Lecture IV. The Sun-God And Istar. 299
goblin”; and the fact that the sun-god was known to have once
been anutukor“goblin”seemed to lend countenance to it. But
when we first catch glimpses of his worship, he has already
ceased to belong to the goblins of the night. He has been
identified with Asari the son of Ea of Eridu, and has thus became
the messenger and interpreter of the culture-god.
In the language of Sumer, Asari signified“the strong one”or
“prince.”^254 His name was expressed by two ideographs which
denoted“place”and“eye,”and had precisely the same meaning
and form as the two which expressed the name of the Egyptian
Osiris.^255 Between the Sumerian Asari and the Egyptian Osiris,
therefore, it seems probable that there was a connection. And
to my mind the probability is raised to practical certainty by the
fact that the character and attributes of both Asari and Osiris
were the same. Osiris was Un-nefer,“the good being,”whose
life was spent in benefiting and civilising mankind; Asari also
was“the good heifer”(amar-dugga), and his common title was [326]
that of“the prince who does good to men”(Aaari-galu-dugga).
He it was who conveyed to men the teaching of Ea, who healed
their diseases by means of his father's spells, and who“raised the
dead to life.”Asari and Osiris are not only the same in name and
pictorial representation, they play the same part in the history of
religion and culture.
But there was one important difference between them. Osiris
was a dead god, whose kingdom was in the other world; Asari
brought help to the living, whom he restored from sickness
and delivered from death. Even in Egypt, however, it was
remembered that Osiris had been a god of the living before he
was god of the dead. Tradition told how he had instructed men
in the arts of life, and done for primeval Egypt what Ea and
Asari had done for Chaldæa. The difference between him and
(^254) CompareAti,“prince,”the title of Osiris.
(^255) This was first pointed out by Ball,Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
Archæology, xii. 8, pp. 401, 402.