l,
having its special protecting deity, the number of water-deities
naturally increases as the land becomes more and more dissected by the
canal system that conditioned the prosperity of the country.

Ea, as we shall see, appears under an unusually large number of
names.[44] One of these is

Nin-a-gal,

which, signifying 'god of great strength,' is given to him as the patron
of the smith's art.[45] A god of this name is mentioned by Ur-Bau,[46]
who speaks of a sanctuary erected in honor of this deity. But since the
king refers to Ea (as En-ki) a few lines previous, it would appear that
at this period Nin-agal is still an independent deity. The later
identification with Ea appears to be due to the idea of 'strength'
involved in the name of Nin-agal. In the same way, many of the names of
Ea were originally descriptive of independent gods who, because of the
similarity of their functions to those of the great Ea, were absorbed by
the latter. Their names transferred to Ea, are frequently the only trace
left of their original independent existence.

Nergal.

Nergal, the local deity of Cuthah (or Kutu), represented by the mound
Tell-Ibrahim, some distance to the east of Babylon, was of an entirely
different character from Ea, but his history in the development of the
Babylonian religion is hardly less interesting. The first mention of his
famous temple at Cuthah is found in an inscription of Dungi (to be read
Ba'u-ukin, according to Winckler[47]) who belongs to the second dynasty
of Ur (_c._ 2700 B.C.). Its origin, however, belongs to a still earlier
period. Such was the fame of the temple known as E-shid-lam, and the
closeness of the connection between the deity and his favorite seat,
that Nergal himself became known as shid-lam-ta-ud-du-a, _i.e._, the god
that rises up from E-shid-lam. It is by this epithet that the same Dungi
describes him in one of his inscriptions.[48] Down to the latest period
of Assyro-Babylonian history, Nergal remains identified with Kutu, being
known at all times as the god of Kutu.[49] When Sargon, the king of
Assyria, upon his conquest of the kingdom of Israel (_c._ 722 B.C.),
brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, and so forth, across to the
lands of the Jordan to take the place of the deported Israelites, the
Hebrew narrator (II Kings, xvii. 24-35) tells us in an interesting
manner of the obnoxious foreign worship which these people brought to
the land, each division bringing the go