Lecture III. The Gods Of Babylonia. 285
of Anu were accepted in the Semitic West; when Babylonian
culture made its way to Canaan, it was primarily Anu and the
divinities most closely associated with him—Istar, Anat, and
Dagon—who found there a home.
Ana, the sky, thus became Anu, the god of a Semitised
Babylonia. But a Semitised Babylonia could not conceive of a
god without a goddess who stood to him in the relation of the
feminine to the masculine gender. Out of Anu was formed Anat,
the feminine counterpart of the god. The same process at Nippur
had created a Belit or Beltis out of the masculine Bel. The
goddesses owed their existence to a grammatical necessity, and
their unsubstantial and colourless character justified their origin.
They fitly represented the relation in which, according to Semitic
ideas, the woman stood to the man. She was formed out of him [311]
in nature as the feminine was out of the masculine in language,
and her very existence thus depended on her“lord.”
There was, indeed, a goddess, even in Erech, the centre of
Semitic influence, who possessed a very strongly-marked and
independent character of her own. This was Istar, of whom I
shall have to speak at a future time. But it was just because
Istar possessed this independent character that she could not be
the wife of the god of the sky. The Semitic Baal brooked the
presence of no independent goddess in the divine family; the
wife of the god could not claim rights of her own any more than
the wife of the man. Anu, like Bel and Ea, stood alone.
Erech had been made the capital of a temporarily united
Babylonia at an early age in its Semitic history. Before the days
of Sargon of Akkad, Lugal-zaggi-ai—we know him only by his
Sumerian name—had made himself supreme over the smaller
States of the country, and even carried his arms to the distant
West. In an inscription he has left us he boasts that his empire
extended“from the lower sea of the Tigris and Euphrates to the
upper sea,”presumably the Mediterranean, as he further defines
his power as stretching“from the rising to the setting of the sun.”