MUSEUM OF THE FALLEN
Dominance is not eternal.
The Wall/ Fallen Gods/ Ashur
Limestone relief of the god Ashur as an archer within a winged disc, with the worshipping hands of Ashurnasirpal II at right, Neo-Assyrian, 865–850 BCE, British Museum

Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Fallen Gods

Ashur

2000 BCE 600 BCE

The god who was Assyria itself, who fell silent the very moment his empire was burned to the ground.

Born
2000 BCE
Died
600 BCE
Lived
1,400 years
Dead for
2,626 yrs
Cause of death
Conquest
Replaced by
Babylonian and later Persian religion, then Christianity and Islam
The Obituary

Ashur was the national god of Assyria, originally the deified city of Assur and head of the Assyrian pantheon. His identity was bound to the state: Assyrian kings campaigned ‘at the command of Ashur’, carrying his standard and crediting him with their conquests. Because the god was the empire, his cult could not outlive it. When the city of Assur fell in 614 BCE and Nineveh in 612 BCE to the Medes and Babylonians, the state and its god collapsed together. Only the faintest worship lingered afterward before vanishing entirely.

Worth remembering

  • Ashur began not as a person but as the deified city of Assur itself, and his power rose and fell exactly with the Assyrian state.
  • Assyrian kings waged war 'at the command of Ashur', carrying his standard into battle and crediting him with every conquest.

Sources

  1. Ashur was the national god of the Assyrians, originally the deified city of Assur, head of the Assyrian pantheon. Wikipedia
  2. The fall of the Assyrian Empire (Assur sacked 614 BCE, Nineveh 612 BCE) effectively ended Ashur's role as a state god. World History Encyclopedia

A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.

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