The title is Sumerian in origin, and must therefore have been given while as yet the Sumerian was dominant. This raises the question whether the name by which the god was subsequently known in Semitic Babylonia was not rather of Amorite than of Babylonian derivation. And there is much in favour of the view. Hadad, or Rimmon as he was also termed, was in a special way the god of Syria. His worship was spread along the whole length of the Syrian seaboard, and we find him holding there the rank of a supreme Baal. It is not as the god of storms, but as the sun-god himself, that he was adored in Syria, and his very name there became synonymous with deity. That the Semitised Sumerian of Babylonia should have identified the supreme god of a land of mountains and storms with his own storm-god, we can understand; that the Syrian should have transferred the name of a Babylonian god of storms to his own chief Baal, would be difficult to explain. However this may be, the person of Hadad is peculiarly Semitic. The features which he inherited from his Sumerian ancestry were obscured or dropped, and he became in all respects a Semitic god. We need not be surprised, therefore, at finding that he was a special favourite in Assyria. Assur-nazir-pal calls him “the mightiest of the gods,” and the Assyrian troops in their onset are likened to him.(249) The doctrine of the triad was not confined to the more prominent gods. It was extended to others also who occupied a lower rank in the divine hierarchy or in the public cult. Thus Samas helps to form the subordinate triad of Samas, Malik, and Bunênê, in which the local sun-gods, Malik and Bunênê, are distinguished from Samas of Sippara, and Bunênê is transformed into a female divinity, the consort of Malik. But in all cases the principle is the same. The Semitic conception of the divine family, husband, wife, and son, is combined with the older ideas of genderless Sumerian, which placed the goddess on the same level as the god, and the result is a triad in which the Sumerian element has so far prevailed as to exclude the mother and son, and leave three gods of equal power and rank.(250)