In the language of Sumer, Asari signified "the strong one" or "prince."(254) His name was expressed by two ideographs which denoted "place" and "eye," and had precisely the same meaning and form as the two which expressed the name of the Egyptian Osiris.(255) Between the Sumerian Asari and the Egyptian Osiris, therefore, it seems probable that there was a connection. And to my mind the probability is raised to practical certainty by the fact that the character and attributes of both Asari and Osiris were the same. Osiris was Un-nefer, "the good being," whose life was spent in benefiting and civilising mankind; Asari also was "the good heifer" (_amar-dugga_), and his common title was that of "the prince who does good to men" (_Asari-galu-dugga_). He it was who conveyed to men the teaching of Ea, who healed their diseases by means of his father's spells, and who "raised the dead to life." Asari and Osiris are not only the same in name and pictorial representation, they play the same part in the history of religion and culture.
But there was one important difference between them. Osiris was a dead god, whose kingdom was in the other world; Asari brought help to the living, whom he restored from sickness and delivered from death. Even in Egypt, however, it was remembered that Osiris had been a god of the living before he was god of the dead. Tradition told how he had instructed men in the arts of life, and done for primeval Egypt what Ea and Asari had done for Chaldæa. The difference between him and Asari is a difference that runs through the whole of Egyptian and Babylonian theology. The Egyptian of the historical period fixed his eyes on the future life, and the god he worshipped accordingly was the god who judged and saved him in the other world; the religion of the Babylonian was confined to this world, and it was in this world only that he was judged by the sun-god, and received his sentence of reward or punishment. The mummified sun-god did not exist for the Babylonians, for the practice of mummification was unknown among them.
It is possible that Asari, "the prince who does good to men," had been originally a title of Ea. If so, the title and the god had been separated from one another at an early epoch, and the title had become itself a god who owned Ea as his father. This relationship between Ea and his son betrays Semitic--or at all events foreign--influence. The ghosts and spirits of primitive Sumerian belief were not bound together by any such family ties; the demons of the night had little in common with the men they terrified and plagued. Asari had once been conceived of as a ram, Ea as an antelope; and between the ram and the antelope no genetic relationship was possible. They might be united together like the composite creatures which had come down to the Babylonians from the old Sumerian days, but there could be no birth of one from the other. Birth characterises the present creation in which like springs from like; it was only in the time of chaos that unlike forms could be mingled together in disorderly confusion.