But his fiery temperament is stirred up by the slightest provocation, and then “his flaming sword scatters pestilence over the land:  he destroys the harvest, brings the ingathering to nothing, tears up trees, and beats down and roots up the corn.”

[Illustration:  179.jpg RAMMAN, THE GOD OF TEMPESTS AND THUNDER.]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Layard.  Properly speaking, this
     is a Susian deity brought by the soldiers of Assurbanipal
     into Assyria, but it carries the usual insignia of Ramman.

In a word, the second triad formed a more homogeneous whole when Ishtar still belonged to it, and it is entirely owing to the presence of this goddess in it that we are able to understand its plan and purpose; it was essentially astrological, and it was intended that none should be enrolled in it but the manifest leaders of the constellations.  Ramman, on the contrary, had nothing to commend him for a position alongside the moon and sun; he was not a celestial body, he had no definitely shaped form, but resembled an aggregation of gods rather than a single deity.  By the addition of Ramman to the triad, the void occasioned by the removal of Ishtar was filled up in a blundering way.  We must, however, admit that the theologians must have found it difficult to find any one better fitted for the purpose:  when Venus was once set along with the rest of the planets, there was nothing left in the heavens which was sufficiently brilliant to replace her worthily.  The priests were compelled to take the most powerful deity they knew after the other five—­the lord of the atmosphere and the thunder.*

* Their embarrassment is shown in the way in which they have classed this god.  In the original triad, Ishtar, being the smallest of the three heavenly bodies, naturally took the third place.  Ramman, on the contrary, had natural affinities with the elemental group, and belonged to Anu, Bel, Ea, rather than to Sin and Shamash.  So we find him sometimes in the third place, sometimes in the first of the second triad, and this post of eminence is so natural to him, that Assyriologists have preserved it from the beginning, and describe the triad as composed, not of Sin, Shamash, and Ramman, but of Ramman, Sin, and Shamash, or even of Sin, Ramman, and Shamash.

The gods of the triads were married, but their goddesses for the most part had neither the liberty nor the important functions of the Egyptian goddesses.* They were content, in their modesty, to be eclipsed behind the personages of their husbands, and to spend their lives in the shade, as the women of Asiatic countries still do.  It would appear, moreover, that there was no trouble taken about them until it was too late—­when it was desired, for instance, to explain the affiliation of the immortals.  Anu and Bel were bachelors to start with.  When it was determined to assign to them female companions, recourse was had to the procedure adopted by the Egyptians in a similar case: