This deity in Assyria was Asshur.  He is recognized by most authorities as Asshur, a son of Shem and grandson of Noah, who was probably the hero and leader of one of the early migrations, and, as founder of the Assyrian Empire, gave it its name,—­his own being magnified and deified by his warlike descendants.  Assyria was the oldest of the great empires, occupying Mesopotamia,—­the vast plain watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,—­with adjacent countries to the north, west, and east.  Its seat was in the northern portion of this region, while that of Babylonia or Chaldaea, its rival, was in the southern part; and although after many wars freed from the subjection of Assyria, the institutions of Babylonia, and especially its religion, were very much the same as those of the elder empire.  In Babylonia the chief god was called El, or Il.  In Babylon, although Bab-el, their tutelary god, was at the head of the pantheon, his form was not represented, nor had he any special temple for his worship.  The Assyrian Asshur placed kings upon their thrones, protected their armies, and directed their expeditions.  In speaking of him it was “Asshur, my Lord.”  He was also called “King of kings,” reigning supreme over the gods; and sometimes he was called the “Father of the gods.”  His position in the celestial hierarchy corresponds with the Zeus of the Greeks, and with the Jupiter of the Romans.  He was represented as a man with a horned cap, carrying a bow and issuing from a winged circle, which circle was the emblem of ubiquity and eternity.  This emblem was also the accompaniment of Assyrian royalty.

These Assyrian and Babylonian deities had a direct influence on the Jews in later centuries, because traders on the Tigris pushed their adventurous expeditions from the head of the Persian Gulf, either around the great peninsula of Arabia, or by land across the deserts, and settled in Canaan, calling themselves Phoenicians; and it was from the descendants of these enterprising but morally debased people that the children of Israel, returning from Egypt, received the most pertinacious influences of idolatrous corruption.  In Phoenicia the chief deity was also called Bel, or Baal, meaning “Lord,” the epithet of the one divine being who rules the world, or the Lord of heaven.  The deity of the Egyptian pantheon, with whom Baal most nearly corresponds, was Ammon, addressed as the supreme God.

Ranking after El in Babylon, Asshur in Assyria, and Baal in Phoenicia,—­all shadows of the same supreme God,—­we notice among these Mesopotamians a triad of the great gods, called Anu, Bel, and Hea.  Anu, the primordial chaos; Hea, life and intelligence animating matter; and Bel, the organizing and creative spirit,—­or, as Rawlinson thinks, “the original gods of the earth, the heavens, and the waters, corresponding in the main with the classical Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune, who divided between them the dominion over the visible creation.”  The god Bel, in the pantheon of the Babylonians and Assyrians, is the God of gods, and Father of gods, who made the earth and heaven.  His title expresses dominion.