deity was the god Rem, whose name signifies “to weep”; he wept fertilizing tears, and corn was sown and reaped amidst lamentations.  He may be identical with Remi, who was a phase of Sebek, the crocodile god, a developed attribute of Nu, the vague primitive Egyptian deity who symbolized the primordial deep.  The connection between a fish god and a corn god is not necessarily remote when we consider that in Babylonia and Egypt the harvest was the gift of the rivers.

The Euphrates, indeed, was hailed as a creator of all that grew on its banks.

    O thou River who didst create all things,
    When the great gods dug thee out,
    They set prosperity upon thy banks,
    Within thee Ea, the King of the Deep, created his dwelling... 
    Thou judgest the cause of mankind! 
    O River, thou art mighty!  O River, thou art supreme! 
    O River, thou art righteous![35]

In serving Ea, the embodiment or the water spirit, by leading him, as the Indian Manu led the Creator and “Preserver” in fish form, from river to water pot, water pot to pond or canal, and then again to river and ocean, the Babylonians became expert engineers and experienced agriculturists, the makers of bricks, the builders of cities, the framers of laws.  Indeed, their civilization was a growth of Ea worship.  Ea was their instructor.  Berosus states that, as Oannes, he lived in the Persian Gulf, and every day came ashore to instruct the inhabitants of Eridu how to make canals, to grow crops, to work metals, to make pottery and bricks, and to build temples; he was the artisan god—­Nun-ura, “god of the potter”; Kuski-banda, “god of goldsmiths”, &c.—­the divine patron of the arts and crafts.  “Ea knoweth everything”, chanted the hymn maker.  He taught the people how to form and use alphabetic signs and instructed them in mathematics:  he gave them their code of laws.  Like the Egyptian artisan god Ptah, and the linking deity Khnumu, Ea was the “potter or moulder of gods and man”.  Ptah moulded the first man on his potter’s wheel:  he also moulded the sun and moon; he shaped the universe and hammered out the copper sky.  Ea built the world “as an architect builds a house".[36] Similarly the Vedic Indra, who wielded a hammer like Ptah, fashioned the universe after the simple manner in which the Aryans made their wooden dwellings.[37]

Like Ptah, Ea also developed from an artisan god into a sublime Creator in the highest sense, not merely as a producer of crops.  His word became the creative force; he named those things he desired to be, and they came into existence.  “Who but Ea creates things”, exclaimed a priestly poet.  This change from artisan god to creator (Nudimmud) may have been due to the tendency of early religious cults to attach to their chief god the attributes of rivals exalted at other centres.

Ea, whose name is also rendered Aa, was identified with Ya, Ya’u, or Au, the Jah of the Hebrews.  “In Ya-Daganu, ‘Jah is Dagon’”, writes Professor Pinches, “we have the elements reversed, showing a wish to identify Jah with Dagon, rather than Dagon with Jah; whilst another interesting name, Au-Aa, shows an identification of Jah with Aa, two names which have every appearance of being etymologically connected.”  Jah’s name “is one of the words for ‘god’ in the Assyro-Babylonian language".[38]