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at the time of the Deluge, while the Anunna-ki followed him
with their blazing torches; and he is the brother of En-nugi, the
god from whose hands there is no escape. With the spread of
solar worship, the solar features of Nin-ip naturally grew more [357]
marked. At times he was the god of the noonday as well as of the
dawn, for it was at noon that the rays of the sun were fiercest and
most deadly to man; at times he was assimilated to his fellow
sun-god Merodach, and made a son of Ea. The syncretic epoch
of Babylonian religion had truly arrived when Ea and En-lil were
thus interchanged, and the teaching of Nippur and Eridu united
in the solar cult!
But we have glimpses of a time when Nin-ip was not yet a god
in human form, much less a solar Baal. His name is a title merely,
and originally denoted the sexless spirit, who was indifferently
“lord”and“lady of the veil.”^282
The veil was worn in sign of mourning, for the head was
covered in sleep and death. Like the cloak which enfolded the
shade of Samuel, it symbolised the denizen of the underworld.
At first it would seem to have been merely a veil that covered
the head and face, like thekeffîyaof the modern Arab; in course
of time it was extended to the cloak in which the sleeper or the
dead man could be wrapped. But in either case it was a symbol
of the world below, and as such became in the Semitic age the
garment of the mourner. The god who was“lord of the veil”
(^282) The ideograph denotes thekeffîya, corresponding both to the veil and to
the turban. In its earliest pictorial form it represents a veil covering both the
head and face, and leaving only the hair at the back of the head visible. It was
usually termeduras, a word borrowed by Semitic Babylonian under the form
ofurasu, which in its turn created the verbarâsu,“to veil,”and the wordaristu,
“a cloak.”Thekeffîyawas also known in Sumerian asmutra, Semiticmutru,
from which the Greekºwƒ¡±was borrowed. Themitraproperly signified the
Oriental turban; but as no such head-dress was worn by the Greeks, it is already
used by Homer for the girdle of the waist. Besides the value ofuras, the
ideograph also had the value ofdara(in Assyriannibittuandiakhu,“a veil”).
It is possible that the actual pronunciation of the name Nin-ip was In-dar.