ign names to the
eight gates of his great palace, does not forget to include Anu in the
list of deities,[257] describing him as the god who blesses his
handiwork.

Dagan.

Coequal in antiquity with the cult of Anu in Assyria is that of Dagan.
Although occurring in Babylonia as early as the days of Hammurabi, and
indeed earlier,[258] it would appear that his worship was imported from
the north into the south.[259] At all events, it is in the north that
the cult of Dagan rises to prominence. The name of the god appears as an
element in the name of Ishme-Dagan (the father of Samsi-Ramman
II.),[260] whose date may be fixed at the close of the nineteenth
century B.C. The form Dagan is interesting as being almost identical
with the name of the chief god of the Philistines, Dagon,[261] who is
mentioned in the Book of Judges. The resemblance can hardly be entirely
accidental. From other sources we know that Dagan was worshipped in
Palestine as early as the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and the form
Dagan, if derived from _Dag_, contains an afformative element which
stamps the word as non-Assyrian. The proposition has much in its favor
which regards Dagan as a god whose worship was introduced into Assyria
at a very early period through the influence of Aramaean hordes, who
continue throughout Assyrian history to skirt the eastern shores of the
Tigris. Once introduced, however, into Assyria, Dagan assumes a
different form from the one that he receives among the Philistines. To
the latter he is the god of agriculture, while in Assyria he rises to
the rank of second in the pantheon, and becomes the associate of Anu.
The latter's dominion being the heavens, Dagan is conceived as the god
of earth. Hence, there results the fusion with the Babylonian Bel, which
has already been noted,[262] and it is due to this fusion that Dagan
disappears almost entirely from the Assyrian pantheon. Ashurnasirbal
invokes Dagan with Anu. Two centuries later, Sargon, whose scribes, as
Jensen has noticed, manifest an 'archaeological' fondness for the
earlier deities, repeats the phrase of Ashurnasirbal, and also calls his
subjects 'troops of Anu and Dagan'; but it is important to observe that
he does not include Dagan among the deities in whose honor he assigns
names to the gates of his palace. We may, therefore, fix upon the ninth
century as the terminus for the Dagan cult in Assyria. Proper names
compounded with Dagan do not occur after the days