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So the names of Dungi and Gudea are written on tablets that belong to the centuries immediately following their reign, with the determinative that is placed before the names of gods. Festivals were celebrated in honor of these kings, sacrifices were offered to them, and their images were placed in temples. No doubt other kings will be found who were similarly honored.
Gudea, accordingly, does not omit to include 'the lady of Mar' in his list of the chief deities to whom he pays his devotions; and on the assumption of the general favor in which the city of Mar stood as a sacred town, we may account for the fact that a much later ruler, Dungi, of the dynasty of Ur, erects a temple to her honor. Pa-sag.
In the time of Dungi, King of Ur, there was a constant interchange of officials between the various cities of Babylonia and Elam, and during the more recent diggings at Telloh there have been found vouchers for the supply of food for their sustenance when stopping at Shirpurla in the course of their journeys.
Such episodes must have been common at this period when each city was striving for hegemony. Meanwhile, Shirpurla remained the centre of Sumerian influence in Babylonia, and her patesis were content to owe allegiance to so powerful a ruler as Dungi, King of Ur, while at all times exercising complete authority within their own jurisdiction.
* The tablets found at Telloh by the late M. de Sarzec, and published during his lifetime, fall into two main classes, which date from different periods in early Chaldæan history. The great majority belong to the period when the city of Ur held pre-eminence among the cities of Southern Babylonia, and they are dated in the reigns of Dungi, Bur- Sin, Gamil-Sin, and Ine-Sin.
Many centuries have to elapse before the monuments of Babylonia again throw light on the history of Canaan. Somewhere about B.C. 2700, a high-priest was ruling in a city of Southern Babylonia, under the suzerainty of Dungi, the king of Ur.
A rather curious feature, illustrated by these temple archives, and one upon which we shall have occasion to dwell, is the divine honors that appear to have been paid towards the end of the first period of Babylonian history to some of the earlier rulers, notably Gudea and Dungi.
Such was the fame of the temple known as E-shid-lam, and the closeness of the connection between the deity and his favorite seat, that Nergal himself became known as shid-lam-ta-ud-du-a, i.e., the god that rises up from E-shid-lam. It is by this epithet that the same Dungi describes him in one of his inscriptions.
Some of those recently discovered, which belong to the period of Dungi, contain memoranda concerning the supply of food for the maintenance of officials stopping at Shirpurla in the course of journeys in Babylonia and Elam, and they throw an interesting light on the close and constant communication which took place at this time between the great cities of Mesopotamia and the neighbouring countries.
Dungi and Gudea, who are far from being the earliest rulers in the Euphrates Valley, appear in tablets with the determinative for deity attached to their names, and it would be natural, therefore, that a hero belonging to a remote period should likewise be deified.
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