This national god had given his people their freedom and right to rule. He it was who had led their armies to victory, and had vanquished the hostile deities of Babylonia. He was thus identified with the army to which Assyria owed its existence, and with the king who was its leader in war. Wherever the army went or the king established himself, Assur went also. He lost, therefore, the last relics of his association with a particular locality, and became the god of the whole people. From every point of view he was national and not local. Freed from the limitations of locality, he was consequently freed from the limitations of form. Bel-Merodach was necessarily human in form, with all the limitations of humanity; it was only where his image was that he could be present in visible shape. But Assur was not confined to the human image that represented him. He could also be represented by a symbol, and where the symbol was he was too. The symbol was a standard, on which an archer was depicted rising from a winged sun. It was carried with the armies of Assyria from place to place, like the ark in which the Israelites of the age of Samuel saw a symbol of the presence of their national God. The winged sun refers us to Egypt; so too does the standard on which the emblem of Assur was borne. The Asiatic conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty had brought Egypt and Assyria into contact; the Assyrian king paid tribute to the Pharaoh, and doubtless depended on him for support against Babylonia. It was the period when Assyria was first feeling itself an independent nation; the authority of Babylonia had been shaken off, and the god of Babylon had been supplanted by Assur. We need not be surprised, therefore, if Assur consented to borrow from Egypt the symbol which henceforth distinguished him from the Babylonian gods, and with the symbol went the theological ideas of which it was the expression. These theological ideas were already deeply tinctured by the theories of the solar cult. The winged solar disc is evidence that Assur was assimilated to Amon-Ra of Egypt. But the assimilation stopped there. The Assyrians were too purely Semitic even to comprehend the nebulous pantheism of the Egyptian solar school; Assur remained an anthropomorphic god, with very definite attributes and sharply-cut features. The archer who rises above the disc of the sun significantly indicates the contrast between the theology of Egypt and Assyria. Above the sun-god is the human warrior, the lord of hosts, the god of battles, the divine leader of the armies of Assur. There was no room in the practical Assyrian mind for a formless divinity, with its infinite transformations and elusive shape. The Assyrian needed a soldier’s god, at once human and clearly defined.