Forcing their way with baneful windstorms,
    Mighty destroyers, the deluge of the storm god,
    Stalking at the right hand of the storm god.[45]

When we deal with a deity in his most archaic form it is difficult to distinguish him from a demon.  Even the beneficent Ea is associated with monsters and furies.  “Evil spirits”, according to a Babylonian chant, were “the bitter venom of the gods”.  Those attached to a deity as “attendants” appear to represent the original animistic group from which he evolved.  In each district the character of the deity was shaped to accord with local conditions.

At Nippur, which was situated on the vague and shifting boundary line between Sumer and Akkad, the chief god was Enlil, whose name is translated “lord of mist”, “lord of might”, and “lord of demons” by various authorities.  He was a storm god and a war god, and “lord of heaven and earth “, like Ea and Anu.  An atmospheric deity, he shares the attributes of the Indian Indra, the thunder and rain god, and Vayu, the wind god; he also resembles the Semitic Adad or Rimman, who links with the Hittite Tarku.  All these are deities of tempest and the mountains—­Wild Huntsmen in the Raging Host.  The name of Enlil’s temple at Nippur has been translated as “mountain house”, or “like a mountain”, and the theory obtained for a time that the god must therefore have been imported by a people from the hills.  But as the ideogram for “mountain” and “land” was used in the earliest times, as King shows, with reference to foreign countries,[46] it is more probable that Enlil was exalted as a world god who had dominion over not only Sumer and Akkad, but also the territories occupied by the rivals and enemies of the early Babylonians.

Enlil is known as the “older Bel” (lord), to distinguish him from Bel Merodach of Babylon.  He was the chief figure in a triad in which he figured as earth god, with Anu as god of the sky and Ea as god of the deep.  This classification suggests that Nippur had either risen in political importance and dominated the cities of Erech and Eridu, or that its priests were influential at the court of a ruler who was the overlord of several city states.

Associated with Bel Enlil was Beltis, later known as “Beltu—­the lady”.  She appears to be identical with the other great goddesses, Ishtar, Nana, Zerpanitu^m, &c., a “Great Mother”, or consort of an early god with whom she was equal in power and dignity.

In the later systematized theology of the Babylonians we seem to trace the fragments of a primitive mythology which was vague in outline, for the deities were not sharply defined, and existed in groups.  Enneads were formed in Egypt by placing a local god at the head of a group of eight elder deities.  The sun god Ra was the chief figure of the earliest pantheon of this character at Heliopolis, while at Hermopolis the leader was the lunar god Thoth.  Professor Budge is of opinion that “both the Sumerians and the early Egyptians derived their primeval gods from some common but exceedingly ancient source”, for he finds in the Babylonian and Nile valleys that there is a resemblance between two early groups which “seems to be too close to be accidental".[47]