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As Professor Jastrow has pointed out, the passage forcibly recalls the story from Berossus, concerning the mythical creature Oannes, who came up from the Erythraean Sea, where it borders upon Babylonia, to instruct mankind in all things, including "seeds and the gathering of fruits". But the only part of the text that concerns us here is the introductory section, where the life-giving flood, by which the dry fields are irrigated, is pictured as following the union of the water-deities, Enki and Ninella.
Supplementing the influence of Nippur, and in strong contrast with it, was the influence of Eridu. Ea or Oannes, the god of Eridu, was a god who benefited mankind. He was the lord of wisdom, and his wisdom displayed itself in delivering men from the evils that surrounded them, and in teaching them the arts of life.
This 'Oannes, as Berosus is said to have called him, was none other than Ea. As the great benefactor of mankind, it is natural that Ea should have come to be viewed as the god whose special function it is to protect the human race, to advance it in all its good undertakings, to protect it against the evil designs of gods or demons.
It is perhaps contained also in the word by which Berosus designates this same creature Oannes which may be explained as Hoa-ana, or "the god Hoa."
Chaldean cosmogony relates that Oannes, the Fish-god, devoted 259,200 years to the education of mankind, then came a period of 432,000 years taken up with the reigns of mythical personages, and at the end of these 691,000 years, the deluge renewed the face of the earth. But the Hindoos have done better than all that.
Canon Rawlison remarks in that connection: “There are very strong grounds for connecting HEA or Hoa, with the serpent of the Scripture, and the paradisaical traditions of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.” As the title of the god of knowledge and science, Oannes, is the lord of the abyss, or of the great deep, the intelligent fish, one of his emblems being the serpent, CAN, which occupies so conspicuous a place among the symbols of the gods on the black stones recording benefactions.
The animal adopted as the symbol of the Hero is the sign of the Zodiac in which the Sun is at the vernal equinox of his age, and this varies with the precession of the equinoxes. Oannes of Assyria had the sign of Pisces, the Fish, and is thus figured. Mithra is in Taurus, and, therefore, rides on a Bull, and Osiris was worshipped as Osiris-Apis, or Serapis, the Bull.
In later forms of the legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being, half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men in arts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he was an author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressed to him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god of Erech on the lower Euphrates.
The Euphrates itself, at the mouth of which Oannes landed, is a thing of yesterday compared with a Belemnite; and even the liberal chronology of magian cosmogony fixes the beginning of the world only at a time when other applications of Zadig's method afford convincing evidence that, could we have been there to see, things would have looked very much as they do now.
The God Fish, the mystic animal, half man, half fish, which came up from the Persian gulf to teach astronomy and letters to the first settlers on the Euphrates and Tigris. According to Berosus the civilization was brought to Mesopotamia by Oannes and six other beings, who, like himself, were half man, half fish, and that they came from the Indian Ocean.
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