point of the very ancient play of words, which in Assyria
itself attributed the meaning "good god" to the word Ashur.
Jensen was the first to state that Ashur was the god Anshar
of the account of the creation.

The god himself was a deity of light, usually represented under the form
of an armed man, wearing the tiara and having the lower half of his body
concealed by a feathered disk. He was supposed to hover continually
over the world, hurling fiery darts at the enemies of his people, and
protecting his kingly worshippers under the shadow of his wings. Their
wars were his wars, and he was with them in the thick of the attack,
placing himself in the front rank with the soldiery,* so that when he
gained the victory, the bulk of the spoil--precious metals, gleanings
of the battle-field, slaves and productive lands--fell to his share. The
gods of the vanquished enemy, moreover, were, like their princes, forced
to render him homage. In the person of the king he took their statues
prisoners, and shut them up in his sanctuary; sometimes he would engrave
his name upon their figures and send them back to their respective
temples, where the sight of them would remind their worshippers of his
own omnipotence.** The goddess associated with him as his wife had given
her name, Nina, to Nineveh,*** and was, as the companion of the Chaldaean
Bel, styled the divine lady Belit; she was, in fact, a chaste and
warlike Ishtar, who led the armies into battle with a boldness
characteristic of her father.****

* In one of the pictures, for instance, representing the
assault of a town, we see a small figure of the god, hurling
darts against the enemy. The inscriptions also state that
the peoples "are alarmed and quit their cities _before the
arms of Assur, the powerful one_."

** As, for instance, the statues of the gods taken from the
Arabs in the time of Esarhaddon. Tiglath-pileser I. had
carried away twenty-five statues of gods taken from the
peoples of Kurkhi and Kummukh, and had placed them in the
temples of Beltis, Ishtar, Anu, and Ramman; he mentions
other foreign divinities who had been similarly treated.

*** The ideogram of the name of the goddess Nina serves to
write the name of the town Nineveh. The name itself has been
interpreted by Schrader as "station, habitation," in the
Semitic languages, and by Fr. Delitzsch "repose of the god