The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

338 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

army went or the king established himself, Assur went also. He
[369] 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;
[370] 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