endence and royalty of Nebo. "When thy power manifests itself, who
can withdraw himself from it?--Thy word is a powerful net which thou
spreadest in heaven and over the earth:--it falls upon the sea, and
the sea retires,--it falls upon the plain, and the fields make great
mourning,--it falls upon the upper waters of the Euphrates, and the word
of Merodach stirs up the flood in them.--O Lord, thou art sovereign,
who can resist thee?--Merodach, among the gods who bear a name, thou art
sovereign." Merodach is for his worshippers the king of the gods, he is
not the sole god. Each of the chief divinities received in a similar
manner the assurance of his omnipotence, but, for all that, his most
zealous followers never regarded them as the only God, beside whom there
was none other, and whose existence and rule precluded those of any
other. The simultaneous elevation of certain divinities to the supreme
rank had a reactionary influence on the ideas held with regard to the
nature of each. Anu, Bel, and Ea, not to mention others, had enjoyed
at the outset but a limited and incomplete personality, confined to a
single concept, and were regarded as possessing only such attributes as
were indispensable to the exercise of their power within a prescribed
sphere, whether in heaven, or on the earth, or in the waters; as each in
his turn gained the ascendency over his rivals, he became invested with
the qualities which were exercised by the others in their own domain.
His personality became enlarged, and instead of remaining merely a
god of heaven or earth or of the waters, he became god of all three
simultaneously. Anu reigned in the province of Bel or of Ea as he ruled
in his own; Bel joined to his own authority that of Anu and Ea; Ea
treated Anu and Bel with the same absence of ceremony which they had
shown to him, and added their supremacy to his own. The personality
of each god was thenceforward composed of many divers elements: each
preserved a nucleus of his original being, but superadded to this were
the peculiar characteristics of all the gods above whom he had been
successively raised. Anu took to himself somewhat of the temperaments
of Bel and of Ea, and the latter in exchange borrowed from him
many personal traits. The same work of levelling which altered the
characteristics of the Egyptian divinities, and transformed them
little by little into local variants of Osiris and the Sun, went on as
vigorously among the Chaldaean god