Unu-ki = Unuk = Uruk = Erech

“It was not of Semitic foundation, however. Its earliest name was the Accadian Unu-ki or Unuk, “the place of the settlement,” of which the collateral form Uruk does not seem to have come into vogue before the Semitic period.

If I am right in identifying Unuk with the Enoch of Genesis, the city built by Kain in commemoration of his first-born son, Unuk must be regarded as having received its earliest culture from Eridu, since Enoch was the son of Jared, according to Genesis iv, and Jared or Irad (Genesis iv.) is the same word as Eridu.

The local god of Erech, however, was not Ea, the god of the river and sea, but Ana, the sky. Thus whereas at Eridu the present creation was believed to have originated out of water, the sky being the primeval goddess Zikum or Zigara, mother alike of Ea and the other gods, at Erech the sky was itself the god and the creator of the visible universe.

The two cosmologies are antagonistic to one another, and produced manifold inconsistencies in the later syncretic age of Babylonian religion.

But it was not in Erech alone that the sky was considered divine. Throughout Chaldea, Ana, “the sky,” received worship, and the oldest magical texts invoke “the spirit of the sky” by the side of that of the earth. What distinguished the worship of Ana at Erech was that here alone he was the chief deity of the local cult, that here alone he had ceased to be a subordinate spirit, and had become a dingir or “creator.”

Of this pre-Semitic period in the worship of Ana we know but little. It is only when he has become the Anu of the Semites and has undergone considerable changes in his character and worship, that we make our first true acquaintance with him.

We come to know him as the Semitic Baal-samaim, or “lord of heaven,” the supreme Baal, viewed no longer as the Sun-god, but as the whole expanse of heaven which is illuminated by the sun.

How early this must have been is shown by the extension of his name as far west as Palestine. In the records of the Egyptian conqueror Thothmes III., in the 16th century before our era, mention is made of the Palestinian town of Beth-bath, “the temple of Anat,” the female double of Anu.

Another Beth-Anath was included within the borders of the tribe of Naphtali (Joshua xix.38); and Anathoth, whose name shows us that, besides the Ashtaroth or “Astartes,” the Canaanites venerated their local goddesses under the title of “Anats,” was a city of the priests.

Anah or Anat was the daughter of the Hivite Zibeon and mother-in-law of Esau (Genesis xxxvi. 1,14), and by her side we hear of Anah or Anu, the son of the Horite Zibeon, who “found the mules (or hot-springs) in the wilderness as he fed the asses of Zibeon his father.” But Anu did not make his way westward alone.”

A.H. Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, 5th ed., London, 1898, pp. 185-8.