Antu- Mesopotamian GodDeity"Lady of the Sky"

The Feminine Sky

Antu's name is the feminine form of Anu's. The Mesopotamians built their heavens in pairs: a god who ruled alone ruled an empty court. So the sky had its queen.

She appears in god lists from the Old Babylonian period onward, always beside Anu, always in the second position. The Assyro-Babylonian god lists place her immediately after her husband, before every other deity except the primordials. Her title was Lady of the Sky, and the horned crown she wore in depictions marked her as a goddess of the highest rank. But no scribe recorded a myth in which she spoke, fought, or traveled. She was present. That was her function.

The Rites at Uruk

Her cult survived longest at Uruk. The Bit Resh temple complex housed both Anu and Antu, and when Seleucid-era kings rebuilt the sanctuary in the third century BCE, they included provisions for her worship alongside her husband's.

The ritual texts from Hellenistic Uruk are the fullest record of what her priests did. Each day they bathed her statue and dressed it in fresh garments. In the evenings, priests climbed to the temple roof to watch for specific stars. When the stars appeared, they spoke prayers to Antu and bound her name to the constellations her husband's sky contained.

During the Akitu festival at the new year, Anu and Antu processed through the city together. Priests served the divine pair banquets on golden platters while reciting hymns. The ceremony was a communion: gods fed by human hands, humans sheltered beneath divine sky.

Where Inanna descended to the underworld and Ereshkigal ruled the dead, Antu held court. The priests who dressed her statue and watched the stars on her behalf kept the sky complete. Without her, the king of heaven was a man on a throne in an empty hall.