Lecture II. Primitive Animism. 267
the Sumerian governor of Lagas; he who had ruled on earth,
whether Semite or Sumerian, was adjudged worthy of a place
among the gods of the official creed. King and noble alike could
be raised to the rank of a divinity; and we even find Gimil-Sin,
the king of Ur, erecting a temple to his own godhead.^230 We are
reminded of the shrines built by the later Pharaohs in honour of
their own Kas.
The deification of man, and therewith a belief in the higher
destinies of the human soul, can thus be traced back to an
early period of Semitic supremacy in Babylonia. Unfortunately
our evidences for this belief in the higher destinies of the soul
are still but scanty. In this respect Babylonia offers a striking
contrast to Egypt. There the larger part of the monumental
records we possess are derived from tombs; and Egyptian belief
in regard to the future life is abundantly described not only on [291]
the tombstones, but also on the inscribed and pictured walls of
the sepulchre itself. We know almost more of what the Egyptian
thought about the imperishable part of man and its lot hereafter,
than we do about any other portion of his creed. In Babylonia and
Assyria, on the contrary, there are no tombstones, no pictured
and inscribed tombs. The literature we possess tells us but little
concerning the future life and the beliefs connected with it. The
ritual and the hymns to the gods are concerned with this life,
not with the next, and we have to grope our way, as it were,
through obscure allusions and ambiguous phrases if we would
find in them any references to the world beyond the grave. To
fall back on mythological poems and heroic epics is dangerous
and misleading. The literary myth will give us as false an idea of
the psychology of a people as it will of their theology; at most it
will express the beliefs of the individual writer, or enshrine old
terms and phrases, the primitive meaning of which has passed
away. To extract a psychology from literary legends is as difficult
(^230) Thureau-Dangin in theRecueil de Travaux, xix. p. 186.