omena. They are
attached to particular cities or districts, and each district or city,
as it becomes a great religious center, raises its favorite god to a
position of preeminence. Generally the choice of a special deity by a
particular city lies back of historical documents, and the reason for
such choice therefore cannot be definitely fixed. The attributes and
functions of the resulting great gods, as has already been remarked, are
substantially everywhere the same, and where one function becomes
prominent, it is often possible to explain its prominence from the
political or other conditions.

+755+. Moreover, as in all theological constructions that follow great
political unifications, it was natural to extend the domain of a
principal god to whatever department of life or of nature appealed
especially to the theologian. When we find certain gods invested with
solar functions it does not follow that they were originally
sun-gods--such functions may be a necessary result of their preeminence.
Out of the great mass of Babylonian and Assyrian deities we may select a
few whose cults illustrate the method of development of the religious
conceptions. As non-Semitic (Sumerian) religious and other ideas and
words appear to have been adopted by the Semitic Babylonians, it is not
always easy to distinguish between Semitic and non-Semitic conceptions
in the cults as known to us.

+756+. _Babylonia._ The god Ea appears to have been originally the local
deity of Eridu, a city which in early times stood on the Persian Gulf.
This proximity to the sea may account for the fact that Ea was generally
associated with water (in Babylonia, as elsewhere, there were many
deities of waters). It is not certain that this was his original role,
but it was, in any case, assigned him in the course of the theistic
construction. It is not improbable that in the original form of the
Babylonian epic it was Ea who sent the flood and saved one man--a
natural representation for the god of Eridu; in later recensions of the
poem it is first Bel and then Marduk who assumes the principal role. As
Eridu was probably a prominent political center, Ea, as its chief god,
naturally became the creator, the bestower of wisdom, the author of the
arts of life, in general a universal god. As the political center
shifted, the popular interest changed and Ea yielded more or less to
other gods, continuing, however, throughout the whole Babylonian and
Assyrian period to