How her worship came to be transferred to Der we do not know.

She appears in the inscription in question by the side of a goddess who--following Hommel--is none other than Bau.

Der is called the city of the god Anu, and we can only suppose that it must at one time have risen to sufficient importance to harbor in its midst a number of deities.

It is presumably[73] the place whence Nebuchadnezzar I.sets out in the twelfth century to drive the Cassites off the throne of Babylonia.

May it be that, during the days of the foreign rule, priests attached to the service of various of the old gods and goddesses transferred the worship of these deities to places more secure from interference?
Be this as it may, if our Nina has any connection with the goddess of Nineveh, it is certain that Ishtar has retained none of Nina's traits.
The fusion in this case has been so complete that naught but the faintest tradition of an original and independent Nina has survived in the North.
Anu.
This god, who, from a theoretical point of view (as will be shown in a subsequent chapter), was regarded as standing at the head of the organized Babylonian pantheon, figures only incidentally in the inscriptions prior to the days of Hammurabi.