gods Brahma and Vishnu had fish forms.  In Sanskrit literature Manu, the eponymous “first man”, is instructed by the fish to build a ship in which to save himself when the world would be purged by the rising waters.  Ea befriended in similar manner the Babylonian Noah, called Pir-napishtim, advising him to build a vessel so as to be prepared for the approaching Deluge.  Indeed the Indian legend appears to throw light on the original Sumerian conception of Ea.  It relates that when the fish was small and in danger of being swallowed by other fish in a stream it appealed to Manu for protection.  The sage at once lifted up the fish and placed it in a jar of water.  It gradually increased in bulk, and he transferred it next to a tank and then to the river Ganges.  In time the fish complained to Manu that the river was too small for it, so he carried it to the sea.  For these services the god in fish form instructed Manu regarding the approaching flood, and afterwards piloted his ship through the weltering waters until it rested on a mountain top.[32]

If this Indian myth is of Babylonian origin, as appears probable, it may be that the spirit of the river Euphrates, “the soul of the land”, was identified with a migrating fish.  The growth of the fish suggests the growth of the river rising in flood.  In Celtic folk tales high tides and valley floods are accounted for by the presence of a “great beast” in sea, loch, or river.  In a class of legends, “specially connected with the worship of Atargatis”, wrote Professor Robertson Smith, “the divine life of the waters resides in the sacred fish that inhabit them.  Atargatis and her son, according to a legend common to Hierapolis and Ascalon, plunged into the waters—­in the first case the Euphrates, in the second the sacred pool at the temple near the town—­and were changed into fishes”.  The idea is that “where a god dies, that is, ceases to exist in human form, his life passes into the waters where he is buried; and this again is merely a theory to bring the divine water or the divine fish into harmony with anthropomorphic ideas.  The same thing was sometimes effected in another way by saying that the anthropomorphic deity was born from the water, as Aphrodite sprang from sea foam, or as Atargatis, in another form of the Euphrates legend, ... was born of an egg which the sacred fishes found in the Euphrates and pushed ashore."[33]

As “Shar Apsi”, Ea was the “King of the Watery Deep”.  The reference, however, according to Jastrow, “is not to the salt ocean, but the sweet waters flowing under the earth which feed the streams, and through streams and canals irrigate the fields".[34] As Babylonia was fertilized by its rivers, Ea, the fish god, was a fertilizing deity.  In Egypt the “Mother of Mendes” is depicted carrying a fish upon her head; she links with Isis and Hathor; her husband is Ba-neb-Tettu, a form of Ptah, Osiris, and Ra, and as a god of fertility he is symbolized by the ram.  Another Egyptian fish