It is not surprising, therefore, that as soon as the Semitic element becomes paramount in Babylonia, the king becomes a god. At Babylon he was made the adopted son of Bel-Merodach by taking the hand of the deity, and thereby became himself a Bel, a ruler of “the people of Bel” over whom he was henceforth to exercise undisputed lordship. In earlier days, Sargon of Akkad, the founder of the first Semitic empire in Western Asia, and his son Naram-Sin, were explicitly deified. Naram-Sin is even addressed as “the god of Akkad”;(269) and a seal-cylinder found by Gen. di Cesnola in Cyprus describes its owner as “the servant of the god Naram-Sin.”(270) The title of “god” is assumed by the Semitic successors of Sargon, to whatever city or dynasty they belonged; even the Sumerian princes in Southern Babylonia followed the example of their Semitic suzerains, and Gudea, the high priest of Lagas, built temples to his own godhead, where for long centuries his cult continued to be observed, and sacrifices and offerings to be made to him.(271) The occupation of Babylonia by the Arab or Canaanite dynasty to which Amraphel belonged, made no difference in the divine honours paid to the king; he still assumed the title of “god,” and his subjects adored him by the side of Bel. But a change came with the conquest of Babylonia by Kassite hordes from the mountains of Elam; the foreign kings ceased to be divine, and the title of “god” is given to them no more. As the doctrine of the divine right of kings passed away in England with the Stuarts, so too the belief in the divinity of the king disappeared in Babylonia with the fall of the Semitic dynasties. Nothing could show more plainly its essentially Semitic origin, and the little hold it possessed upon the non-Semitic part of the population. The king was a god only so long as he was a Semite, or subject to Semitic influence and supremacy. The apotheosis of the king is thus coeval with the rise of Semitic domination in Babylonia. In the older Sumerian epoch we look in vain for any traces of it. Man was not yet divine, for the gods were not yet human. There was as yet no Semitic Bel, and En-lil of Nippur was but a “lord of ghost(s).”