theologians who classified them in this manner seem never to have dreamt of explaining, like the authors of the Heliopolitan Ennead, the successive steps in their creation:  these triads were not, moreover, copies of the human family, consisting of a father and mother whose marriage brings into the world a new being.  Others had already given an account of the origin of things, and of Merodach’s struggles with chaos; these theologians accepted the universe as it was, already made, and contented themselves with summing up its elements by enumerating the gods which actuated them.* They assigned the first place to those elements which make the most forcible impression upon man—­beginning with Anu, for the heaven was the god of their city; following with Bel of Nipur, the earth which from all antiquity has been associated with the heaven; and concluding with Ea of Eridu, the terrestrial waters and primordial Ocean whence Anu and Bel, together with all living creatures, had sprung—­Ea being a god whom, had they not been guided by local vanity, they would have made sovereign lord of all.  Anu owed his supremacy to an historical accident rather than a religious conception:  he held his high position, not by his own merits, but because the prevailing theology of an early period had been the work of his priesthood.

* I know of Sayce only who has endeavoured to explain the historical formation of the triads.  They are considered by him as of Accadian origin, and probably began in an astronomical triad, composed of the moon-god, the sun-god, and the evening star, Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar; alongside this elementary trinity, “the only authentic one to be found in the religious faith of primitive Chaldaea,” the Semites may have placed the cosmogonical trinity of Anu, Bel, and Ea, formed by the reunion of the gods of Uruk, Nipur, and Eridu.

The characters of the three personages who formed the supreme triad can be readily deduced from the nature of the elements which they represent.  Anu is the heaven itself—­“ana”—­the immense vault which spreads itself above our heads, clear during the day when glorified by the sun, obscure and strewn with innumerable star clusters during the night.  Afterwards it becomes the spirit which animates the firmament, or the god which rules it:  he resides in the north towards the pole, and the ordinary route chosen by him when inspecting his domain is that marked out by our ecliptic.  He occupies the high regions of the universe, sheltered from winds and tempests, in an atmosphere always serene, and a light always brilliant.  The terrestrial gods and those of middle-space take refuge in this “heaven of Anu,” when they are threatened by any great danger, but they dare not penetrate its depths, and stop, shortly after passing its boundary, on the ledge which supports the vault, where they loll and howl like dogs.  It is but rarely that it may be entered, and then only by the highly privileged—­kings