gyptian pantheon, with whom Baal most nearly corresponds, was Ammon,
addressed as the supreme God.

Ranking after El in Babylon, Asshur in Assyria, and Baal in
Phoenicia,--all shadows of the same supreme God,--we notice among these
Mesopotamians a triad of the great gods, called Anu, Bel, and Hea. Anu,
the primordial chaos; Hea, life and intelligence animating matter; and
Bel, the organizing and creative spirit,--or, as Rawlinson thinks, "the
original gods of the earth, the heavens, and the waters, corresponding
in the main with the classical Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune, who divided
between them the dominion over the visible creation." The god Bel, in
the pantheon of the Babylonians and Assyrians, is the God of gods, and
Father of gods, who made the earth and heaven. His title
expresses dominion.

In succession to the gods of this first trio,--Anu, Bel, and Hea,--was
another trio, named Siu, Shamas, and Vul, representing the moon, the
sun, and the atmosphere. "In Assyria and Babylon the moon-god took
precedence of the sun-god, since night was more agreeable to the
inhabitants of those hot countries than the day." Hence, Siu was the
more popular deity; but Shamas, the sun, as having most direct
reference to physical nature, "the lord of fire," "the ruler of the
day," was the god of battles, going forth with the armies of the king
triumphant over enemies. The worship of this deity was universal, and
the kings regarded him as affording them especial help in war. Vul, the
third of this trinity, was the god of the atmosphere, the god of
tempests,--the god who caused the flood which the Assyrian legends
recognize. He corresponds with the Jupiter Tonans of the Romans,--"the
prince of the power of the air," destroyer of crops, the scatterer of
the harvest, represented with a flaming sword; but as god of the
atmosphere, the giver of rain, of abundance, "the lord of fecundity," he
was beneficent as well as destructive.

All these gods had wives resembling the goddesses in the Greek
mythology,--some beneficent, some cruel; rendering aid to men, or
pursuing them with their anger. And here one cannot resist the
impression that the earliest forms of the Greek mythology were derived
from the Babylonians and Phoenicians, and that the Greek poets, availing
themselves of the legends respecting them, created the popular religion
of Greece. It is a mooted question whether the Greek civilization is
chiefly derived from Egypt, or from Ass