Assur: The Supreme God of the Ancient Assyrians
Assur (also Ashur, Anshar) is the god of the ancient Assyrians who was elevated from a local deity of the city of Ashur to the supreme god of the Assyrian pantheon. His attributes were drawn from earlier Sumerian and Babylonian deities, and so he was, at once, a god of war, wisdom, justice, agriculture, and kingship, among others.
The Assyrian Empire, like the later Roman Empire, had a great talent for borrowing from other cultures. This penchant is illustrated clearly in the figure of Assur, whose character and attributes drew on the Sumerian and Babylonian gods. Assur’s family and history are modeled on the Sumerian Anu and Enlil and the Babylonian Marduk; his power and attributes mirror Anu’s, Enlil’s, and Marduk’s, as do details of his family: Assur’s wife is Ninlil (Enlil’s wife) and his son is Nabu (Marduk’s son). Assur had no actual history of his own, such as those created for Sumerian and Babylonian gods, but borrowed from these other figures to create a supreme deity whose worship, at its height, was almost monotheistic. Scholar Jeremy Black notes:
In spite of (or possibly because of) the tendencies to transfer to him the attributes and mythology of other gods, Assur remains an indistinct deity with no clear character or tradition (or iconography) of his own.
Assur had power over the kingship of Assyria, but in this, he was no different from Marduk of Babylon. The king of Assyria was his chief priest, and all those who tended his temple in the city of Ashur and elsewhere were lesser priests. Assyrian kings frequently chose his name as an element in their own to honor him: Ashurbanipal, Ashurnasirpal I, Ashurnasirpal II, etc.
Worship of Assur consisted, as with other Mesopotamian deities, of priests tending the statue of the god in the temple and taking care of the duties of the complex surrounding it. Although people may have engaged in private rituals honoring the god or asking for assistance, there were no temple services as one would recognize them in the modern day.
The iconography of Assur is often taken from the Sumerian god An/Anu, a crown or a crown on a throne, but he is as frequently represented as a warrior-god wearing a horned helmet and carrying a bow and quiver of arrows.
He wears a short skirt of feathers and is sometimes depicted within a winged disk (although the association of Assur with the solar disk is contested by a number of modern scholars, among them Jeremy Black). Assur is also sometimes represented standing on a snake-dragon, an image borrowed from the Babylonian Marduk, among other gods.
Assur is first positively attested to in the Ur III period (circa 2112 to circa 2004 BCE) of Mesopotamian history. He is identified as the patron god of the city of Ashur circa 1900 BCE and also gives his name to the Assyrians. From a local, and probably agricultural, god who personified the city, Assur steadily acquired greater and greater attributes.
The scholar E. A. Wallis Budge describes the general progression gods made from spirits, to local deities, to supreme gods:
The oldest of such spirits was the “house spirit” or household-god. When men formed themselves into village communities, the idea of the “spirit of the village” was evolved and later came the “god of the town or city” and the “god of the country”.
Each of the elements, earth, air, fire, and water had its spirit or “god”, the earthquake, lightning, thunder, rain, storm, desert whirlwind, each likewise its spirit or “god”, and of course each plant, tree, and animal.
As time went on, men began to think that certain spirits were more powerful than others and these they selected for special reverence or worship.
Such was the case with Assur in that he is originally referenced as the god of only the locale surrounding the city, but came to personify and represent the entire nation of Assyria. His city’s history mirrored his rise to fame as Ashur began as a small trading center built on the site of an earlier community founded by Sargon of Akkad (the Great, reign 2334-2279 BCE) but flourished through trade with Anatolia and with other regions of Mesopotamia to become the capital of Assyria by the time of the reign of the Assyrian king Shamashi Adad I (1813-1791 BCE).
Shamashi Adad I drove the Amorites from the region in Assur’s name and secured his boundaries, but he was defeated by the Amorite king Hammurabi of Babylon (reign 1792-1750 BCE), who then controlled the region. Worship of Assur at this time was restricted to the city and the Assyrian lands surrounding it, while Marduk of Babylon was worshiped as the supreme god and the Babylonian work Enuma Elish was considered the authoritative piece on creation and the birth of the gods and humanity.
⇒ Assur: The Supreme God of the Ancient Assyrians
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