Anu: Who Was the Sumerian God of the Sky?

The Sumerian god of the sky itself, remote father of the gods, whose heaven Etana and Adapa tried to reach.

Anu (An) was the Mesopotamian god of the sky and the remote father of the gods. His name is the Sumerian word for 'sky', and the name Anunnaki is usually understood to mean 'offspring of An'.

An, called Anu or Anum in Akkadian, was the Mesopotamian god of the sky. His name is the Sumerian word for 'sky', and the cuneiform sign that writes it, a star, also served as the marker placed before the name of any god. He was the father of many gods and, in theory, their supreme king, but in most myths he stays in his distant heaven while younger gods act.

His city was Uruk, where the great temple complex included a shrine to him that archaeologists call the White Temple, raised on a high platform in the late fourth millennium BCE. In later centuries, under Seleucid rule, Anu's cult at Uruk was revived and grew very large. Clay tablets from that late period list rituals performed for him in his temple, the Bit Resh, well into the Hellenistic age.

Humans who try to reach his heaven rarely do well. Adapa is summoned before Anu after breaking the wing of the South Wind, and refuses the bread and water of life he is offered. Etana rides an eagle toward Anu's heaven. In the Gilgamesh epic, Ishtar goes up to her father Anu to demand the Bull of Heaven.

The group name Anunnaki is usually understood to mean 'offspring of An'. Ancient-astronaut writers make Anu the ruler of a home planet; the texts make him the sky, personified and very far away. That distance was the point. An was the source of authority, the one whose decrees could not be revoked, even when he rarely acted in person. Kings claimed their office came from him and from Enlil.