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 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.