The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

304 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

it. As is the man, so is the god, for the one has been made in the
likeness of the other.
Nevertheless the solar origin of Merodach left its impress upon
the theology of the State. It had much to do with that process of
[331] identifying one god with another, which, as we have seen, tended
to approximate the doctrines of Babylonia to those of Egypt.
Though the individual gods were distinguished and marked off
from one another like individual men, it was yet possible to get
as it were behind the individual traits, and find in certain of them
a common element in which their individual peculiarities were
lost. The name, so the Babylonian believed, was the essence
of the person or thing to which it was attached; that which had
no name did not exist, and its existence commenced only when
it received its name. A nameless god could not exist any more
than a nameless man, and a knowledge of his name brought
with it a knowledge of his real nature and powers. But a name
was transferable; it could be taken from one object and given
to another, and therewith the essential characteristics which had
belonged to the first would become the property of the other.
When the name was changed, the person or thing was changed
along with it. To give Merodach another name, therefore,
was equivalent to changing his essential characteristics, and
endowing him with the nature and properties of another god.
The solar character which belonged to him primitively gave the
first impulse to this transference and change of name. There
were other solar deities in Babylonia, with distinct personalities
of their own, for they were each called by an individual name.
But the sun which they typified and represented was the same
everywhere, and the attributes of the solar divinity differed but
little in the various States of Semitic Babylonia. It was easy,
therefore, to assign to the one the name of another, and the
assignment brought with it a change of personality. With the
name came the personality of the god to whom it originally
belonged, and who now, as it were, lost his individual existence.