Then came Anu, the sunlit sky by day, the starlit firmament by night; Inlil-Bel, the king of the earth; Ea, the sovereign of the waters and the personification of wisdom. Each of them duplicated himself, Anu into Anat, Bel into Belit, Ea into Damkina, and united himself to the spouse whom he had produced from himself. Other divinities sprang from these fruitful pairs, and, the impulse once given, the world was rapidly peopled by their descendants. Sin, Samash and Ramman, who presided respectively over the sun, moon and air, were all three of equal rank; next came the lords of the planets, Ninib, Merodach, Nergal, Ishtar, the warrior-goddess, and Nebo; then a whole army of lesser deities who ranged themselves around Anu as around a supreme master. Discord arose. The first great battle of the gods was between Tiamat and Merodach. In this fearful conflict Tiamat was destroyed. Splitting her body into halves, the conqueror hung up one on high, and this became the heavens; the other he spread out under his feet to form the earth, and made the universe as men have known it. Merodach regulated the movements of the sun and divided the year into twelve months. The heavens having been put in order, he set about peopling the earth. Many such fables concerning the cosmogony were current among the races of the lower Euphrates, who seem to have belonged to three different types. The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Armenian, Hebrew and Phoenician. Side by side with these the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, whom we provisionally call Sumerians, who came, it is said, from some northern country, and brought with them a curious system of writing which, adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the majority of the empires which rose and fell in Western Asia before the Persian conquest. The cities of these Semites and Sumerians were divided into two groups, one in the south, near the sea, the other more to the north, where the Euphrates and the Tigris are separated by a narrow strip of land. The southern group consisted of seven, Eridu lying nearest the coast. Uru was the most important. Lagash was to the north of Eridu. The northern group consisted of Nipur, "the incomparable," Borsip, Babylon (gate of the god and residence of life, the only metropolis of the Euphrates region of which posterity never lost reminiscence), Kishu, Kuta, Agade, and, lastly, the two Sipparas, that of Shamash, and that of Annuit.