Anu's Late Return: A Forgotten God Restored at Uruk

After centuries in which Marduk's rise at Babylon had pushed Anu into a largely honorary supremacy, honored in title but rarely at the center of active cult, the old sky god underwent a striking revival at his ancient city of Uruk under Seleucid rule in the third century BCE. Local priests, led by a temple official who took the Greek-sounding throne name Anu-uballit Kephalon with the blessing of the Seleucid king, rebuilt and reconsecrated the great Bit Resh temple precinct as a home for Anu and his consort Antu, reviving elaborate rituals, some drawing on very ancient liturgical texts, and reasserting Anu's primacy in a city that had spent much of the intervening millennium devoted chiefly to Ishtar under her later name Inanna. This late Uruk revival is one of the best documented instances of a genuinely ancient Mesopotamian cult being deliberately reconstructed by its own priesthood after a long eclipse, drawing on archives of older ritual and astronomical texts the temple scribes had preserved, rather than an example of continuous unbroken worship. It is also among the last clearly attested flowerings of native Mesopotamian religion before the practice faded from the historical record in the early centuries CE, so that Anu, the most remote and abstract of the old gods, both opens the Mesopotamian pantheon in its earliest texts and very nearly closes it, restored one final time at the site of his oldest temple before cuneiform religion itself fell silent.