See Dietz O. Edzard, Gudea and His Dynasty, The Royal Inscriptions of Mesopotamia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 26–28. According to Edzard, Gudea, the most outstanding ruler of the Second Dynasty of Lagash, was not deified in his lifetime, because his name is never written with the divine determinative in contemporary documents and he never received offerings while alive. Therefore, when in his great temple hymn he is called “the ruler, the god of his city,” this is a metaphoric expression, meaning that he was the protector of his city or that he was the mediator between his people and the city god.