less than secondary importance,--shining merely by the reflected glory
of her great liege, whose presence in Babylon was essential to a
restoration of Babylon's position.

There are reasons for believing, however, that Sarpanitum once enjoyed
considerable importance of her own, that prior to the rise of Marduk to
his supreme position, a goddess was worshipped in Babylon, one of whose
special functions it was to protect the progeny while still in the
mother's womb. A late king of Babylon, the great Nebuchadnezzar, appeals
to this attribute of the goddess. To her was also attributed the
possession of knowledge concealed from men. Exactly to what class of
deities she belonged, we are no longer able to say, but it is certain
that at some time, probably about the time of Hammurabi, an amalgamation
took place between her and another goddess known as Erua,[123]--a name
that etymologically suggests the idea of 'begetting.'[124] She is
represented as dwelling in the temple of E-Zida at Borsippa, and was
originally the consort of Nabu, the chief god of this place.[125] A late
ruler of Babylon--Shamash-shumukin--calls her the queen of the gods, and
declares himself to have been nominated by her to lord it over men.

A factor in this amalgamation of Erua and Sarpanitum was the close
association brought about in Babylon between Marduk and a god whose seat
was originally at the Persian Gulf--Ea. The cult of this god, as we
shall see, survived in Babylonia through all political vicissitudes, and
so did that of some other minor water-deities that belong to this
region. Among these was Erua, whose worship centered in one of the
islands in or near the gulf. Wisdom and the life-giving principle were
two ideas associated in the Babylonian mind with water. As inferior in
power to Ea, Erua appears to have been regarded as the daughter of Ea,
and such was the sway exercised by Ea over men's minds, that even the
Babylonian schoolmen did not venture to place Marduk over Ea, but
pictured him as Ea's son. Erua, however, was not prominent enough to
become Marduk's mother, and so she was regarded as his consort. In this
capacity she was associated with Sarpanitum, and the two were merged
into one personality. It rarely happens that all the links in such a
process are preserved, but in this case, the epithets borne by
Sarpanitum-Erua, such as 'lady of the deep,' 'mistress of the place
where the fish dwell,' 'voice of the deep,' point the way towards