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: there was added to
their names the distinctive suffix of the feminine gender, and in this
manner two grammatical goddesses were formed, Anat and Belit, whose
dispositions give some indications of this accidental birth. There was
always a vague uncertainty about the parts they had to play, and their
existence itself was hardly more than a seeming one. Anat sometimes
represented a feminine heaven, and differed from Anu only in her sex.
At times she was regarded as the antithesis of Anu, i.e. as the earth in
contradistinction to the heaven. Belit, as far as we can distinguish her
from other persons to whom the title "lady" was attributed, shared with
Bel the rule over the earth and the regions of darkness where the dead
were confined. The wife of Ea was distinguishe