personal names show that it was a common thing to regard children as
the gifts of the gods whom their father worshipped), the divine
fatherhood thus attributed to them naturally could, in the case of
those of royal rank, give them a real claim to divine birth and
honours. An exception is the deification of the Babylonian Noah,
Ut-napistim, who, as the legend of the Flood relates, was raised and
made one of the gods by Aa or Ea, for his faithfulness after the great
catastrophe, when he and his wife were translated to the "remote place
at the mouth of the rivers." The hero Gilgames, on the other hand, was
half divine by birth, though it is not exactly known through whom his
divinity came.

[*] According to Nabonidus's date 3800 B.C., though many
Assyriologists regard this as being a millennium too early.


The earliest form of the Babylonian religion.

The state of development to which the religious system of the
Babylonians had attained at the earliest period to which the
inscriptions refer naturally precludes the possibility of a
trustworthy history of its origin and early growth. There is no doubt,
however, that it may be regarded as having reached the stage at which
we find it in consequence of there being a number of states in ancient
Babylonia (which was at that time like the Heptarchy in England) each
possessing its own divinity--who, in its district, was regarded as
supreme--with a number of lesser gods forming his court. It was the
adding together of all these small pantheons which ultimately made
that of Babylonia as a whole so exceedingly extensive. Thus the chief
divinity of Babylon, as has already been stated, as Merodach; at