323
supremacy.
The apotheosis of the king is thus coeval with the rise of
Semitic domination in Babylonia. In the older Sumerian epoch
we look in vain for any traces of it. Man was not yet divine, for
the gods were not yet human. There was as yet no Semitic Bel,
and En-lil of Nippur was but a“lord of ghost(s).”
But we have better testimony to the fact than the ghosts of
Nippur. Behind the human figures of the Semitic gods the
primitively pictorial character of the cuneiform signs enables
us to discern the lineaments of figures that belong to a wholly
different sphere of religious thought. They are the figures not of
men, but of brute beasts. The name of En-lil was denoted by a
composite sign which represented the wordelim,“a ram”;^272 that
of Ea by the ideograph which stood fordara,“the antelope.”^273 [353]
En-lil, accordingly, was once a ram; Ea, an antelope. There are
other deities which reveal their first shapes in similar fashion. The
wife of Hadad, for example, was Azaga-auga,“the milch-goat”
of En-lil, from whom the primitive Sumerian shepherd derived
his milk.^274 Merodach himself, or rather his Sumerian prototype
at Eridu, was once Asari-elim,“the princely ram”;^275 a striking
title when we remember that Osiris, too, was addressed in Egypt
as Ati,“the prince,”and identified with the ram of Mendes. Even
Zu, the divine thief who stole the tablets of destiny, was the
storm-bird, the forefather alike of the roc of theArabian Nights
(^272) See Brünnow,Classified List, No. 8883.
(^273) WAI.ii. 55. 27, iv. 25. 40. Dara, Semiticturakhu, is shown to be
“an antelope”by the figure of an antelope, ending in a fish, which is stated
to represent Ea on a boundary-stone from Susa published in de Morgan's
Délégation en Perse, vol. i., and explained by Scheil in theRecueil de Travaux,
xxiii. pp. 96, 97. The figure is accompanied by the symbol of Ea, a weapon
which terminates in the head of a ram.
(^274) WAI.iii. 68. 12-14. See my Hibbert Lectures, p. 286. For“the cow”Bau,
see above, p. 148. Nergal or Allamu was originally the gazelle (Brünnow,
Classified List, Nos. 1906, 1907).
(^275) WAI.ii. 18. 57, 55. 69, iv. 3. 25.