For most of Mesopotamian history the king stood below the gods as their chief servant, however exalted his earthly rank. He was called shepherd, chosen one, or vicar of the god, titles that placed him firmly on the human side of the line between mortal and divine even while granting him unmatched religious authority. That line moved, briefly and controversially, in the dynasty of Akkad. Naram-Sin, grandson of Sargon, took the extraordinary step of writing his own name with the divine determinative usually reserved for gods, commissioned a cult of himself complete with a temple and offerings, and had himself depicted on his Victory Stele wearing the horned crown that Mesopotamian art used exclusively for deities. Later Mesopotamian tradition remembered this as hubris that helped bring Akkad down, though the dynasty's actual collapse had more immediate political and military causes.
The kings of the Third Dynasty of Ur revived royal self-deification on more institutional terms a few generations later. Shulgi of Ur, and several of his successors, were worshipped with temples, priesthoods and regular offerings while still alive, their names likewise written with the divine marker, in what scholars generally read as a deliberate instrument of dynastic legitimation rather than a claim that the king had become identical with the great gods of the pantheon. The practice receded after Ur's fall around 2000 BCE. Later Babylonian and Assyrian kings returned to the more conventional model, ruling as the gods' chosen stewards rather than as gods themselves, though the older, more expansive claim was never entirely forgotten and echoes of it recur in royal titulature for centuries afterward.