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Updated: June 5, 2025
As already intimated in a previous chapter, the god who plays perhaps the most prominent rôle in the incantation texts is Ea. He occupies this rank primarily by virtue of his being the god of humanity; but another factor which enters into consideration, though in an indirect fashion, is his character as a water-god.
The primaeval waters are originally the source of life, not of destruction, and it is in them that the gods are born, as in Egyptian mythology; there Nu, the primaeval water-god from whom Ra was self-created, never ceased to be the Sun-god's supporter.
This course was, no doubt, artificial, and the water ran more rapidly in it than it did in the neighbouring streamlets. There were sluice-gates, too, by which it could be altogether expelled, or kept up to this or that height; and it was a river absolutely under man's control, in which no water-god could take delight.
Here the traveller sat himself down, and with an air which seemed unconscious of what he was doing, bent his eye on the little sparkling font for more than half an hour, without change of posture; so that he might, in Pagan times, have represented the statue of a water-god bending over his urn, and attentive only to the supplies which it was pouring forth.
The Romans had worshipped deities of water in abundance, as became an agricultural people, for water meant life, and drought, death; but their deities were those of the sweet waters of springs and rivers, they knew no god of the sea. But when the oracles brought Poseidon to Rome he was identified with an old Roman water-god Neptune, whose cult henceforward included the sea.
I had no wish that he should fall, and I was perfectly conscious of intense sympathy with his discomfort; but I found the scene quite inexpressibly diverting, and I still simmer with laughter at the recollection of the disappearance of the trim figure, and his furious emergence, like an oozy water-god, from the pool. It is not in the least an ill-natured laughter.
In the religious literature, moreover, as reshaped by the schoolmen of the time, his rôle is even more prominent than that of Marduk. As a water-god, and more particularly as the god to whom the largest body of water known to the Babylonians was sacred, Ea was regarded as the source and giver of wisdom.
Unktahe, the god of the waters, is much reverenced by the Dahcotahs. Morgan's bluff, near Fort Snelling, is called "God's house" by the Dahcotahs; they say it is the residence of Unktahe, and under the hill is a subterranean passage, through which they say the water-god passes when he enters the St. Peter's. He is said to be as large as a white man's house.
In that case we should have to find some way of explaining the difference between the Hebrew and the Babylonian forms of the royal name. Lagamar or Lagamer, written Laomer in Hebrew, was one of the principal deities of Elam, and the Babylonians made him a son of their own water-god Ea.
He had not refused to quit his feet, but kneeling on one knee, he pressed the tiller down, lashed it, and clinging to the massive timber, faced the tempest with the steadiness of a water-god.
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