you may remember that the Egyptians, after forming the idea of Ra, the sun-god--a god that had his eye over all the world--and after imagining Osiris to be so powerful as to rule divinely over all Egypt: after they had thus exalted these two gods at the expense of all the others, they then began to regard the two as one--the one being but one form of the other--Osiris, as Ra, traversing the heavens, and Ra, as Osiris, ruling the earth. And since Ra, the Sun, was supposed to go under the earth at night, in order to get back to the east to begin his journey across the sky again the next morning, there was no great difficulty in imagining him, again as Osiris, ruling over the dead in the under-world also.