the fitness and loyalty of a minister whom they proposed to appoint.[121.5] And this religion affords a unique illustration of the intimacy of the bond between the king as head of the State and the divine powers. The gods are the rulers of destiny: and in the Hall of Assembly at Esagila each year the Council of the Gods under the presidency of Nebo fixed the destiny of the king and the Empire for the ensuing year.[121.6] This award must have signified the writing down of oracles concerning the immediate future, and no doubt the questions were prepared by the king and the priests. The good king {122} who was devoted to the service of the gods was glorified by the priesthood in much the same terms as are applied in the Old Testament to the king who was devoted to the service of Jahwé: in the cult-inscription of Sippar in the British Museum,[122.1] Nabupaladdin, who reigned 884-860 B.C., and who re-established the cult of Shamash, is praised by the priest as “the called of Marduk, the darling of Anu and Ea, the man wholly after the heart of Zarpanit.” The king, then, is the head of the church, himself a high-priest, as Gudea was high-priest of Ningirsu, and as the Assyrian kings described themselves as the priests of Asshur, the professional priesthood serving as their expert advisers and ministers. Was he actually worshipped in his life? This is maintained by some Assyriologists, and certain evidence points to the practice. In the conversation between Nebo and Assurbanipal, to which reference has been made, the god promises to the king, “I will raise up thy head and erect thy form in the temple of Bit-Mashmash”;[122.2] the names of old Babylonian kings are marked with the ideogram of divinity, and Professor Jastrow[122.3] mentions an inscription of the fourth millennium B.C. in which Gudea ordains sacrifices to his own statues. A document is quoted by Mr. Johns,[122.4] recording the dedication of a piece of land by a private citizen “for his life,” that is to say, to bring a blessing on himself, to the King Lugalla who is called a god, and to his consort. But Zimmern[122.5] considers that the direct deification of kings was a practice of the earliest period only, and was never pushed so far as it was in Egypt. {123} There is reason to suppose that the king or patesi who controlled Nippur had alone the right to be deified, Nippur being the original centre of the Sumerian religion.[123.1] The sacred character of the king implied that he could exercise miraculous functions or put forth divine “mana” on behalf of his people. We find him in the earlier period reciting incantations in the dark of the moon to avert evil from the land.[123.2] One of the kings of the dynasty of Ur assumed the title “the exorciser of the holy tree of Eridu,” which may point to certain magic functions performed by the king on the sacred tree.[123.3]