+The Divinity of kings+ was a fundamental belief {62} which reveals itself in a variety of forms through Western Asia and Egypt. The inscriptions of Gudea, the code of Khammurabi, the Assyrian records and the praises of the Pharaohs reflect conceptions which are materialised now in the insignia of the kings, and now in their costume and toilet. In a Babylonian myth the royal ornaments lay before the supreme god awaiting the monarch; in Egypt the king is the god's _ka_, his first-born; chosen, created and crowned by the divine father. The kings stood in the closest relationship to the gods; they were not only the heads of the state, they were also (in early Assyria) priest-kings, and in Egypt theoretically all offerings for the living and the dead were made by the Pharaoh. All this was neither mere empty formality nor an isolated eccentricity. It is quite in accordance with the powers commonly ascribed to divine representatives, that the control of the rain and storm is held to depend upon the influence of Ramses II. with the weather-god. It is equally intelligible (from anthropological evidence) when the same king caused the gods to take up their abode in the images which had been prepared for them! Khammurabi could declare that he carried in his bosom the people of Sumer and Akkad, and {63} the Pharaoh could call himself the husband of Egypt, while Egypt was 'the only daughter of Re (the sun-god) whose son sits upon the throne.' Not only was he the incarnation and the son of the deity (or of all the recognised deities), but he was the cause of the land's fruitfulness, prosperity, and protection. The Pharaoh, 'the god of all people' (as he is once called), received the adoration of his subjects, and one could sometimes believe that he was more essentially a deity than the gods themselves, were it not that the subordinate gods always maintained their hold upon the people locally. With all allowance for the difference between conventional and practical religion, the fundamental relations between land, people, ruler and the deity persisted in many related though varying forms, which are extremely interesting in any consideration of the social changes at the rise of a monarchy and after its downfall.