Nergal, again, the god of Kutha, has been supposed to have had a solar origin, as the god of the midday and destructive sun;[101.2] yet his special realm is Hades, where he ruled by the side of the goddess Allatu, and his name is doubtfully interpreted as the Lord of the Great Habitation, and thus he is regarded as a god of disease and death. This did not hinder him from becoming with Ninib the great war-god of the Assyrians and their god of the chase, nor a pious Babylonian poet from exalting him as “God of the little ones, he of the benevolent visage.”[101.3] In one of the Tel-El-Amarna texts he is designated by an ideogram, that almost certainly means “the god of iron.”[101.4] This last fact, if correct, is an illustration of that which a general survey of the Babylonian texts at last impresses upon us: the physical origin of the deity, if he had one, does not often shape and control his whole career; the high god grows into manifold forms, dilates into a varied spiritual personality, progresses with the life of his people, reflects new aspects of life, altogether independently of any physical idea of him that may have originally prevailed. Adad, the {102} god of storms, becomes a god of prophecy, and is addressed as a god of mercy in the fragment of a hymn.[102.1] Ea the god of waters becomes _par excellence_ the god of wisdom, not because waters are wise, but probably because Eridu, the seat of his cult, was an immemorial home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic. As for the great Nebo of Borsippa, Jeremias,[102.2] who is otherwise devoted to solar theories, has some good remarks on the absence of any sign of his nature-origin: his ideogram designates “the prophet,” in his earliest character he is the writer, his symbol is the “stilus” of the scribe. Yet he does not confine himself to writing: he is interested in vegetation, and eulogised in one hymn as “he who openeth the springs and causeth the corn to sprout, he without whom the dykes and canals would run dry.” Surely this interest comes to him, not from the planet Mercury,[102.3] but from his wisdom and his concern with Babylonian civilisation, which depended upon dykes and canals. We are presented here with a progressive polytheism, that is, one of which the divinities show the power of self-development parallel with the self-development of the people.