Nimrod, the king of Babel (Babylon), in Shinar (Sumer), was, it would appear, a deified monarch who became ultimately identified with the national god of Babylonia.  Professor Pinches has shown[298] that his name is a rendering of that of Merodach.  In Sumerian Merodach was called Amaruduk or Amarudu, and in the Assyro-Babylonian language Marduk.  By a process familiar to philologists the suffix “uk” was dropped and the rendering became Marad.  The Hebrews added “ni” = “ni-marad”, assimilating the name “to a certain extent to the ’niphal forms’ of the Hebrew verbs and making a change”, says Pinches, “in conformity with the genius of the Hebrew language”.

Asshur, who went out of Nimrod’s country to build Nineveh, was a son of Shem—­a Semite, and so far as is known it was after the Semites achieved political supremacy in Akkad that the Assyrian colonies were formed.  Asshur may have been a subject ruler who was deified and became the god of the city of Asshur, which probably gave its name to Assyria.

According to Herodotus, Nineveh was founded by King Ninus and Queen Semiramis.  This lady was reputed to be the daughter of Derceto, the fish goddess, whom Pliny identified with Atargatis.  Semiramis was actually an Assyrian queen of revered memory.  She was deified and took the place of a goddess, apparently Nina, the prototype of Derceto.  This Nina, perhaps a form of Damkina, wife of Ea, was the great mother of the Sumerian city of Nina, and there, and also at Lagash, received offerings of fish.  She was one of the many goddesses of maternity absorbed by Ishtar.  The Greek Ninus is regarded as a male form of her name; like Atargatis, she may have become a bisexual deity, if she was not always accompanied by a shadowy male form.  Nineveh (Ninua) was probably founded or conquered by colonists from Nina or Lagash, and called after the fish goddess.

All the deities of Assyria were imported from Babylonia except, as some hold, Ashur, the national god.[299] The theory that Ashur was identical with the Aryo-Indian Asura and the Persian Ahura is not generally accepted.  One theory is that he was an eponymous hero who became the city god of Asshur, although the early form of his name, Ashir, presents a difficulty in this connection.  Asshur was the first capital of Assyria.  Its city god may have become the national god on that account.

At an early period, perhaps a thousand years before Thothmes III battled with the Mitannians in northern Syria, an early wave of one of the peoples of Aryan speech may have occupied the Assyrian cities.  Mr. Johns points out in this connection that the names of Ushpia, Kikia, and Adasi, who, according to Assyrian records, were early rulers in Asshur, “are neither Semitic nor Sumerian”.  An ancient name of the goddess of Nineveh was Shaushka, which compares with Shaushkash, the consort of Teshup, the Hittite-Mitanni hammer god.  As many of the Mitannian names “are”, according to Mr. Johns, “really Elamitic”, he suggests an ethnic connection between the early conquerors of Assyria and the people of Elam.[300] Were the pre-Semitic Elamites originally speakers of an agglutinative language, like the Sumerians and present-day Basques, who were conquered in prehistoric times by a people of Aryan speech?