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Updated: June 20, 2025
This event might be the cutting of a canal, when the year in which this took place might be referred to as "the year in which the canal named Ai-khegallu was cut;" or it might be the building of a temple, as in the date-formula, "the year in which the great temple of the Moon-god was built;" or it might be "the conquest of a city, such as the year in which the city of Kish was destroyed."
Ashtoreth-Karnaim, "Ashtoreth with the two horns," was already in existence in the age of Abraham. In Babylonia the Moon-god of ancient Sumerian belief had never been dethroned; but there was no Moon-god in Canaan, and accordingly the transformation of the Babylonian goddess into "the queen of the night" was a matter of little difficulty.
The omission of Ramman here, though invoked at the close of the inscription, is noticeable. Ishtar takes the place that in the more developed system belongs to the god of storms, who with the moon-god and sun-god constitutes a second triad. See p. 163. Written with the sign An, and the feminine ending tum, but probably pronounced Anatum. I prefer the fuller forms of these names.
The preference generally shown by nomads for the moon, since their journeys are made by night, is kept up in early Babylonia, where the moon-god is regarded as the father of the sun-god, and as the greater being. In Ur of the Chaldees the moon was the principal deity.
The Sun and Moon, for example, are said to have been born in Japan, though afterwards placed in heaven; the Sun-goddess, Ama-terasu-no-oho-Kami, having been produced from the left eye of Izanagi, and the Moon-god, Tsuki-yomi-no-Mikoto, having been produced from the right eye of Izanagi when, after his visit to the under-world, he washed himself at the mouth of a river in the island of Tsukushi.
Ur lay on the western side of the Euphrates in Southern Babylonia, where the mounds of Muqayyar or Mugheir mark the site of the great temple that had been reared to the worship of the Moon-god long before the days of the Hebrew patriarch. Here Abraham had married, and from hence he had gone forth with his father to seek a new home in the west.
Its site is now marked by the mounds of Abu Shahrein or Nowâwis, nearly 150 miles from the sea; its foundation, therefore, must go back to about 7500 years, or 5500 B.C. Ur, a little to the north-west, with its temple of the Moon-god, was a colony of Eridu. In the plain itself many cities were erected, which rose around the temples of the gods.
Her name as interpreted in the tablet dedicated to her, signifies again, as in several cases already noted, 'great lady. She was probably therefore only the consort of some patron deity; and Nannar being the most prominent god invoked by Rim-Sin, it would seem that the goddess to whom the queen pays her respects is again one of the consorts of the moon-god.
The similarity in meaning is in keeping with the similarity of function of the two deities, thus named: Babbar being the sun and Nannar, the moon. It was under the name of Nannar that the moon-god was worshipped at Ur, the most famous and probably the oldest of the cities over which the moon-god presided.
One day he formed the wish to fill the shrine of Shiva, the moon-god, with milk up to the ceiling. He consulted his chief minister, and the latter sent a crier through Atpat ordering, under terrible penalties, all the townspeople to bring every Monday all the milk in their houses and offer it to the god Shiva.
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