Again, in Greece this tendance of the spirits, in the case of the great ones of the community--the king, the hero, or the priest--was undoubtedly linked at an early period with apotheosis of the dead; and actual hero-cults and actual cults of ancestors became, as we have seen, a salient phenomenon of Greek religion. But if this phenomenon is to be noted at all in the Babylonian, it certainly was not salient. We know that under certain circumstances the king might be worshipped in his lifetime and after, but we do not yet know that the departed head or ancestor of the family received actual cult; where this is asserted by modern scholars,[213.1] it may be that they have not paid sufficient attention to the important difference that has been defined between the tendance and the worship of the dead.[213.2] This at all events, on the evidence already placed before us, may be said: in respect of the frequency and force of hero-worship, Mesopotamia stands at the opposite pole to Greece, and in testing the question of primitive religious influences of East on West this fact must be weighed in the scale. Evidence has been adduced pointing to an early Greek belief that the spirit of the departed ancestor might reincarnate itself in a descendant: a belief fairly common among savage peoples. I have not been able to find any indication of it in Babylonian records, nor am I aware of any trace of it among other Semitic peoples except, possibly, a late {214} Phoenician inscription from the tomb of Eshmunazar, King of Sidon about B.C. 300: in the curse which he invokes against the violator of his tomb he prays that such a man’s posterity may be rooted out: “May they have no root in the world below, nor fruit above, nor any bloom in the life under the sun.”[214.1] These strange words contain the idea of a family-tree; the fruit and the bloom are the living members who are in the light of the sun: the root are the ancestral spirits. If the figure is to be interpreted literally, we must regard these latter as the source of the life that is on the earth, and the curse would mean “may the departed ancestors no longer have the power to reappear in the living.” But we cannot feel sure how much sense we can press into the words.