slaying the followers of Set.  As the divine sower of seed, Ninip may have developed from Tammuz as Horus did from Osiris.  Each were at once the father and the son, different forms of the same deity at various seasons of the year.  The elder god was displaced by the son (spring), and when the son grew old his son slew him in turn.  As the planet Saturn, Ninip was the ghost of the elder god, and as the son of Bel he was the solar war god of spring, the great wild bull, the god of fertility.  He was also as Ber “lord of the wild boar”, an animal associated with Rimmon[316].

Nebo (Nabu), who was identified with Mercury, was a god of Borsippa.  He was a messenger and “announcer” of the gods, as the Egyptian Horus in his connection with Jupiter was Her-ap-sheta, “Horus the opener of that which is secret[317]”.  Nebo’s original character is obscure.  He appears to have been a highly developed deity of a people well advanced in civilization when he was exalted as the divine patron of Borsippa.  Although Hammurabi ignored him, he was 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.