Ashur

The rock rises from the west bank of the Tigris like a knuckle, and the river has been working at it for longer than there were people to watch. The ground on either side is soft. This spur of stone is not, and the men who put a city on top of it appear to have decided very early that the hardness was holy.

They called the place Assur. They called their god Assur too, using the same signs, and nobody in four thousand years has produced a convincing explanation of what the word means. In the merchant archives from Anatolia the scribes sometimes attach the sign for a god to it and sometimes the sign for a place, and these were not careless scribes. The confusion looks less like a mistake than an accurate report of what people thought they were dealing with.

That is the first strange thing about him, and there are several. Every major god of Mesopotamia arrives with relatives. Enlil has a wife, sons, a temple city, a stack of titles worn smooth by repetition. Ashur has none of it. No parents in the early record, no wife anyone could name, no children, no fixed epithets, no weather or grain or underworld to preside over. Early Assyrian kings address him simply as beli, my lord. In the personal names of Old Assyrian traders, “the god” with no further specification means him, because in that city there was no ambiguity about which god was meant. W. G. Lambert, who assembled the evidence in 1983, concluded that Ashur was the deified hill itself, a holiness of place that the inhabitants later worked up into a person. Northern Mesopotamia offers the pattern: the Jebel Hamrin, the Habur, the Tigris all turn up inside personal names as gods, with no separate deity standing behind the landscape. The mountain is not the mountain’s god. The mountain is the god.

At Kanesh, a thousand kilometres away in central Anatolia, the Assyrian merchant colony kept a sanctuary with his weapons in it. A dagger stood there, and it received libations, and men swore by it and heard verdicts in front of it. In an ordeal the accused had to draw the blade from its sheath, cold and slightly greasy from the offerings, and a guilty hand was expected to find it fixed. Traders wrote to each other reminding one another to go home to the city and pay their respects.

His kingship was not a metaphor. A seal used in the Old Assyrian period opens with the line “Ashur is king, Silulu is the governor of Assur,” and for generations Assyrian rulers declined the title of king altogether, calling themselves governor or city ruler and reserving the crown for the god. The coronation took place inside his temple, where his priest went before the man about to be invested and shouted that Ashur was king, Ashur was king. The hymn sung there told the new ruler to be at ease in his priesthood and then handed him a job: expand your land with your straight sceptre. Ashurbanipal was still being crowned to that formula six hundred years later.

The borrowing began with Shamshi-Adad, who took the city in 1808 BCE and left an inscription calling Ashur’s temple a temple of Enlil. From the thirteenth century the Assyrians dressed their god in Enlil’s clothes in earnest. He became lord of the lands, king of the gods, the Assyrian Enlil. Enlil’s wife Ninlil became his wife under the Assyrian name Mullissu. Enlil’s sons Ninurta and Zababa became, on occasion, his sons. His house was renamed after Ekur at Nippur, and Shalmaneser claimed to have carried the gods of Ekur into it. All of it was borrowed. The one relative who seems genuinely his own is the goddess Šerua, and even there the Assyrians could not agree: Tukulti-Ninurta called her his daughter, Tiglath-pileser III called her his wife, and one Neo-Assyrian text has to instruct its readers to stop calling her a daughter and call her a wife instead.

Every province of the empire sent an annual contribution of food for his daily meal. The whole country fed him, and since the country carried his name as well, the arrangement said something very plain about who owned it.

Under Sargon II the scribes began writing his name as AN.ŠÁR, which pulled him level with Anshar, the ancestor of the gods in the Babylonian creation epic. Sennacherib went further. After he flattened Babylon in 689 BCE he built a new akitu house at Assur and put Ashur at the centre of the festival that had belonged to Marduk. His scholars produced an Assyrian recension of the Enuma Elish with Ashur standing where Marduk had stood, so that it was Ashur who cut the sea into a sky. Alongside it ran the strange text modern editors call the Marduk Ordeal, in which Marduk is arrested for offences against Ashur, imprisoned, tried and sent to the river, the red of his garments reread as blood while Nabu comes looking for his father. The rewriting left an obvious seam. The epic now contains two Anshars, an ancestor and a great-grandson, both kings of the gods. Lambert put that down to clumsiness. Eckart Frahm reads it as deliberate, a way of giving Ashur seniority and supremacy in the same breath.

