+755+. Moreover, as in all theological constructions that follow great political unifications, it was natural to extend the domain of a principal god to whatever department of life or of nature appealed especially to the theologian. When we find certain gods invested with solar functions it does not follow that they were originally sun-gods--such functions may be a necessary result of their preëminence. Out of the great mass of Babylonian and Assyrian deities we may select a few whose cults illustrate the method of development of the religious conceptions. As non-Semitic (Sumerian) religious and other ideas and words appear to have been adopted by the Semitic Babylonians, it is not always easy to distinguish between Semitic and non-Semitic conceptions in the cults as known to us. +756+. _Babylonia._ The god Ea appears to have been originally the local deity of Eridu, a city which in early times stood on the Persian Gulf. This proximity to the sea may account for the fact that Ea was generally associated with water (in Babylonia, as elsewhere, there were many deities of waters). It is not certain that this was his original rôle, but it was, in any case, assigned him in the course of the theistic construction. It is not improbable that in the original form of the Babylonian epic it was Ea who sent the flood and saved one man--a natural representation for the god of Eridu; in later recensions of the poem it is first Bel and then Marduk who assumes the principal rôle. As Eridu was probably a prominent political center, Ea, as its chief god, naturally became the creator, the bestower of wisdom, the author of the arts of life, in general a universal god. As the political center shifted, the popular interest changed and Ea yielded more or less to other gods, continuing, however, throughout the whole Babylonian and Assyrian period to receive high consideration.