the heavenly troops rather than earthly armies. Such patrons of learning as Sargon and Ashurbanabal were naturally fond of parading their devotion to Nabu. The former significantly calls him the 'writer of everything,' and as for Ashurbanabal, almost every tablet in the great literary collection that he made at Nineveh closes with a solemn invocation to Nabu and his consort Tashmitum, to whom he offers thanks for having opened his ears to receive wisdom, and who persuaded him to make the vast literary treasures of the past accessible to his subjects. Tashmitum. The consort of Nabu was permitted to share the honors in the temple of Nabu at Calah, but beyond this and Ashurbanabal's constant association of Tashmitum with Nabu in the subscript to his tablets, she appears only when the kings of Assyria coming to Babylonia as they were wont to do,[308] in order to perform sacrifices, enumerate the chief gods of the Babylonian pantheon. Ea. Ea takes his place in the Assyrian pantheon in the double capacity of god of wisdom and as a member of the old triad. Ashurnasirbal makes mention of a sanctuary erected to the honor of Ea in Ashur. A recollection of the role that Ea plays in Babylonian mythology survives in the titles of 'creator' and 'king of the ocean,' which Shalmaneser gives him,[309] and of the 'one who opens the fountains' as Ashurbanabal declares.[310] He is also, as in Babylonia, the one who determines the fates of mankind. As the one who has a care for the arts, he is the wise god, just as Nabu, and under various titles, as Nu-gim-mud,[311] Nin-igi-azag, and Igi-dug-gu,[312] all emphasizing his skill, he is the artificer who aids the kings in their building operations. The similarity of the roles of Nabu and Ea, as gods of wisdom and the arts, might easily have led to a confusion. Fortunately, the grandiloquent and all-embracing titles accorded to the former did not alter his character as essentially the god who presides over the art of writing, while Ea retains the control over the architectural achievements,--the great colossi, in the first instance, that guarded the approach of palaces, the images of the gods in the second, and the temples and palaces in general as his third function. Damkina. Of the consort of Ea, it is sufficient to note that she is occasionally referred to in the historical texts of the Assyrian period. In the inscriptions of Sargon she appears under the rather strange title of 'Belit ilani,' _i.e._, the mistress of the gods.[313] This 'mistress' cannot be, as might at first blush appear, Ishtar or the old Belit, for elsewhere[314] Ishtar, Belit, and Belit ilani occur side by side. Sargon declares that he owes his wisdom to Ea and Belit ilani. In naming the gates of his palace, he again associates Ea with 'the mistress of the gods,' from which it is clear that the epithet is used of Ea's consort. Nin-gal.