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The gods and spirits had their home in the abysses of the ocean, not in the dark recesses of a mountain of the north; the centre of the world was the palace of Ea beneath the waves, not “the mountain-house” of En-lil, or the dark caverns of “the mountain of Arallu.”

A hymn entitles him “the lord of the earth, the prince of Arallu, lord of the place and the land whence none return, even the mountain of the spirits of earth ... without whom Inguriṡa cannot produce prosperity in field or canal, cannot create the crop ... he who gives sceptre and reign to Anu and El-lil.”

Possibly the prophet in speaking of arelim had in mind the Babylonian Arallu, “the nether-world”; see Ex.

Arali, or Arallu, the Land of the Dead, 157; its connection with the Sacred Mountain, 276.

Arallû, 132, 26; 134, 7. arāmu, cover, 198 n.