Similarly, Anu, the spirit of the sky, became the Semitic Sky-god Anu, whose temple stood at Erech. Ur, on the western bank of the Euphrates, was dedicated to the Moon-god under the name of Sin, like Harran in Mesopotamia; Larsa was dedicated to the Sun-god. When Borsippa became a suburb of Babylon its presiding deity became at the same time the minister and interpreter of Merodach under the title of Nabium or Nebo “the prophet.” The Semitic god everywhere took the place of the Sumerian “spirit,” while those among the “spirits” themselves who had not undergone the transforming process merged in the three hundred spirits of heaven and the six hundred spirits of earth. They formed the “hosts of heaven,” of whom Bel was the lord. But Semitic belief necessitated the existence of a goddess by the side of the god. It was, indeed, a grammatical necessity rather than a theological one; the noun in the Semitic languages has a feminine as well as a masculine gender, and the masculine Bilu or Bel, accordingly, implied a female Belit or Beltis. But the goddess was little more than a grammatical shadow of the god, and her position was still further weakened by the analogy of the human family where the wife was regarded as the lesser man, the slave and helpmeet of her husband. One goddess only escaped the general law which would have made her merely the pale reflection of the god. This was Istar. Istar was an independent deity, owing no allegiance to a husband, and standing on a footing of equality with the gods. But this was because she had once been one of the chief objects of Sumerian worship, the spirit of the evening star. In the Sumerian language there was no gender, nothing that could distinguish the goddess or the woman from the god or man, and the “spirits,” therefore, were indifferently of both sexes. Moreover, the woman occupied an important place in the Sumerian family; where the Semitic translation speaks of “man and woman” the Sumerian original makes it “woman and man.” To the Sumerian mind, accordingly, the female “spirit” was as powerful as the male, acting independently and possessing the same attributes. Hence it was that in taking Istar over from their Sumerian predecessors the Semitic inhabitants of Babylonia took over at the same time a goddess who was the equal of a god.