It is paralleled by the apotheosis of the King in ancient Egypt. There, too, the Pharaoh was regarded as an incarnation of divinity, to whom shrines were erected, priests ordained, and sacrifices offered. In early times he was, moreover, declared to be the son of the goddess of the city in which he dwelt; it was not till the rise of the fifth historical dynasty that he became the “Son of the Sun-god” of Heliopolis, rather than Horus, the Sun-god, himself. This curious parallelism is one of many facts which point to intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt in the prehistoric age; whether the deification of the King originated first on the banks of the Euphrates or of the Nile must be left to the future to decide. Naram-Sin is addressed as “the god of Agadê,” or Akkad, the capital of his dynasty, and long lists have been found of the offerings that were made, month by month, to the deified Dungi, King of Ur, and his vassal, Gudea of Lagas. Here, for example, are Dr. Scheil’s translations of some of them: “I. Half a measure of good beer and 5 _gin_ of sesame oil on the new moon, the 15th day, for the god Dungi; half a measure of good beer and half a measure of herbs for Gudea the High-priest, during the month Tammuz. II. Half a measure of the king’s good beer, half a measure of herbs, on the new moon, the 15th day, for Gudea the High-priest. One measure of good wort beer, 5 _qas_ of ground flour, 3 _qas_ of cones (?), for the planet Mercury: during the month of the festival of the god Dungi. III.… Half a measure of good beer, half a measure of herbs, on the new moon, the 15th day, for the god Gudea the High-priest: during the month Elul, the first year of Gimil-Sin, king [of Ur].” The conception of the King as a visible god upon earth was unable to survive the conquest of Babylonia by the half-civilized mountaineers of Elam and the substitution of foreigners for the Semitic or Semitized Sumerian rulers of the country. As the doctrine of the divine right of kings passed away in England with the rise of the Hanoverian dynasty, so, too, in Babylonia the deified King disappeared with the Kassite conquest. But he continued to be supreme pontiff to the adopted son of the god of Babylon. Babylon had become the capital of the kingdom, and Merodach, its patron-deity, was, accordingly, supreme over the other gods of Chaldea. He alone could confer the royal powers that the god of every city which was the centre of a principality had once been qualified to grant. By “taking his hands” the King became his adopted son, and so received a legitimate right to the throne.