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 distinguished by a name which was not derived from that of her husband, but she was not animated by a more intense vitality than Anat or Belit: she was called Damkina, the lady of the soil, and she personified in an almost passive manner the earth united to the water which fertilized it. The goddesses of the second triad were perhaps rather less artificial in their functions. Ningal, doubtless, who ruled along with Sin at Uru, was little more than an incarnate epithet. Her name means "the great lady," "the queen," and her person is the double of that of her husband; as he is the man-moon, she is the woman-moon, his beloved, and the mother of his children Shamash and Ishtar. But A or Sirrida enjoyed an indisputable authority alongside Shamash: she never lost sight of the fact that she had been a sun like Shamash, a disk-god before she was transformed into a goddess. Shamash, moreover, was surrounded by an actual harem, of which Sirridà was the acknowledged queen, as he himself was its king, and among its members Gula, the great, and Anunit, the daughter of Sin, the morning star, found a place. Shala, the compassionate, was also included among them; she was subsequently bestowed upon Ramman. They were all goddesses of ancient lineage, and each had been previously worshipped on her own account when the Sumerian people held sway in Chaldæa: as soon as the Semites gained the upper hand, the powers of these female deities became enfeebled, and they were distributed among the gods. There was but one of them, Nana, the doublet of Ishtar, who had succeeded in preserving her liberty: when her companions had been reduced to comparative insignificance, she was still acknowledged as queen and mistress in her city of Eridu. The others, notwithstanding the enervating influence to which they were usually subject in the harem, experienced at times inclinations to break into rebellion, and more than one of them, shaking off the yoke of her lord, had proclaimed her independence: Anunit, for instance, tearing herself away from the arms of Shamash, had vindicated, as his sister and his equal, her claim to the half of his dominion. Sippara was a double city, or rather there were two neighbouring Sipparàs, 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 Chaldæa 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.