distinguished by sign of the circle; according to the inscription he illuminates "heaven and earth," and is the "lord of the day." Beside Sin and Samas the Babylonians worshipped a deity of the heaven, Bin, the god who "thunders in the midst of the sky," who holds "a flaming sword in his hand," "who holds the lightning," "who is the giver of abundance, the lord of fertility."[363] At the head of the five spirits of the planets stands the lord of Saturn (the Kaivanu of the Babylonians), the most distant and highest of all. This is the god Adar, _i.e._ "the sublime." His name was given to the last month in the Babylonian year. In the inscriptions the epithet Malik is often joined to Adar; Sakkut Adar also is a name given in the inscriptions to this god. The Hebrews tell us that the men of Sepharvaim worshipped Adrammelech; and this can hardly be any other deity than the Adar-Malik of the inscriptions. They also add that children were burned to Adrammelech,[364] and hence we may conclude that the Adar of the Babylonians was a harsh and cruel deity, averse to generation, whose wrath had to be appeased by human sacrifice. When the prophet Amos announces to the Israelites that they would "carry Siccuth their king, and Kewan (Chiun) their star-god, their images which they had made,"[365] Sichuth-Melech can be no other god than Sakkut-Malik, _i.e._ Adar, and by Kewan is meant the Kaivanu (Saturn) of the inscriptions.[366] Nebo (Nabu), the god of Borsippa, was the lord of the planet Mercury. According to the inscriptions of Babylonia, he ruled over the hosts of heaven and earth. His image on the cylinder of Urukh has been mentioned above (p. 259). Statues of Nebo with long beard and hair, and a robe from the breast downwards, have been found in the ruins of Nineveh. Assyrian inscriptions entitle him the "prince of the gods." His name means the "revealer," and what we learn from western writers about a special school of Chaldaic priests at Borsippa agrees very well with this. The lord of Mars, Nergal, was worshipped at the city of Kutha. The inscriptions name him the "king of the battle," the "ruler of the storm," or simply the "lion-god."[367] Hence the winged lions with a human head at the temples and palace gates of Susa and Nineveh (p. 253) were his images, and stood no doubt at Babylon and Kutha also, while the winged bulls must have been the images of Adar. In the narrative of the flood on Assyrian tablets, it is Adar who overthrows and Nergal who destroys (p. 243). After the restoration of the Babylonian kingdom, the kings are named after Nebo and Nergal. Yet the inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar II. celebrate above all other deities the lord of Jupiter, Merodach, as Belrabu, i.e. the "great lord," the "highest god," the "lord of heaven and earth."[368]