The question we have just been considering, the physical character of the Babylonian deities in relation to their whole personality, suggests two last reflections. Their gods have a certain relation to the planets, which is preserved even in our modern astronomy. That the early Sumerians worshipped stars is probable,[102.4] as the Sumerian sign for divinity is a star; but that the Sumerian-Babylonian high gods were personal forms of the planets, is denied by leading modern Assyriologists,[103.1] {103} except in the case of the sun and the moon, Shamash and Sin. It was only the Chaldaean astronomic theory that came to regard the various planets in their varying positions as special manifestations of the powers of the different personal gods; and the same planet might be a manifestation, according to its different positions, of different gods: the “star Jupiter at one point is Marduk, at another point Nebo”; this dogma is found on a seventh-century tablet, which declares at the same time that “Mercury” is Nebo.[103.2] This planetary association of the deities is well illustrated by the memorial relief of Asarhaddon found at Sinjerli, and the relief of Maltaija, showing stars crowning their heads;[103.3] but both these are later than the period with which we are here immediately concerned. Lastly, we fail to observe in that domain of the old Babylonian religion which may be called nature-worship, any clear worship of the earth regarded as a personal and living being, as the Hellenes regarded Gaia. The great goddesses, Ishtar, the goddess at once warlike and luxurious, virgin and yet unchaste, terrible and merciful, the bright virgin of the sky, Bau, the wife of Ninib, the “amorous lady of heaven,” are certainly not of this character. Still less is Allatu, the monstrous and grim Queen of Hell, at whose breast the lions are suckled. It seems that if the early Sumerians conceived the earth as a personal divinity at all, they imagined it as a male divinity. For in the inscriptions of Nippur, Enlil or Bel appears as a Lord of the underworld, {104} meaning our earth as distinct from the heavens: he is hymned as the “lord of the harvest-lands, lord of the grain-fields”[104.1]--he is the “husbandman who tends the fields”; when Enlil is angry, “he sends hunger everywhere.” In another hymn he is thus described: “The great Earth-Mountain is Enlil, the mountain-storm is he, whose shoulders rival the heavens, whose foundation is the bright abyss”;[104.2] and again, “Lord, who makest to abound pure oil and nourishing milk;… in the earth Lord of life art thou”; “to give life to the ground thou dost exist.”[104.3] It is evident that Enlil is more than the personal earth regarded as a solid substance; he is rather the god of all the forces and life that move on and in the earth, hence he is “the lord of winds.”[104.4] He is more, then, than the mere equivalent of Gaia. One might have expected to find a Sumerian counterpart for this goddess in Ninlil or Belit,