It has been more than once suggested, and Prof. Hommel has stated the matter as his opinion, that the name of the god Aê or Ea, another possible reading of which is Aa, may be in some way connected with, and perhaps originated the Assyro-Babylonian divine name Ya’u, “God,” which is cognate with the Hebrew Yah or, as it is generally written, Jah. If this be the case, it would seem to imply that a large section of the people remained faithful to his worship, and the flood of the Babylonians may symbolize some persecution of them by the worshippers of the god Ellila, angry at the slight put upon him by their neglect or unwillingness to acknowledge him as the chief of the Pantheon. Some of the people may, indeed, have worshipped Ae or Aa alone, thus constituting a kind of monotheism. This, nevertheless, is very uncertain, and at present unprovable. It is worthy of note, however, that at a later date there was a tendency to identify all the deities of the Babylonian Pantheon with Merodach, and what in the “middle ages” of the Babylonians existed with regard to Merodach may very well have existed for the worship of Ae or Ea at an earlier date. The transfer, in the Semitic Babylonian Creation-story, of the name of Aê to his son Merodach may perhaps be a re-echo of the tendency to identify all the gods with Ae, when the latter was the supreme object of worship in the land. There is one thing that is certain, and that is, that the Chaldean Noah, Pir-napištim, was faithful in the worship of the older god, who therefore warned him, thus saving his life. Ae, the god who knew all things, knew also the design of his fellows to destroy mankind, and being “all and always eye,” to adopt a phrase used by John Bunyan, he bore, as a surname, that name Nin-igi-azaga, “Lord of the bright eye,” so well befitting one who, even among his divine peers, was the lord of unsearchable wisdom.