Lecture II. Primitive Animism. 255
reason seemed to demand that what held true of himself must
hold true also of the rest of the world.
But, like the Egyptian, the Sumerian could not conceive of life
except under visible and concrete form. The abstract was still
embedded, as it were, in the concrete; it could not be divorced
from it in thought any more than in those pictorial characters
which were used by the scribes. What we mean by“force”would
have been unintelligible to the primitive Babylonian; for him
life was something real and material, which had a shape of its
own, even though this shape was but an unsubstantial shadow,
seen indeed by the eye, but eluding the grasp. At the same time
it was more than a shadow, for it possessed all the qualities of
the object or person to whom it belonged. It was not life in
the abstract, but the counterpart of an individual object, which
endowed that object with the power of motion, and gave it a
place in the animate world.
The Sumerian Zi, therefore, closely resembled the Egyptian
Ka. The human Zi was the imperishable part of man; it made him
a living soul while he was in this world, and after death continued
to represent him in the shadowy world below.^216 Unlike thelilla [278]
or“ghost,”it represented the man himself in his personality; if
that personality were destroyed, it also ceased to exist. While on
the one side it was the Zi which gave man life and the power of
movement, on the other side, without the individual man there
could be no individual Zi. Food and drink were offered to the
Babylonian dead as they were to the Egyptian, and the objects
the dead man had loved during his lifetime were deposited in
his grave. His seal was attached to his wrist, his spear or staff
was laid at his side, and at times even dates or fish or poultry
were buried with him, lest he might feel hungry in the darkness
(^216) Thus we have the phrase“to swear by theZiof the king”(see Delitzsch,
Assyrisches Handwörterbuch, s.v.nisu). The Zi included theekimor specific
ghost, whose prominence belongs rather to post-Sumerian days than to the
early ages of Babylonian history.