Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia. 287
princes, made Ea the guardian and guide of the monarchy in the
south. For their worshippers Bel and Ea stood on the same level;
the cult of each alike had descended from a remote antiquity,
and their priests exercised a similar influence and power. As the
Babylonians of the north were called the people of Bel whom [313]
Bel could grant to whom he would, so too the mixed races of
the south were the creation of Ea to whom the god of Eridu had
taught the arts of life.
The union of north and south consequently brought with it the
formation of a divine triad. Ea joined himself to Bel and Anu, and
the supreme triad of Anu, Bel, and Ea thus came into existence.
The process of formation was facilitated by the fact that the three
gods were already distinguished from one another in their main
features. Anu was the god of the sky; the earlier history of Bel
had given him naturally the dominion of the earth; and though,
in becoming a Semitic Baal, he had acquired the attributes of
a god of the upper sphere, these were allowed to fall into the
background. Ea was even easier to deal with; his home was in
the deep, and his rule was accordingly confined to the waters
and the sea. That he had once been a god of the land as well as
of the sea, was dropped out of sight, and in the later centuries
of Babylonia it even began to be forgotten that he had created
man out of the dust of the ground. He ceased to be the divine
potter, and became instead the god of the waters, who pours out
the Tigris and Euphrates from the vases in his hands. As god of
the earth and the living things upon it, his place was taken by
his son. Aaari, transformed into the Semitic sun-god Merodach,
became the inheritor of his father's wisdom, and therewith of his
father's power.
The formation of the Babylonian triad, and the differentiation
of the divine persons who composed it, must have been the work
of a theological school. It is an artificial scheme elaborated after
the union of the northern and southern parts of the country. The
universe is divided between the three divine representatives of