The Turanian Chaldeans, on the other hand, were unreserved polytheists. Their gods were as the sands of the sea for number. Each city, with its surrounding locality, had its special god, and the greater the city the greater the god, the more magnificent the temple dedicated to his worship, and the more powerful its priesthood.
This was the case in the city of Ur, where Hurud, or Sin, the Moon God, was the local divinity. There were other moon gods in other localities, each worshipped in a special way, but the Moon God of Ur was greater than all.
Thus it was with the worship of Ea, the god of the deep, the local god of the more ancient city of Eridu; and again of Anu, the Sky God of Erech.
This organization of the Chaldean Pantheon by Sargon was simply the orderly arrangement of these into greater and lesser divinities, the blending of these separate local cults into one general system.
At the head of this pantheon was placed the Semitic Illu, or El, signifying God, and whose name is the root word of the Hebrew Elohim and the Arabian Allah.
Next in order, was a triad of great gods, Turanian divinities, consisting of Anu, the Sky God of Erech; Bel, or Mul-lil, the local god of Nippur, the Lord of the lower world, and last in this triad, of Ea, of Eridu, the god of the great waters, and creator of the Accadean race.
The position of these gods in this triad is explained by local circumstances. At the time of this new arrangement of the Chaldean deities Erech was a prominent city of southern Mesopotamia. It had a richly endowed library, perhaps the greatest collection of literary treasures at this time known in the ancient world. This was greatly enlarged by Sargon, who, perhaps from motives of policy towards his Chaldean subjects, thought it wisest not to enrich his library at Agane at the expense of this the oldest of the libraries of southern Mesopotamia.
It is also possible that some of the literary treasures obtained by him in other decaying cities of this region may have been placed in the library at Erech for the same reason, as it offered better opportunities for the safe deposit of these ancient documents. At any rate, we find that when Assur-bani-pal founded his great library at Nineveh many centuries later, and the ancient cities of Chaldea were ransacked for their literary treasures, it was at Erech that he reaped his richest harvest.
As suggested, Erech was at the time of Sargon’s reformation of the gods of Chaldea, a populous and wealthy city. It possessed a powerful priesthood devoted to the service of Anu, the Sky God, the local god of Erech, who, for these reasons, was placed first in the trinity of gods, before the more ancient and sacred divinities of Turanian Chaldea.
Nippur, the second capital of Chaldea, was also at this time a wealthy and populous city. Here was located a temple to Belus, the older Bel, identical with Mul-lil, the Lord of the lower world, and as the local god of Nippur, Bel became the second god in the trinity.