rs, offers herself in
marriage if Nergal will spare her.

You shall be my husband and I will be your wife.
The tablets of wisdom I will lay in your hands.
You shall be master and I mistress.

Nergal accepts the condition, kisses Allatu, and wipes away her tears.

One cannot resist the conclusion that the tale is, as already suggested,
an imitation of the Marduk-Tiamat episode. Allatu is a female like
Tiamat. Nergal acts for the gods just as Marduk does. The attendants of
Nergal are suggested by the monsters accompanying Tiamat; the tables of
wisdom which Nergal receives, correspond to the tablets of fate which
Marduk snatches from Kingu.[1213] But while the conflict between Marduk
and Tiamat is an intelligible nature-myth, symbolizing the annual
rainstorms that sweep over Babylonia, there is no such interpretation
possible in the contest between Nergal and Allatu. The story is not even
a glorification of a local deity, for Nergal appears solely in the role
of a solar deity. The attendants given to him--heat, lightning, and
disease--are the popular traits in the story; but with the chief
characters in the old nature-myth changed,--Marduk or the original Bel
replaced by Nergal, and Tiamat by Allatu,--the story loses its popular
aspect, and becomes a medium for illustrating a doctrine of the schools.
If this view of the tale be correct, we would incidentally have a proof
(for which there is other evidence) that as early as the fifteenth
century, the Marduk-Tiamat story had already received a definite shape.
But the most valuable conclusion to be drawn from the Nergal-Allatu tale
is that, according to the popular conceptions, the real and older head
of the pantheon of the lower world was a goddess, and not a god.

Allatu takes precedence of Nergal. In the story of Ishtar's descent to
the lower world, a trace of the earlier view survives. Allatu is
introduced as the ruler of the lower world. Nergal plays no part. Viewed
in this light, the design of the tale we have just discussed becomes
still more evident. It was inconsistent with the prominence assigned to
male deities in the systematized pantheon, that the chief deity of the
lower world should be a female. Allatu could not be set aside, for the
belief in her power was too strongly imbedded in the popular mind; but a
male consort could be given her who might rule with her. Another factor
that may have entered into play in the adaptation of the Marduk-Tiamat
story