No, I was talking about two different things here:
(1) In the Babylonian system, Marduk, the chief god,was identified with the 5th planet. When the Greeks / Romans took over the Babylonian system, they identified their own chief god (Zeus/Jupiter)with the 5th planet. The identification was based on the shared position of chief god, not on any shared attribute like "brightness".
(2) At the point when that identification happened, the theonym Jupiter / Zeus had already become etymologically opaque (i.e., Romans and Greeks didn't know that the theonym originally had meant "shining, bright"), so identifying Zeus/Jupiter with the 5th planet didn't mean that Jupiter was seen as especially bright.
As for Marduk, he has his own wikipedia page (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marduk). Based on that, you can see that he is not a "bright sky" god. On the site it is said that "Marduk's original character is obscure but he was later on connected with water, vegetation, judgment, and magic". He was a local god of the city of Babylon and became chief of the pantheon due to the fact that Babylon became th centre of power in Mesopotamia.
Chronology:
1) PIE times - dye:us pH2te:r - god of the bright sky
2) Ancient Greek - god developed into Zeus, chief of the pantheon, the meaning of the name was no longer understood; Ancient Rome - god developed into Juppiter, chief of the pantheon, the meaning of the name was no longer understood
3) Greeks take over the system of identifying gods with planets from the orient. They substitute their own chief god (Zeus) for the Babylonian chief god (Marduk) as being identified with the 5th planet.
4) Romans take over the system from the Greeks, substituting Jupiter for Zeus.
Best regards,
Hans-Werner
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> Marduk.
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> You are saying that Marduk is "god of the bright day"?
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> Couldn't see Marduk in the wiki paragraph on Babylon.
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> There is an earlier (by hours) post of mine on this thread but it has disappeared currently.
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> Many thanks,
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> Ric
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