ctual growth of the community. First one god and then another
comes to the front as this or that city attains leadership, but these
chief gods are substantially identical with one another in functions.
The genealogical relations introduced by the priestly theologians throw
no light on the original characters of the deities and are often ignored
in the inscriptions. A natural division into gods of the sky and gods of
the earth may be recognized, but in the high gods this distinction
practically disappears.

+753+. Turning first to the Tigris-Euphrates region, we find certain
nature gods that attained more or less definite universal
character.[1302] The physical sky becomes the god Anu, who, though
certainly a great god, was never so prominent as certain other deities,
and in Assyria yielded gradually to Ashur. Why the Semites, in marked
contrast with the Indo-Europeans and the Chinese, have shown a
relatively feeble recognition of the physical heaven we are not able to
say; possibly the tribal feeling referred to above may have led to a
centering of devotion on those deities that lay nearer to everyday life,
or in the case of Babylonia it may be that the city with which Anu was
particularly connected lost its early importance, and its deity in
consequence yielded to others.[1303] The sun is a more definite and more
practically important object than the expanse of the sky, and the
Semitic sun-god, Shamash, plays a great role from the earliest to the
latest times. The great king Hammurabi (commonly placed near the year
2000 B.C.), in his noteworthy civil code, takes Shamash as his patron,
as the inspirer of wisdom and the controller of human right; and from
this time onward this deity is invoked by the kings in their
inscriptions. The worship of the sun was established in Canaan at an
early time (as the name of the town Bethshemesh, 'house of Shemesh,'
shows), and under Assyrian influence was adopted by a large number of
Israelites in the seventh century B.C.; the prophet Ezekiel represents
prominent Israelites as standing in the court of the temple, turning
their backs on the sacred house and worshiping the sun;[1304] but as to
the nature of the sun-god and his worship in these cases we have no
information. Other nature deities that rose to eminence are the
moon-god, Sin, and the storm-god, Ramman.

+754+. The other deities of the Babylonian and Assyrian pantheons seem
not to be connected by their names with natural phen