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Updated: May 23, 2025
Anu's place among the "Great Gods" of Assyria is not so well marked as that of many other divinities. His name does not occur as an element in the names of kings or of other important personages. He is omitted altogether from many solemn invocations. It is doubtful whether he is one of the gods whose emblems were worn by the king and inscribed upon the rock-tablets.
Asshur-izir-pal uses expressions as if he were Anu's special votary, calling himself "him who honors Anu," or "him who honors Anu and Dugan." His son, the Black-Obelisk king, assigns him the second place in the invocation of thirteen gods with which he begins his record.
And though we possess no detailed account of Anu's creative work, the persistent ascription to him of the creation of heaven, and his familiar title, "the Father of the Gods", suggest that he once possessed a corresponding body of myth in Eanna, his temple at Erech.
In the second period of Babylonian history the worship of the supreme god of heaven becomes even more closely bound up with Anu's position as the first member of the inseparable triad than was the case in the first period. For Hammurabi, as has been noted, Anu is only a half-real figure who in association with Bel is represented as giving his endorsement to the king's authority.
For while Anu's creation of heaven is postulated as the necessary precedent of Enki's activities, the latter creates the Deep, vegetation, mountains, seas, and mankind. Moreover, in his character as God of Wisdom, he is not only the teacher but the creator of those deities who were patrons of man's own constructive work.
On the whole, then, Anu's claim to reverence rests in Assyria as well as in Babylonia upon his position in the triad, and while Assyria is less influenced by the ancient system devised in Babylonia whereby Anu, Bel, and Ea come to be the representatives of the three kingdoms among which the gods are distributed, still Anu as a specific deity, ruling in his own right, remains a rather shadowy figure.
Finally, Sargon who names the eight gates of his palace after the chief gods of the land does not omit Anu, whom he describes as the 'one who blesses his handiwork. Otherwise we have Anu only when the triad Anu, Bel, and Ea is invoked. After Sargon we no longer find Anu's name at all among the deities worshipped in Assyria.
The kings of the Lower Dynasty do not generally hold him in much repute; Sargon, however, is an exception, perhaps because his own name closely resembled that of a god mentioned as one of Anu's sons. Sargon not infrequently glorifies Anu, coupling him with Bel or Bil, the second god of the first Triad. Anu had but few temples in Assyria.
He advises him to present himself at the throne of Anu for trial, and to secure the intervention of two gods, Tammuz and Gishzida, who are stationed at the gate of heaven, Anu's dwelling-place.
It is unfortunate that the second tablet is so badly preserved. We are dependent largely upon conjecture for what follows the failure of Anu's mission. From references in subsequent tablets, it seems certain that Anshar sends out Ea as a second messenger and that Ea also fails.
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