re not always pacific: jealousies arose among them like those
which disturbed the cities over which they ruled; they conspired against
each other, and on occasions broke out into open warfare. Instead of
forming a coalition against the evil genii who threatened their rule,
and as a consequence tended to bring everything into jeopardy, they
sometimes made alliances with these malign powers and mutually betrayed
each other. Their history, if we could recover it in its entirety, would
be marked by as violent deeds as those which distinguished the princes
and kings who worshipped them. Attempts were made, however, and that too
from an early date, to establish among them a hierarchy like that which
existed among the great ones of the earth. The faithful, who, instead of
praying to each one separately, preferred to address them all, invoked
them always in the same order: they began with Anu, the heaven, and
followed with Bel, Ea, Sin, Shamash, and Bamman. They divided these six
into two groups of three, one trio consisting of Anu, Bel, and Ea, the
other of Sin, Shamash, and Bamman. All these deities were associated
with Southern Chaldoa, and the system which grouped them must have taken
its rise in this region, probably at Uruk, whose patron Anu V occupied
the first rank among them. The theologians who classified them in this
manner seem never to have dreamt of explaining, like the authors of
the Heliopolitan Ennead, the successive steps in their creation: these
triads were not, moreover, copies of the human family, consisting of
a father and mother whose marriage brings into the world a new being.
Others had already given an account of the origin of things, and of
Merodach's struggles with chaos; these theologians accepted the universe
as it was, already made, and contented themselves with summing up its
elements by enumerating the gods which actuated them.* They assigned the
first place to those elements which make the most forcible impression
upon man--beginning with Anu, for the heaven was the god of their city;
following with Bel of Nipur, the earth which from all antiquity has
been associated with the heaven; and concluding with Ea of Eridu, the
terrestrial waters and primordial Ocean whence Anu and Bel, together
with all living creatures, had sprung--Ea being a god whom, had they
not been guided by local vanity, they would have made sovereign lord
of all. Anu owed his supremacy to an historical accident rather than a
rel