ds of their place with them. The
men of Cuthah, he adds (v. 30), made a statue of Nergal. Singamil, of
the dynasty, having its capital at Uruk (_c._ 2750 B.C.), likewise
testifies to his devotion to Nergal by busying himself with improvements
and additions to his temple at Cuthah. His worship, therefore, was not
confined to those who happened to reside at Cuthah; and closely as he is
identified with the place, the character of the god is a general and not
a special one. The full form of his name appears to have been
Ner-unu-gal, of which Nergal, furnished by the Old Testament passage
referred to, would then be a contraction or a somewhat corrupt form. The
three elements composing his name signify "the mighty one of the great
dwelling-place," but it is, again, an open question whether this is a
mere play upon the character of the god, as in the name of Ea (according
to one of the interpretations above suggested), or whether it is an
ideographic form of the name. The Old Testament shows, conclusively,
that the name had some such pronunciation as Nergal. Jensen, from other
evidences, inclines to the opinion that the writing Ner-unu-gal is the
result of a species of etymology, brought about by the prominence given
to Nergal as the god of the region of the dead. It is in this capacity
that he already appears in the inscription of Singamil, who calls him
'king of the nether world.' The "great dwelling-place," therefore, is
clearly the dominion over which Nergal rules, and when we come to the
cosmogony of the Babylonians,[50] it will be found that this epithet for
the nether world--the great dwelling-place--accords with their
conception of the life after death. But while Nergal, with a host of
lesser demons about him, appears as the Babylonian Pluto, particularly
in the religious texts, his functions are not limited to the control of
the dead. He is the personification of some of the evils that bring
death to mankind, particularly pestilence and war. The death that
follows in his path is a violent one, and his destructive force is one
that acts upon large masses rather than upon the individual. Hence, one
of the most common ideographs used to express his name is that which
signifies 'sword.'

War and pestilence are intimately associated in the mind of the
Babylonians. Among other nations, the sword is, similarly, the symbol of
the deity, as the plague-bringer as well as the warrior.

To this day, a pestilence is the general a