simultaneously.  Anu reigned in the province of Bel or of Ea as he ruled in his own; Bel joined to his own authority that of Anu and Ea; Ea treated Anu and Bel with the same absence of ceremony which they had shown to him, and added their supremacy to his own.  The personality of each god was thenceforward composed of many divers elements:  each preserved a nucleus of his original being, but superadded to this were the peculiar characteristics of all the gods above whom he had been successively raised.  Anu took to himself somewhat of the temperaments of Bel and of Ea, and the latter in exchange borrowed from him many personal traits.  The same work of levelling which altered the characteristics of the Egyptian divinities, and transformed them little by little into local variants of Osiris and the Sun, went on as vigorously among the Chaldaean gods:  those who were incarnations of the earth, the waters, the stars, or the heavens, became thenceforth so nearly allied to each other that we are tempted to consider them as being doubles of a single god, worshipped under different names in different localities.  Their primitive forms can only be clearly distinguished when they are stripped of the uniform in which they are all clothed.

The sky-gods and the earth-gods had been more numerous at the outset than they were subsequently.  We recognize as such Anu, the immovable firmament, and the ancient Bel, the lord of men and of the soil on which they live, and into whose bosom they return after, death; but there were others, who in historic times had partially or entirely lost their primitive character,—­such as Nergal, Ninib, Dumuzi; or, among the goddesses, Damkina, Esharra, and even Ishtar herself, who, at the beginning of their existence, had represented only the earth, or one of its most striking aspects.  For instance, Nergal and Ninib were the patrons of agriculture and protectors of the soil, Dumuzi was the ground in spring whose garment withered at the first approach of summer, Damkina was the leafy mould in union with fertilizing moisture, Esharra was the field whence sprang the crops, Ishtar was the clod which again grew green after the heat of the dog days and the winter frosts.  All these beings had been forced to submit in a greater or less degree to the fate which among most primitive races awaits those older earth-gods, whose manifestations are usually too vague and shadowy to admit of their being grasped or represented by any precise imagery without limiting and curtailing their spheres.  New deities had arisen of a more definite and tangible kind, and hence more easily understood, and having a real or supposed province which could be more easily realized, such as the sun, the moon, and the fixed or wandering stars.  The moon is the measure of time; it determines the months, leads the course of the years, and the entire life of mankind and of great cities depends upon the regularity of its movements:  the Chaldaeans, therefore, made it, or rather the