For a god who began with no origin at all he acquired three of them inside a century. The Assyrian epic gave him parents, Lahmu and Lahamu. Sennacherib’s inscriptions claim he made himself. The Marduk Ordeal says he came into being out of nothing.

What he grants is empire, and nothing smaller. Kings attributed their campaigns to his command and submitted written accounts of them to him afterwards. Assyrian ideology aligned the territory he controlled with cosmic order and everything beyond it with disorder, which made expansion a religious duty, though Alexander Edmonds has recently pointed out that this centre-and-periphery language is late and reads more like justification than motive. What he does not do is anything personal. He was never asked a question by extispicy in the Neo-Assyrian period and never turns up in the incantations recited over sick people.

The limits follow from the same source as the power. He had no cult centre anywhere Assyrians had not established one. Babylonia, ruled from Assyria for a century and a half, built him not a single shrine, and Grant Frame’s explanation is that nobody there rejected him so much as failed to find him interesting: a national god with almost no character of his own has little to offer a foreigner. When the Medes took Assur in 614 BCE the temple came down, and someone went into the courtyard, broke the nose and mouth off the stone mountain god with his goats and his water goddesses, and dropped him down a well with the rest of the rubble. Douglas Frayne thinks that relief was never Ashur at all but the mountain Ebiḫ, which would be a fitting last confusion for him.

The name outlasted the empire anyway. A small sanctuary to Anshar was operating in Neo-Babylonian Uruk among a community of Assyrians. Cyrus claimed to have sent the gods of Assur home. By the Seleucid period Assor is turning up inside Aramaic personal names, one of them Ahhiy-Assor, my brother is Ashur, which is an oddly intimate thing to call a deity who spent two millennia being addressed as the king. Under the Parthians a row of vaulted halls went up over his ruined temple, and worshippers scratched divine names into the plaster of the third one. Ashur and Šerua appear more often than anyone else.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was the god Ashur?

Ashur was the national god of Assyria and the god of the city of Assur, which carried the same name. He was regarded as the true king of Assyria, with the human ruler acting as his governor and chief priest. Unusually for a Mesopotamian deity, he had no domain in nature, no original family and no mythology of his own.

Why does Ashur have no myths of his own?

The leading explanation, argued by the Assyriologist W. G. Lambert in 1983, is that Ashur began as the deified hill on which the city of Assur was built rather than as a character. Northern Mesopotamia has a wider pattern of mountains and rivers treated as gods in their own right, with no separate deity behind them. Assyrian theologians spent centuries trying to give him a personality, first by modelling him on Enlil and later by replacing Marduk with him.

Was Ashur the same god as Enlil?

No, but the Assyrians deliberately made him look like Enlil from about the thirteenth century BCE onward. Ashur took Enlil’s titles, his wife Ninlil under the Assyrian name Mullissu, and occasionally his sons Ninurta and Zababa, and Ashur’s temple was renamed after Enlil’s Ekur at Nippur. The two were still treated as separate gods in texts such as the Tukulti-Ninurta Epic.

What did Sennacherib do to the cult of Ashur?

After destroying Babylon in 689 BCE, Sennacherib built a new akitu house at Assur and moved the New Year festival that had belonged to Marduk onto Ashur. His scholars produced an Assyrian version of the Enuma Elish in which Ashur, written as Anshar, takes Marduk’s role as creator, and a related text known as the Marduk Ordeal puts Marduk on trial for crimes against Ashur.

What did Ashur look like?

No agreed image of Ashur survives. The winged disc found throughout Neo-Assyrian art is often identified as him, but other scholars read it as Shamash or as something else entirely, and the wild goat has been proposed as his sacred animal. The one serious candidate for a portrait is a gypsum relief recovered from a well in his temple courtyard at Assur, showing a mountain god with cones growing from his sides and two goats feeding on them, its face deliberately mutilated.

Related Entries

Enlil, Marduk, Ninurta, Ishtar, Anu (Mesopotamian), Nabu, Tiamat, Apsu, Kingu, Shamash, Nergal, Lamassu, Anunnaki