2760 x 3941 px | 23,4 x 33,4 cm | 9,2 x 13,1 inches | 300dpi
Data acquisizione:
18 gennaio 2012
Altre informazioni:
Ashur (also, Assur, Aššur; written A-šur, also Aš-šùr) is the head of the Assyrian pantheon. As the deified city Assur (pronounced Ashur), which dates from the 3rd millennium BC and was the capital of the Old Assyrian kingdom. As such, Ashur did not originally have a family, but as the cult came under southern Mesopotamian influence he came to be regarded as the Assyrian equivalent of Enlil, the chief god of Nippur and one of the most important gods of the southern pantheon, and in time Ashur absorbed Enlil's wife Ninlil (as the Assyrian goddess Mullissu) and his sons Ninurta and Zababa - this process began around in the 13th century BC E and continued down to the 8th and 7th centuries.The Assyrians did not require conquered peoples to take up the worship of Ashur; instead, Assyrian imperial propaganda declared that the conquered peoples had been abandoned by their gods. When Assyria conquered Babylon in the Sargonid period (8th-7th centuries BCE), Assyrian scribes began to write the name of Ashur with the cuneiform signs AN.SHAR, literally "whole heaven" in Akkadian, the language of Assyria and Babylonia. The intention seems to have been to put Ashur at the head of the Babylonian pantheon, where Anshar and his counterpart Kishar ("whole earth") preceded even Enlil and Ninlil. Thus in the Sargonid version of the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian national creation myth, Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, does not appear, and instead it is Ashur, as Anshar, who slays Tiamat the chaos-monster and creates the world of humankind.Some scholars have claimed that Ashur was represented as the solar disc that appears frequently in Assyrian iconography, but evidence indicates that this is in fact the sun god Shamash. Many Assyrian kings had names that included the name Ashur, including, above all, Ashurnasirpal, Esarhaddon (Ashur-aha-iddina), and Ashurbanipal. Epithets include bêlu rabû "great lord", ab ilâni "father of gods", šadû rabû "great mountain", and il aš
