the old-Babylonian
period, i.e. before Khammurabi, Anu was regarded as the god of the
heavens and his name became in fact synonymous with the heavens, so that
in some cases it is doubtful whether, under the term, the god or the
heavens is meant. It would seem from this that the grouping of the
divine powers recognized in the universe into a triad symbolizing the
three divisions, heavens, earth and the watery-deep, was a process of
thought which had taken place before the third millennium. To Anu was
assigned the control of the heavens, to Bel the earth, and to Ea the
waters. The doctrine once established remained an inherent part of the
Babylonian-Assyrian religion and led to the more or less complete
disassociation of the three gods constituting the triad from their
original local limitations. An intermediate step between Anu viewed as
the local deity of Erech (or some other centre), Bel as the god of
Nippur, and Ea as the god of Eridu is represented by the prominence
which each one of the centres associated with the three deities in
question must have acquired, and which led to each one absorbing the
qualities of other gods so as to give them a controlling position in an
organized pantheon. For Nippur we have the direct evidence that its
chief deity, En-lil or Bel, was once regarded as the head of an
extensive pantheon. The sanctity and, therefore, the importance of Eridu
remained a fixed tradition in the minds of the people to the latest
days, and analogy therefore justifies the conclusion that Anu was
likewise worshipped in a centre which had acquired great prominence. The
summing-up of divine powers manifested in the universe in a threefold
division represents an outcome of speculation in the schools attached to
the temples of Babylonia, but the selection of Anu, Bel and Ea for the
three representatives of the three spheres recognized, is due to the
importance which, for one reason or the other, the centres in which Anu,
Bel and Ea were worshipped had acquired in the popular mind. Each of the
three must have been regarded in his centre as the most important member
in a larger or smaller group, so that their union in a triad marks also
the combination of the three distinctive pantheons into a harmonious
whole.

In the astral theology of Babylonia and Assyria, Anu, Bel and Ea became
the three zones of the ecliptic, the northern, middle and southern zone
respectively. The purely theoretical character of Anu is thus s