benlehman

>I mean, unless I and my Classics courses are totally wrong--or, granted, unless they covered it in one of the multifarious sessions I slept through--cultures had gods of stuff.

Yes, but saying that Enki is the "God of Water" totally belittles the significance of the god. It cuts out everything the Sumerian people knew about the character of Enki, all the other things he meant (and by corollary, all the other things that water itself symbolized to that culture,) and generally removes any sort of individual character that god may have. When the Greeks thought about Posiedon, they didn't just think, oh, hey, water. They thought about an entire constellation of stories and attributes that together formed a part of their conception of the world, and apart would mean nothing. The "god of" thing is something people say and teach each other about ancient gods to act like they know what they're talking about at parties without actually having any sense what that god's mythology means. It is, in many ways, disrespectful. Enki does not equal Posiedon, in any way, shape, or form, nor the Greek conception of the waters the sumerian one. But by the "god of" formulation, he does.