350 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniarescued from the tides and created by obstructing their ebb and
flow.[382] But it is also evident that the old poem has been revised and
re-edited by the priesthood of Babylon. Ê-Saggil, the temple of
Bel-Merodach of Babylon, has been confounded with the earlier
Ê-Saggil of Eridu, and the creator-god Ea has been supplanted by
Merodach. The supplanter, however, cannot conceal his foreign
origin. The“enclosure”or“dwelling-place,” “at the edge of the
sea,”must have been made in the first instance by the god of
the deep, not by the sun-god of Babylon. Merodach had nothing
to do with the sea and marshland, with cities that stood on the
margin of the ocean, or reeds that grew by its shores. He was the
god of an inland city, and he symbolised the sun and not the sea.
It is possible that even before its alteration at the hands of
the theologians of Babylon, the old cosmological poem of Eridu
had been modified in accordance with the requirements of a
theology which resulted from a fusion of Sumerian and Semitic
ideas. The doctrine of the triad is already presupposed by it;
Nippur, Erech, and Eridu, with their sanctuaries of Bel, Anu,
and Ea, already represent Babylonia, and the temples of Bel
and Anu even take precedence of that of Ea. At the same time
the parallelism between Nippur and Erech on the one side, and
Eridu on the other, is imperfect. The uncreated“deep,”on the
margin of which Eridu stood, has nothing corresponding with
it in the two preceding lines, while the place of the temples of
Nippur and Erech is occupied by the name of the city of Eridu.
It seems clear, that the reference to the two great sanctuary-cities
of Northern and Central Babylonia is an interpolation, which
breaks and injures the sense. Originally, we may conclude, the
poem named Eridu only; its author knew nothing of the other
shrines of Babylonia; for him the temple of Ea at Eridu was the
[383] house of all“the gods.”
Ea, under the mask of Merodach, is the creator of mankind,
as of all things else. In this act of creation the goddess Aruru is