A Companion to Assyria

by Eckart Frahm

  The news of the destruction of the Assur temple and the city of Ashur must have been a crushing blow to the last Assyrian king, his confidants, and also the Assyrian population, while spurring on the opponents of the Assyrian empire. The god Assur, people concluded, had apparently abandoned his charges and surrendered them to destruction. In the period following the unexpected withdrawal of the Medes, a few people seem to have continued to lead a humble life in the largely destroyed city (Kühne 2011: 108–10). During this time, rubble was apparently removed and a small sanctuary constructed in the area of the destroyed Assur temple, thus allowing a provisional continuation of the cult (Andrae and Haller 1955: 81; Hauser 2011: 120–7). Perhaps in an attempt to evoke the enormous age of the sanctuary and its association with the numerous “vice‐regents of Assur,” a great number of building inscriptions from all periods of Assyrian history were encased in the modest new building (Miglus 1992).

  With the fall of Nineveh, the city Ashur seems to have almost completely ceased to exist for a while. But some of the residents of Ashur who had survived the catastrophic collapse of the Neo‐Assyrian empire at the end of the 6th century BCE, among them probably also temple affiliates and priests, found refuge in the southern Mesopotamian city Uruk, which had often held loyalty to the Assyrians instead of siding with Babylon (Beaulieu 1997). Documents discovered in Uruk indicate that the city housed an Assyrian religious community in the period from ca. 605 to 520 BCE (Beaulieu 2003: 331–3, 2010: 254–5). In the new Assur temple constructed there, some of the old knowledge about the cult of the god was apparently carefully preserved.

  Yet in Ashur, the cult of the city god did not come to a complete end either. When the city awakened again to new life under the Parthians in the first century BCE and became the seat of a governor who maintained a magnificent palace here, a new temple, inspired by Hellenistic and Parthian models, arose on the ruins of the old Assur sanctuary (Andrae and Lenzen 1933; Hauser 2011). This temple was dedicated neither to Zeus nor to a Persian god, but rather to “Assor.” The city flourished until the third century CE. Discoveries originating from this time breathe the spirit of the Hellenized East. Cuneiform was forgotten, the Assyrian language replaced by Aramaic and Greek. But Aramaic dedicatory inscriptions (Beyer 1998), recorded on the same “days of the city god” (Weidner 1941–44) that were considered holy to Assur already well over 1000 years earlier, are evidence that, perhaps thanks to mediation through the Assyrian community in Uruk, the bond between Assur, his city, and his people had survived the destruction of the temple, the downfall of the Assyrian empire, and the demise of an entire era.

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  Further Reading

  No comprehensive assessment of Assyrian religion from the beginnings of Assyrian history to the downfall of the Assyrian empire is currently available, but Lambert 1983 provides a valuable, albeit short discussion of the changing images of the god Assur throughout this period. The only monographic treatment of Old Assyrian religion, Hirsch 1961, remains useful but is now very dated. Holloway 2002 provides the most comprehensive treatment of the relationship between religion and politics in the Neo‐Assyrian era. Menzel 1981 studies Assyrian temples and Maul 2000 the most important festival cycle in Ashur during Neo‐Assyrian times.

  Notes

  1 This chapter was translated from the German by Shana Zaia, with revisions by the editor of this book.

  2 It should be noted, however, that Jürgen Bär has collected arguments for an early structure possibly dedicated to Assur that could have stood at the site of the later Assur temple in the Early Dynastic period (Bär 2010).

  3 Note that the name of Nippur’s principal god, Enlil, is included in the writing of his city (EN.LÍLki).

  4 We do, however, have accounts that Assur took to traveling. From inscriptions of Esarhaddon is it known that Assur, Ištar of Arbela, and other gods followed an “invitation” of the king on the occasion of the dedication of the new armory (ekal māšarti) of Nineveh (Borger 1956: 63, Episode 23, cf.
also Borger 1996: 255, § 17: Assur and Mullissu at the dedication of the New Year’s House of Ištar in Nineveh).

  5 One of the oldest examples of this is provided by the seal of the ruler Ṣilulu (Grayson 1987: A.0.27).

  6 Ass. 21506e, 16–17 reads: i[l]‐pi‐nu SIG4/kab‐tu‐te ṣe‐e‐ru‐te DUMU.MEŠ LUGAL (collated).

  7 É‐ḫur‐sag‐gal‐kur‐kur‐ra, the Sumerian ceremonial name for the cella of Assur.

  8 See KAR 142, obv. 1.

  CHAPTER 19

  Assyrian Literature

  Alasdair Livingstone

  This chapter provides a brief introduction to literary texts written in the Assyrian language or covering topics that are specifically Assyrian, with a focus on the Neo‐Assyrian period. The rich Babylonian literature that was studied in Assyria is not covered here.

  The bulk of Assyrian literature that has come down to us is from the Neo‐Assyrian period, substantially but not exclusively from the Assurbanipal libraries, but there is a limited amount of material from earlier periods that also needs to be discussed. As will be seen, despite much literature that is Assyrian in its content and cultural orientation, there is a general indebtedness to Babylonian literature, and key aspects of this indebtedness can already be seen in the earliest periods. A rich source for both Assyrian and Babylonian literature is Foster (2005), which supplies English translations as well as a brief introduction to each text and separate annotations. The principal source for Neo‐Assyrian literature is Livingstone (1989) with both editions and translations and a brief introduction and notes. All the texts described below are to be found in one or the other of these two sources.

  Old Assyrian Period

  The most important work of Old Assyrian literature that has come down to us so far is a well preserved and substantial text of sixty‐three lines from Kültepe (Kaniš) that describes the deeds of the Old Akkadian king Sargon. It was once thought to be a parody (Van De Mieroop 2000: 133–59 and Foster 2005: 71–5, “Sargon, Lord of the Lies”) but it has now been shown by Dercksen (2005: 107–29) that this results from misunderstanding of the text. By placing the text in the Old Assyrian cultural and linguistic context in which it belongs, Dercksen also demonstrated the manner in which this text stands at the head of a tradition of Assyrian historical and epical‐historical royal literature that flourished above all in the first millennium BCE. The text is in the first person, with Sargon himself speaking. He owes his strength to the god Adad, swears by Ištar, “Lady of Combat,” and “talks with the gods.” With the strength of Adad he takes possession of “the land” from “East to West.” The text is not lacking in hyperbole. Sargon does battle with seventy cities in one day; his standing army numbers 7000, with an additional 3000 runners, and he has a thousand cupbearers. He recounts how with this entourage he defeated and humiliated a whole sequence of tribal groups in Anatolia. In the final summary paragraph he claims to have touched three cardinal points of the heavens with his hands.