ASHUR was the national god of Assyria; his name is that of the city-state of Ashur (or Assur). The characteristics of this god are very different from those of the other divinities of the Sumerian-Akkadian pantheon. There is some speculation that Ashur was formerly recorded in a list of divine names of the middle of the third millennium BCE (Mander, 1986, p. 69). However, in the earliest confirmed documents (twentieth to nineteenth centuries BCE), it is the god who appears as the real lord of his city, whereas the Assyrian sovereign was nothing more than Ashur's chief priest and manager of the city on his behalf. The god Ashur personifies the homonymous city (similar conditions are documented in High Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, and the Diyala region, but are neither so frequent nor so relevant) as a possible expression of the holiness of the place near present-day Shirqat, where an imposing...