266 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniapolytheism.
How close this connection between the gods and the souls of
men became in later days, may be seen from the fact that when
Assur-bani-pal visited the tombs of his forefathers, he poured
out a libation in their honour and addressed to them his prayers.
They had, in short, become gods, like the gods of light to whom
temples were erected and offerings made. The change in point
of view had doubtless been quickened by that deification of the
king of which I shall have to speak in a future lecture, and
which seems to have been of Semitic origin. When the king
became a god, to whom priests and temples were dedicated both
in his lifetime and after his death, it was inevitable that new
ideas should arise in regard to the nature of the soul. The spirit
who was addressed as a god, and set on a level with the divine
lords of heaven, was no powerless and starveling ghost in the
underworld of En-lil, but a spirit in the more modern sense of
the word, who dwelt in the realms of light, where he could hear
and answer the prayers that were laid before him. The ghost had
[290] been transformed into a soul, whose nature was the same as that
of the gods themselves, and which, like them accordingly, could
move freely where it would, listening to the petitions of those on
earth, and interceding for them.
This conception of the soul had already been arrived at in the
age of Sargon of Akkad, the earliest to which at present anything
like full contemporaneous records reach back. But it was an age
in which Semitic influence was already dominant; Sargon was
the founder of a Semitic empire which extended to the shores
of the Mediterranean, and the Sumerian epoch of Babylonian
civilisation had long since passed away. Remote as the age
seems to us of to-day, it was comparatively late in the history
of Chaldæan culture. And deification was not confined to the
person of the king. The high priests of the Babylonian cities who
owned allegiance to him were similarly deified by their subjects.
The daily offering was made, for instance, to the deified Gudea,