Sipparas, one distinguished as the city of the Sun, “Sippara sha Shamash,” while the other gave lustre to Anunit in assuming the designation of “Sippara sha Anunitum.”  Rightly interpreted, these family arrangements of the gods had but one reason for their existence—­the necessity of explaining without coarseness those parental connections which the theological classification found it needful to establish between the deities constituting the two triads.  In Chaldaea as in Egypt there was no inclination to represent the divine families as propagating their species otherwise than by the procedure observed in human families:  the union of the goddesses with the gods thus legitimated their offspring.

* The passive and almost impersonal character of the majority of the Babylonian and Assyrian goddesses is well known.  The majority must have been independent at the outset, in the Sumerian period, and were married later on, under the influence of Semitic ideas.

The triads were, therefore, nothing more than theological fictions.  Each of them was really composed of six members, and it was thus really a council of twelve divinities which the priests of Uruk had instituted to attend to the affairs of the universe; with this qualification, that the feminine half of the assembly rarely asserted itself, and contributed but an insignificant part to the common work.  When once the great divisions had been arranged, and the principal functionaries designated, it was still necessary to work out the details, and to select v agents to preserve an order among them.  Nothing happens by chance in this world, and the most insignificant events are determined by previsional arrangements, and decisions arrived at a long time previously.  The gods assembled every morning in a hall, situated near the gates of the sun in the east, and there deliberated on the events of the day.  The sagacious Ea submitted to them the fates which are about to be fulfilled, and caused a record of them to be made in the chamber of destiny on tablets which Shamash or Merodach carried with them to scatter everywhere on his way; but he who should be lucky enough to snatch these tablets from him would make himself master of the world for that day.  This misfortune had arisen only once, at the beginning of the ages.  Zu, the storm-bird, who lives with his wife and children on Mount Sabu under the protection of Bel, and who from this elevation pounces down upon the country to ravage it, once took it into his head to make himself equal to the supreme gods.  He forced his way at an early hour into the chamber of destiny before the sun had risen:  he perceived within it the royal insignia of Bel, “the mitre of his power, the garment of his divinity,—­the fatal tablets of his divinity, Zu perceived them.  He perceived the father of the gods, the god who is the tie between heaven and earth,—­and the desire of ruling took possession of his heart;—­yea, Zu perceived the father of the gods, the god who is