Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia. 283
inhabitants of Erech knew nothing of it. For them Anu was the
protecting god of their city, the father of Istar, whose habitation
it was. From the days when Erech first became a Semitic
possession, Anu and Istar had been worshipped in it side by
side. Indeed, it would seem from the inscription of Lugal-zaggi-
ai, discovered at Nippur, that at the remote period to which it
belongs Istar had not yet been associated with Anu in the divine
government of Erech. Lugal-zaggi-ai was king of Erech, and
as a consequence“priest of Ana,”but not of Istar. So far as
the evidence goes at present, it points to the fact that the divine
patron of Erech was Anu, and that Istar was introduced by the
Semites, perhaps from the town of Dilbat (now Dillem).
The god and his name were alike borrowed by the Semite
from his Sumerian predecessor. Ana was the Sumerian word
for“sky,”and it was doubtless a spirit of the sky which had
been worshipped by the primitive population of the country.
But when the hieroglyphic pictures were first invented, out of
which the cuneiform characters afterwards developed, the spirit
was already on the way to becoming a god. The eight-rayed
star which denotes Ana in the historical days of Babylonia also [309]
denotes a god. He thus became a type of the god as distinguished
from the spirit, and bears witness to the evolution that was already
taking place in the religion of Babylonia.
That there had been spirits of the sky, however, as well as
spirits of the earth, was never forgotten. By the side of the
Anunna-ki or“spirits of the earth”the later theology continued
to retain a memory of the Igigi or spirits of heaven.^243 As En-lil
(^243) The Igigi are represented ideographically by v+ii (the ideograph of
plurality). Perhaps, therefore, they were originally the spirits of the five
planets duplicated according to their appearance in the evening and morning.
If the opinion of Pognon (L'Inscription de Bavian, i. p. 25) could be sustained
that the original ideograph was really vii and not v+ii, we should have a
better explanation of them as the seven planets which, in Chaldæan astronomy,
included the sun and moon. The meaning of the name is unknown. Guyard's
supposition, that it is derived from the Assyrianagâgu,“to be angry”(not“to