(urth) Oannes

[David Stockhoff]

On 3/17/2012 1:03 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 3/16/2012 8:13 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>> And isn't Oannes the Babylonian fish god?
>
> Dagon
>
>

Apparently only by conflation with Oannes, because Dagon was originally 
a grain-god. However, Dagon is part of the chain of identifications, 
which includes Pan:

Dagon, Fish-god tradition

In the eleventh century, Jewish bible commentator Rashi writes of a 
Biblical tradition that the name Dāgôn is related to Hebrew dāg/dâg 
'fish' and that Dagon was imagined in the shape of a fish: compare the 
Babylonian fish-god Oannes. In the thirteenth century David Kimhi 
interpreted the odd sentence in 1 Samuel 5.2–7 that "only Dagon was left 
to him" to mean "only the form of a fish was left", adding: "It is said 
that Dagon, from his navel down, had the form of a fish (whence his 
name, Dagon), and from his navel up, the form of a man, as it is said, 
his two hands were cut off." The Septuagint text of 1 Samuel 5.2–7 says 
that both the hands and the head of the image of Dagon were broken off.[5]

H. Schmökel asserted in 1928[6] that Dagon was never originally a 
fish-god, but once he became an important god of those maritime 
Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the folk-etymological connection with dâg 
would have ineluctably affected his iconography.[7]

The fish form may be considered as a phallic symbol as seen in the story 
of the Egyptian grain god Osiris, whose penis was eaten by (conflated 
with) fish in the Nile after he was attacked by the Typhonic beast Set. 
Likewise, in the tale depicting the origin of the constellation 
Capricornus, the Greek god of nature Pan became a fish from the waist 
down when he jumped into the same river after being attacked by Typhon.

Various 19th century scholars, such as Julius Wellhausen and William 
Robertson Smith, believed the tradition to have been validated from the 
occasional occurrence of a merman motif found in Assyrian and Phoenician 
art, including coins from Ashdod and Arvad.

John Milton uses the tradition in his Paradise Lost Book 1:

... Next came one
Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark
Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off,
In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge,
Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers:
Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high
Reared in Azotus, dreaded through the coast
Of Palestine, in Gath and Ascalon,
And Accaron and Gaza's frontier bounds.


Adapa, As Oannes

Oannes (Ὡάννης,　Hovhannes [Հովհաննես] in Armenian) was the name given 
by the Babylonian writer Berossus in the 3rd century BCE to a mythical 
being who taught mankind wisdom. Berossus describes Oannes as having the 
body of a fish but underneath the figure of a man. He is described as 
dwelling in the Persian Gulf, and rising out of the waters in the 
daytime and furnishing mankind instruction in writing, the arts and the 
various sciences.

The name "Oannes" was once conjectured to be derived from that of the 
ancient Babylonian god Ea,[2] but it is now known that the name is the 
Greek form of the Babylonian Uanna (or Uan) a name used for Adapa in 
texts from the Library of Ashurbanipal.[3][4

So Dagon, Oannes, and Pan are all legitimately "mermen." Dagon links to 
the biblical tradition and Pan to the Greek.