was the case in Babylonia or not, it is vain to speculate.
Babylonian religion as we see it has risen far above the direct
worship of animals. Each god comes before us in a certain local
connection and with a special character, but they tend to grow like
each other, and their worship is organised on the same plan. The gods
of Babylonia undoubtedly belonged to different towns, and though
attempts were made in later times to bring them all together in an
imperial Babylonian religion, and to settle their relations to each
other, these attempts led to no system which was finally accepted.
The number of the recognised great gods varied, and there was always
a large number of minor gods. Each god has his own early history;
here as everywhere it is the case that the individual gods are
earlier than the system which seeks to connect them together.

The Great Gods.--The great gods of Babylonia belong to the elements
and to the heavenly bodies. When we first see them, they are not,
like the gods of the western Semites, lords and masters, characters
taken from human families; they are not husbands and fathers but
creators and universal powers. Another mark about them is that they
have originally no wives. When they come to have wives, these are
simply doubles of themselves with no special character. A consort is
given to the god by adding a feminine termination to his name, thus
Bel receives Belit, Anu has Anat. Finally Babylonian religion is more
and more directed to the heavenly bodies. It is Astral religion
carried to its furthest point. This fixed the arrangement of its
temples, the occupations of its priests.

We rapidly pass in review the principal Gods. One of the oldest is Ea
of Eridu, a town which stood in old times at the head of the Persian
Gulf. He is a god of the deep, whether it was that he was considered
to have come over the water from another land, or whether he is
connected with the belief which was held in Babylonia as elsewhere,
that all things originally arose out of the abyss. In later forms of
the legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being,
half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men in
arts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he was
an author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressed
to him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god of
Erech on the lower Euphrates. Like the Chinese, the men of Erech
regarded the