The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

40 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

the mountains of Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the
reigning king ceased to be a god. Like the doctrine of the divine
right of kings in England, which could not survive the fall of the
Stuarts, the doctrine of the divine nature of the monarch did not
survive in Babylonia the fall of the native dynasties.
In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to be
invoked as a god after his death. Chapels and priests were
consecrated to his memory, and stated sacrifices and offerings
made to him. It was not necessary that the deified prince should
be the supreme sovereign, it was sufficient if he were the head of
a feudal principality. Thus, while Dungi, the supreme sovereign
of Babylonia, receives in his inscriptions the title of“god,”his
vassal Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city
of Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult lasted
for many centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in race, but most
of the Babylonian kings who were thus deified were Semites.
[042] It is therefore possible that the deification of the ruler was
of Semitic origin, and only adopted from them by the older
Sumerian population, as in the case of Gudea; it is also possible
that it was one of the consequences of that fusion of the two races,
Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later population and
culture of Babylonia. However this may be, the apotheosis of the
Babylonian king during his lifetime can be traced back as far as
Sargon and Naram-Sin, 3800B.C. Sargon incorporated Palestine,
“the land of the Amorites,”as it was then called, into his empire,
while Naram-Sin extended his conquests to Mâgan or the Sinaitic
Peninsula, thus bringing the arms and civilisation of Babylonia
to the very doors of Egypt. The precise nature of the connection
which existed between the Babylonian and the Egyptian belief
in the divinity of the ruler must be left to future research.
In the Egyptian mind, at all events, it was a belief that was
deeply implanted. The Pharaoh was a god upon earth. Like the
Incas of Peru, he belonged to the solar race, and the blood which
flowed in his veins was the ichor of the gods. The existence of