One of the most fundamental of the beliefs which the Pharaonic Egyptians brought with them was that in the divine origin of certain individuals. The prince who led them was not only the son of a god or goddess, he was an incarnation of the god himself. The belief is one of the many facts which link the Pharaonic civilisation with the culture of primitive Babylonia. In Babylonia also the king was divine. One of the early kings of Ur calls himself the son of a goddess, just as Besh does at Nekhen; and the great conquerors of primeval Asia, Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin, give themselves the title of “god” in their inscriptions; while Naram-Sin is even invoked during his lifetime as “the god of the city of Agadê” or Akkad. For many generations the Babylonian kings continued to receive divine honours while they were still alive; and it was not until after the conquest of Babylonia by a tribe of half-civilised foreigners from the mountains of Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the reigning king ceased to be a god. Like the doctrine of the divine right of kings in England, which could not survive the fall of the Stuarts, the doctrine of the divine nature of the monarch did not survive in Babylonia the fall of the native dynasties. In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to be invoked as a god after his death. Chapels and priests were consecrated to his memory, and stated sacrifices and offerings made to him. It was not necessary that the deified prince should be the supreme sovereign, it was sufficient if he were the head of a feudal principality. Thus, while Dungi, the supreme sovereign of Babylonia, receives in his inscriptions the title of “god,” his vassal Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city of Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult lasted for many centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in race, but most of the Babylonian kings who were thus deified were Semites. It is therefore possible that the deification of the ruler was of Semitic origin, and only adopted from them by the older Sumerian population, as in the case of Gudea; it is also possible that it was one of the consequences of that fusion of the two races, Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later population and culture of Babylonia. However this may be, the apotheosis of the Babylonian king during his lifetime can be traced back as far as Sargon and Naram-Sin, 3800 B.C. Sargon incorporated Palestine, “the land of the Amorites,” as it was then called, into his empire, while Naram-Sin extended his conquests to Mâgan or the Sinaitic Peninsula, thus bringing the arms and civilisation of Babylonia to the very doors of Egypt. The precise nature of the connection which existed between the Babylonian and the Egyptian belief in the divinity of the ruler must be left to future research.