How close this connection between the gods and the souls of men became in later days, may be seen from the fact that when Assur-bani-pal visited the tombs of his forefathers, he poured out a libation in their honour and addressed to them his prayers. They had, in short, become gods, like the gods of light to whom temples were erected and offerings made. The change in point of view had doubtless been quickened by that deification of the king of which I shall have to speak in a future lecture, and which seems to have been of Semitic origin. When the king became a god, to whom priests and temples were dedicated both in his lifetime and after his death, it was inevitable that new ideas should arise in regard to the nature of the soul. The spirit who was addressed as a god, and set on a level with the divine lords of heaven, was no powerless and starveling ghost in the underworld of En-lil, but a spirit in the more modern sense of the word, who dwelt in the realms of light, where he could hear and answer the prayers that were laid before him. The ghost had been transformed into a soul, whose nature was the same as that of the gods themselves, and which, like them accordingly, could move freely where it would, listening to the petitions of those on earth, and interceding for them. This conception of the soul had already been arrived at in the age of Sargon of Akkad, the earliest to which at present anything like full contemporaneous records reach back. But it was an age in which Semitic influence was already dominant; Sargon was the founder of a Semitic empire which extended to the shores of the Mediterranean, and the Sumerian epoch of Babylonian civilisation had long since passed away. Remote as the age seems to us of to-day, it was comparatively late in the history of Chaldæan culture. And deification was not confined to the person of the king. The high priests of the Babylonian cities who owned allegiance to him were similarly deified by their subjects. The daily offering was made, for instance, to the deified Gudea, the Sumerian governor of Lagas; he who had ruled on earth, whether Semite or Sumerian, was adjudged worthy of a place among the gods of the official creed. King and noble alike could be raised to the rank of a divinity; and we even find Gimil-Sin, the king of Ur, erecting a temple to his own godhead.(230) We are reminded of the shrines built by the later Pharaohs in honour of their own Kas.