subsequently invoked
with Merodach, and had probably much in common with Merodach. Indeed,
Merodach was also identified with the planet Mercury. Like the Greek
Hermes, Nebo was a messenger of the gods and an instructor of mankind.
Jastrow regards him as "a counterpart of Ea", and says: "Like Ea, he
is the embodiment and source of wisdom. The art of writing--and
therefore of all literature--is more particularly associated with him.
A common form of his name designates him as the 'god of the
stylus'."[318] He appears also to have been a developed form of
Tammuz, who was an incarnation of Ea. Professor Pinches shows that one
of his names, Mermer, was also a non-Semitic name of Ramman.[319]
Tammuz resembled Ramman in his character as a spring god of war. It
would seem that Merodach as Jupiter displaced at Babylon Nebo as
Saturn, the elder god, as Bel Enlil displaced the elder Ninip at
Nippur.

The god of Mars was Nergal, the patron deity of Cuthah,[320] who
descended into the Underworld and forced into submission Eresh-ki-gal
(Persephone), with whom he was afterwards associated. His "name", says
Professor Pinches, "is supposed to mean 'lord of the great
habitation', which would be a parallel to that of his spouse,
Eresh-ki-gal".[321] At Erech he symbolized the destroying influence of
the sun, and was accompanied by the demons of pestilence. Mars was a
planet of evil, plague, and death; its animal form was the wolf. In
Egypt it was called Herdesher, "the Red Horus", and in Greece it was
associated with Ares (the Roman Mars), the war god, who assumed his
boar form to slay Adonis (Tammuz).

Nergal was also a fire god like the Aryo-Indian Agni, who, as has been
shown, links with Tammuz as a demon slayer and a god of fertility. It
may be that Nergal was a specialized form of Tammuz, who, in a version
of the myth, was reputed to have entered the Underworld as a conqueror
when claimed by Eresh-ki-gal, and to have become, like Osiris, the
lord of the dead. If so, Nergal was at once the slayer and the slain.

The various Babylonian deities who were identified with the planets
had their characters sharply defined as members of an organized
pantheon. But before this development took place certain of the
prominent heavenly bodies, perhaps all the planets, were evidently
regarded as manifestations of one deity, the primeval Tammuz, who was
a form of Ea, or of the twin deities Ea and Anu. Tammuz may have been
the "sevenfold one" of t