The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

300 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Asari is a difference that runs through the whole of Egyptian and
Babylonian theology. The Egyptian of the historical period fixed
his eyes on the future life, and the god he worshipped accordingly
was the god who judged and saved him in the other world; the
religion of the Babylonian was confined to this world, and it
was in this world only that he was judged by the sun-god, and
received his sentence of reward or punishment. The mummified
sun-god did not exist for the Babylonians, for the practice of
mummification was unknown among them.
It is possible that Aaari,“the prince who does good to men,”
had been originally a title of Ea. If so, the title and the god
had been separated from one another at an early epoch, and the
title had become itself a god who owned Ea as his father. This
relationship between Ea and his son betrays Semitic—or at all
events foreign—influence. The ghosts and spirits of primitive
Sumerian belief were not bound together by any such family
[327] ties; the demons of the night had little in common with the
men they terrified and plagued. Asari had once been conceived
of as a ram, Ea as an antelope; and between the ram and the
antelope no genetic relationship was possible. They might be
united together like the composite creatures which had come
down to the Babylonians from the old Sumerian days, but there
could be no birth of one from the other. Birth characterises the
present creation in which like springs from like; it was only in
the time of chaos that unlike forms could be mingled together in
disorderly confusion.
That Asari was a sun-god follows from his identification with
Merodach. Here and here only could have been the link which
bound the two deities together.^256 But in passing into Merodach
he lost his own personality. Henceforth the son of Ea and the

(^256) We may compare the statement in a hymn (WAI.v. 50. i. 5) that the
sun-god“rises from the Du-azagga, the place of destinies,”where the Assyrian
translation has“mountain of destinies.”The Du-azagga was on the horizon of
Ea's domain, the deep.