The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

284 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

was the chief among the spirits of the earth, so it is probable that
Ana was chief among the spirits of the sky. But there was not
the same difficulty in accommodating his name and personality
to the new conception of a god that there was in the case of
En-lil. His old Sumerian title brought with it no associations with
animism; there was no need to change it, and it could therefore,
like the name of Ea, be retained even when the spirit of the sky
had become the god of heaven. From the outset Ana had stood
outside the sphere and dominion of En-lil; he was no ghost of the
underworld to be degraded or renamed.
While, therefore, in En-lil of Nippur, even under his new
Semitic form of Bel, the dominant element remained Sumerian,
and in Ea of Eridu the Semitic and Sumerian elements were
[310] mingled together, Ana of Erech was distinctively a Semitic
god. It was only by main force, as it were, that En-lil could
be transformed into the semblance of a Semitic Baal; up to the
last he continued to be lord of the earth rather than of the sky,
whose dwelling-place was below rather than above.^244 It was
this, perhaps, which facilitated his effacement by Merodach; the
lineaments of a Baal were more easily traceable in the sun-god of
Babylon than in the god of Nippur. But the sky-god was already
a Baal. Between him and the Semitic Baal-shamain,“the lord
of heaven,”the distance was but slight, and it was not difficult
to clothe him with the attributes which the Semite ascribed to
his supreme deity. A consciousness of the fact may possibly
be detected in the readiness with which the name and worship

be strong,”as he imagined), is devoid of probability. In K 2100, col. iv., it is

also written Igâgâ, and explained byisartum,“justice,”or“straight direction.”

InWAI.ii. 35. 37, the NUN-GAL{FNS(pronouncedKisagal) is called theRîbu

which Jensen would connect with the Hebrew Rahab.

(^244) The divine“lord”of a place or territory, such as is met with in a South
Arabian or Phœnician inscription, is totally different from the lord of the
ghost-world at Nippur. The one was master of a definite territory on the surface
of the earth, the other was a spirit ruling over other spirits in an underground
world. The two conceptions have nothing in common with one another.