In the Gilgamesh epic we appear to have a form of the patriarch
legend--the story of the "culture hero" and teacher who discovered the
path which led to the land of ancestral spirits. The heroic Patriarch
in Egypt was Apuatu, "the opener of the ways", the earliest form of
Osiris; in India he was Yama, the first man, "who searched and found
out the path for many".

The King as Patriarch was regarded during life as an incarnation of
the culture god: after death he merged in the god. "Sargon of Akkad"
posed as an incarnation of the ancient agricultural Patriarch: he
professed to be a man of miraculous birth who was loved by the goddess
Ishtar, and was supposed to have inaugurated a New Age of the
Universe.

The myth regarding the father who was superseded by his son may
account for the existence in Babylonian city pantheons of elder and
younger gods who symbolized the passive and active forces of nature.

Considering the persistent and cumulative influence exercised by
agricultural religion it is not surprising to find, as has been
indicated, that most of the Babylonian gods had Tammuz traits, as most
of the Egyptian gods had Osirian traits. Although local or imported
deities were developed and conventionalized in rival Babylonian
cities, they still retained traces of primitive conceptions. They
existed in all their forms--as the younger god who displaced the elder
god and became the elder god, and as the elder god who conciliated the
younger god and made him his active agent; and as the god who was
identified at various seasons with different heavenly bodies and
natural phenomena. Merodach, the god of Babylon, who was exalted as