It may well be that Shamash was the name given to the god at Sippar, whereas at Ur he may have been known as Utu. Ur-Bau (of the first Ur dynasty) calls him Utu also, when speaking of the temple at Larsa, but it would be natural for the kings of Ur to call the sun-god of Larsa by the same name that he had in Ur. That Hammurabi, however, calls the sun-god of Larsa, Utu, may be taken as an indication that, as such he was known at that place, for since we have no record of a sun-temple at Babylon in these days, there would be no motive that might induce him to transfer a name, otherwise known to him, to another place. The testimony of Hammurabi is therefore as direct as that of Sargon, who calls the sun-god of Sippar, Shamash. It is not always possible to determine, with as much show of probability, as in the case of the sun-god, the distribution of the various names, but the general conclusion, for all that, is warranted in every instance, that a variety of names refers, originally, to an equal variety of places over which the worship was spread,--only that care must be exercised to distinguish between distinctive names and mere epithets. A. A consort of the sun-deity, appearing frequently at his side in the incantation texts, is A. It is more particularly with the Shamash of Sippar, that A is associated. She is simply the 'beloved one' of the sun-deity, with no special character of her own. In the historical texts, her role is quite insignificant, and for the period with which we are at present concerned she is only mentioned once by a North Babylonian ruler, Ma-an-ish-tu-su,[57] who dedicates an object to her. The reading of the ideogram A, or Nin-A (_i.e._, Lady A), is doubtful. Malkatu ("mistress" or "queen") is offered as a plausible conjecture.[58] Lehman (_Keils Bibl._ iii. I, 202) suggests _A-Ja_, but on insufficient grounds. In any case A has the force of mistress, and Nin-A simply designates the goddess as the lady, mistress, or queen. It is likely that A was originally an independent deity, and one of the names of the sun-god in a particular locality. It occurs in proper names as a title of Shamash. Instead, however, of becoming identified with Shamash, A degenerated into a pale reflection of Shamash, pictured under the relationship of consort to him. This may have been due to the union of Shamash with the place where A was worshipped. If, as seems likely, that near Sippar, there was another city on the other side of the Euphrates, forming a suburb to it (as Borsippa did to Babylon), the conclusion is perhaps warranted that A was originally the sun-god worshipped at the place which afterwards became incorporated with Sippar.[59] Such an amalgamation of two originally male deities into a combination of male and female, strange as it may seem to us, is in keeping with the lack of sharp distinction between male and female in the oldest forms of Semitic religions. In the old cuneiform writing the