Note 213.1 — Chapter XII · Eschatologic Ideas of East and West.

But if this phenomenon is to be noted at all in the Babylonian, it certainly was not salient. We know that under certain circumstances the king might be worshipped in his lifetime and after, but we do not yet know that the departed head or ancestor of the family received actual cult; where this is asserted by modern scholars,213.1 it may be that they have not paid sufficient attention to the important difference that has been defined between the tendance and the worship of the dead.213.2 This at all events, on the evidence already placed before us, may be said: in respect of the frequency and force of hero-worship, Mesopotamia stands at the opposite pole to Greece, and in testing the question of primitive religious influences of East on West this fact must be weighed in the scale.