Anu

An, whom the Akkadians called Anu, is the sky and the father of the Sumerian gods, the ultimate source of authority. His name is simply the word for heaven, and the cuneiform sign that writes it is also the sign for god (dingir), placed before every divine name, so that the small star-shaped sign standing at the head of every god's name in the script is, in a sense, Anu. He presides over the divine assembly that fixes destinies and confers kingship, the source from which legitimate rule descends to earth. His city is Uruk, where he shared the Eanna temple with Inanna, though she came in time to overshadow him there.

Anu's name appears among the very earliest written signs known, in the archaic administrative tablets from Uruk dated to roughly 3100 BCE, making him, in a real sense, as old as writing itself in Mesopotamia. He is rarely shown in human form in art; instead his presence is marked by the horned cap or tiara that became the generic sign of divinity, worn by every god in Mesopotamian art regardless of rank, a convention usually explained as deriving from Anu's own crown lent, in effect, to the whole pantheon. Excavation of the Eanna precinct at Uruk has uncovered building phases reaching back to the Uruk period in the fourth millennium BCE, one of the longest continuously sacred plots of ground anywhere in the ancient world, even as the temple's dedication shifted over the centuries.

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.

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.