Old Memes To Wish For A Good, Probably Not As Problematic As Last-year Year

It’s bog day

help me

ominous

Very late response, but I thank you.

Didn’t really understand him until reading this, cleared a few things up.

Hello, I am a person interested in folklore. I wanted to ask if you who Assur or Ashur is and what legends he has and if it isn’t too much of an issue, give some good sources on Mesopotamian myth and folklore as I can’t tell what’s real and what’s bullshit.

Probably the best overviews of Ashur’s character are still Wilfred G. Lambert’s short 1983 article The God Aššur and Grant Frame’s My Neighbour's God: Aššur in Babylonia and Marduk in Assyria.  If you can read German, Wiebke Meinhold’s Die Familie des Gottes Aššur is a must read too. The wikipedia article is actually quite in depth too now, a pleasant surprise - it used to be a nightmare.

Long story short, it is generally agreed Ashur started as a divine representation of the namesake city (or perhaps the hill on which it was built) and with time could become essentially whatever its political interests required; so, for instance, when his cult center turned from a city-state into the capital of an empire interested in military expansion, he gained warlike traits. His early character was fairly indistinct, and he had no signature epithets which would point at a specific sphere of influence, though.

While it’s par the course for ancient Mesopotamia to have gods essentially represent the political interests of their cult centers, this is particularly extreme in Ashur’s case because for a solid chunk of his history it’s hard to even speak of him as a personified deity. For example, the Old Assyrian texts from the trading colony Kanesh essentially make it difficult to tell when the god is meant and when the city. Regarding specific cities as numinous, basically divine, locations are not without parallel either, but rarely to such a degree. It’s possible he was initially depicted in art in non-anthropomorphic form, see here for some discussion. However, anthropomorphic depictions might be present on seals too, see here.

As a result of Ashur’s lack of personhood in early sources, he had very few truly distinct associations with other deities to speak of. Basically the only exception is the minor goddess Sherua, but it was already a matter of heated debate in antiquity how they are related to each other. There are also virtually no references to him having parents; no genealogical speculation centered on him ever developed before the emergence of a Neo-Assyrian trend of referring to him as self created (bānû ramānīšu).

The earliest evidence for a gradual shift towards making Ashur into a more standard deity, as opposed to a semi-personified deified city, are probably theophoric names. Additionally, rulers of the city addressed him as a source of their authority and presented themselves essentially as governors acting on his behalf, similarly to what their counterparts in Eshnunna and Der did with Tishpak and Ishtaran, respectively.

Further important developments occurred in the Middle Assyrian period, some 4-5 centuries later. The idea at this time was to essentially pattern Ashur’s character on Enlil. This is attested to various degrees for the heads of many pantheons on the periphery of Mesopotamia, you can read more about other similar cases here. However, in Ashur’s case this process was nowhere near as straightforward as sometimes claimed, as recently stressed by Spencer J. Allen in Aššur and Enlil in Neo-Assyrian Documents. For the most part, the two were effectively separate, even though Ashur did borrow Enlil’s titles, traits and even some of his relatives and servants.

Ashur generally doesn’t appear in myths. The only exception I can think of is that during the reign of Sennacherib there was an attempt to develop a rewrite of the Enuma Elish with Ashur taking Marduk’s role but it’s… well, an incomplete rewrite and nothing more. A pretty incoherent one at that according to Lambert.  Regarding your other question: I have a recommended reading doc linked in my pinned post, you can find it here.

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