The Babylonian sovereign was thus quite as much a pontiff as he was a king. The fact was acknowledged in the titles he bore, as well as in the ceremony which legitimized his accession to the throne. Two views prevailed, however, as to his relation to the god. According to one of these, sonship conferred upon him actual divinity; he was not merely the representative of a god, but a god himself. This was the view which prevailed in the earlier days of Semitic supremacy. Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin are entitled “gods;” temples and priests were dedicated to them during their lifetime, and festivals were observed in their honor. Their successors claimed and received the same attributes of divinity. Under the third dynasty of Ur even the local prince, Gudea, the high-priest of Tello, was similarly deified. It was not until Babylonia had been conquered by the foreign Kassite dynasty from the mountains of Elam that a new conception of the King was introduced. He ceased to be a god himself, and became, instead, the delegate and representative of the god of whom he was the adopted son. His relation to the god was that of a son during the lifetime of his father, who can act for his father, but cannot actually take the father’s place so long as the latter is alive. Some of the earlier Chaldean monarchs call themselves sons of the goddesses who were worshipped in the cities over which they held sway. They thus claimed to be of divine descent, not by adoption, but by actual birth. The divinity that was in them was inherited; it was not merely communicated by a later and artificial process. The “divine right,” by grace of which they ruled, was the right of divine birth. At the outset, therefore, the Babylonian King was a pontiff because he was also a god. In him the deities of heaven were incarnated on earth. He shared their essence and their secrets; he knew how their favor could be gained or their enmity averted, and so mediated between god and man. This deification of the King, however, cannot be traced beyond the period when Semitic rule was firmly established in Chaldea. It is true that Sumerian princes, like Gudea of Lagas, were also deified; but this was long after the rise of Semitic supremacy, and the age of Sargon of Akkad, and when Sumerian culture was deeply interpenetrated by Semitic ideas. So far as we know at present the apotheosis of the King was of Semitic origin.