The High God Who Rarely Acts

For all his supremacy, Anu is a remarkably inactive god, a pattern familiar from other high sky-gods, who preside without intervening. In the Epic of Gilgamesh he yields the Bull of Heaven to his daughter Ishtar only after she threatens to break down the gates of the underworld and let the dead consume the living; he sets the terms and withdraws. Mesopotamian theology reflects this by pushing him steadily into the background: active rule passes first to Enlil and later to Marduk at Babylon and Ashur in Assyria, while Anu remains the honoured but distant apex of the pantheon, the guarantor of an order he no longer personally enforces. He is invoked in the highest oaths and stands first in the great triad with Enlil and Ea.

Anu's cult persisted astonishingly late. In the Seleucid period, after Alexander's conquests had brought Greek rule to Babylonia, priests at Uruk rebuilt a great temple called the Bit Resh and revived an elaborate liturgy centred on Anu and his consort Antu, a conscious archaising renewal of the old sky god's worship carried out in cuneiform ritual texts as late as the second century BCE, among the last flowerings of Mesopotamian religion before it faded from practice. The episode shows that even a god as remote and inactive in myth as Anu could still anchor a living priesthood two and a half thousand years after his name first appears in writing, a span of continuity with few parallels anywhere in world religion.