Aššur

Summary

Aššur is one name for three things: a city on a high rock above the Tigris in northern Iraq, the god who lives in its temple, and the country its kings ruled. In cuneiform only a small sign before the name tells the three apart: the sign for a land, for a city, or for a god.

Aššur has no myth of his own birth or battles; his story is the story of the city and its kings. His temple Ešarra, "House of the Universe", stood on the highest point of the rock, and from the early second millennium BCE the city's rulers called themselves "vice-regent of Aššur". The king ruled in his name, went to war at his command, and then reported to him what he had done, as Sargon II wrote his long letter to Aššur about his eighth campaign against Urartu. When scholars wanted to give him a place among the great gods, they lent him another god's family: Šamši-Adad I equated him with Enlil, so that his wife became Mullissu, a name of Ninlil, Ninurta became his son, and his temple was named Ekur after Enlil's temple at Nippur.

Then Sennacherib destroyed Babylon in 689 BCE and set out to put Aššur in Marduk's place in myth and in cult. His scholars produced a new version of Enūma eliš that put Aššur's name, written AN.ŠÁR, where Marduk's had been, so that Aššur became the one who fights Tiamat and makes the world from her body, and put Baltil, a name of the city of Aššur, where Babylon had been. Sennacherib built a festival house outside the city, named "House where Tiamat is put to death", and gave it a bronze gate showing Aššur in his chariot, bow in hand, setting out to fight Tiamat, with the gods marching before and behind him, Ninurta among them. His son Esarhaddon restored Marduk, and Aššur returned to his Enlil-like form.

The idea Aššur's history turns on is that the god here is the place itself. Lambert's view is that the rock was a holy spot before it was built on, then became a city, and the spirit of the place became a person with a name and a throne. Having no attributes of his own, he took on whatever his people needed: a god of war when they became warriors, Enlil's family when they needed a lineage, Marduk's battle when they wanted him to be the world's maker. He outlived the kingdom: his city was destroyed in 614 BCE, his priests carried his cult to Uruk, and people at Aššur still bore names built on his into the third century CE, in Aramaic graffiti.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Aššur has a glottal stop, a doubled š and r. Syriac writes it Āthūr with t, and Old Persian Athurā. Aramaic t answers Arabic th, as Hebrew and Akkadian š also do: Arabic thalātha, "three", is Aramaic tlātā and Hebrew šālōš. So the š of Aššur is an old th, and the name is Arabic athar, the Babylonian essay's first reading. In Lisān al-ʿArab the athar is the remains of a thing, such as the remains of a house; the athar of a foot is its print on the ground; and āthār are the remains of the past. Hebrew has a word with the same letters and the same doubled š, ʾaššur, "step". On this reading Aššur is the lasting trace: the spot where a foot was set down and a city grew, which is what Lambert says of the holy rock, and also what the kings wanted from his name, a trace of themselves written in stone.

Linguistic Root

Aššur and athar

Lambert writes that no serious etymology of the name has ever been offered and that its form tells us nothing. What decides between readings is the name's other spellings. The Juthoor correspondence laws make Arabic th into Hebrew š and Aramaic t, and treat Aramaic t as the diagnostic reflex of th in particular. Aššur has š in Hebrew and Akkadian, and t in Syriac and Persian. The letter that is š in the first and t in the second is th. So the root is ʾ-th-r.

Lane gives athar as the remains of a thing, as of a house; a sign or trace of a thing as against the thing itself; the print a foot leaves on the ground; plural āthār, the remains and monuments of past times; and athāra min ʿilm, a remnant of knowledge handed down from earlier generations. Hebrew ʾaššur, with the same letters, means "step", and BDB compares it with Arabic and Ethiopic words for footstep. In both branches the root means the place of a foot and the mark that stays after the one who made it.

Other readings in the essay

After athar the Babylonian essay gives ashira, to rejoice to the point of insolence, with Hebrew ʾāšēr, happy, blessed; then yashara with Hebrew yāšār, straight. BDB also notes a link with the Hebrew sense of straightness and goodness. But Arabic sh does not become t in Aramaic, so it cannot explain Syriac Āthūr, while th does. Delight and blessing remain what the people of Aššur hoped for from their god, not the origin of his name.

The Hindu essay compares Aššur with Sanskrit asura, and the Persian essay with the title ahura, both titles of sovereign, powerful beings. That comparison has its own page at Ahura, and it needs dated forms that account for s and h against š.

Historical Context

The city of Aššur was founded in the early third millennium BCE on a rocky spur that turns the Tigris eastwards; from its top one sees the plain for miles, and it was easy to defend. West of the temple stood the ziggurat, and beneath them the Old Palace, under which kings were buried until the end of the empire, even after the capital moved to Kalhu and then Nineveh. Some 140 stelae of kings and officials were found in the city; they were probably first dedicated to Aššur in his temple, and the older ones moved outside to make room for new ones.

Royal names carry the god's image in each age. Middle Assyrian names such as Aššur-dan, "Aššur is strong", and Aššur-nerari, "Aššur is my ally"; first-millennium names asking him to keep the heir: Aššur-naṣir-apli, "Aššur is the protector of my heir", Aššur-ahhe-iddin, "Aššur gave brothers", that is Esarhaddon, and Aššur-bani-apli, "Aššur is the creator of my heir", that is Ashurbanipal. In Old Assyrian personal names Aššur is referred to as ilum, "the god", and Lambert sees in this a trace of a pantheon headed by El, like the one later known in Syria.

Family and connections

Key Mythic Narratives

Aššur in the Assyrian Enūma eliš

A tablet from Aššur published by Ebeling, KAR 173, preserves a passage of the Assyrian version: Anšar sends his vizier Kakka to Lahmu and Lahamu to invite the forefathers to a feast, so that they may fix a destiny "for Anšar, their champion", where the Babylonian version has "for Marduk". The poem now had two Anšars: old Anšar, son of Lahmu and Lahamu, and Anšar the hero who fought Tiamat. Lambert put this down to poor craft among the Assyrian scribes; Frahm thinks they meant to give Aššur both priority of descent, with the first Anšar, and the power of the hero, with the second. A Sennacherib inscription calls Aššur, written AN.ŠÁR, "the one who created himself".

The bronze gate

In the festival-house inscription Sennacherib says that, at the command of Šamaš and Adad given through divination, he depicted on the gate Aššur going out against Tiamat with his bow, in a chariot driven by Amurru, with the Deluge he had harnessed, and Tiamat "with the creatures inside her". He lists the gods who march in front of Aššur, among them Nusku and "Ninurta of the Wall", and those who march behind him, among them Sîn, Šamaš, Anu, Adad, Ea and Ninurta. He swears by Aššur, "the god who created me", that he himself had the bronze cast.

The Marduk Ordeal

An Assyrian commentary now called the "Marduk Ordeal" reads the Babylonian New Year festival as Marduk's capture and trial. Frahm notes that this commentary ignores the new version of Enūma eliš, so the two works were not one coordinated campaign against Marduk.

Symbolic Reading

The Babylonian essay reads Aššur as "the strong one who leaves his mark", the spirit of the victorious empire. In the evidence that mark is in stone: the stelae dedicated to him, the campaign reports addressed to him, the royal names built on his. Sennacherib's story shows its limits: the poem with Aššur in Marduk's place did not outlive its patron, while the first place, the city on the rock, kept Aššur's worship for centuries after the kingdom fell.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The Roman structural essay sets Aššur beside Mars: both are gods of an organised state and army, for whom war imposes order. They differ in that Mars is Rome's founding father through Romulus, while Aššur is the city itself, not its father. The Babylonian essay sets Aššur beside Marduk by function, and the record puts them in one poem: Aššur took Marduk's place in Enūma eliš and then gave it back. The comparison with the title in Ahura Mazda has its own page at Ahura.