Uṣur-amāssu
mesopotamian deity
Uṣur-amāssu (also spelled Uṣur-awāssu or Uṣur-amāssa) was a Mesopotamian deity. While originally viewed as male, she later came to be regarded as a goddess. Regardless of gender, Uṣur-amāssu was considered as a child of Adad and Shala and like other members of their entourage was considered a deity of justice. The earliest attestations of veneration of Uṣur-amāssu are theophoric names from cities such as Kish, but the female version of this deity is best attested in sources from Uruk from the Neo-Babylonian period. She belonged to the pentad of goddesses who stood on top of the local pantheon, which also included Ishtar, Nanaya, Bēltu-ša-Rēš and Urkayītu. She is still attested in texts from the Seleucid period, and continued to be celebrated during an akitu festival.
Name and gender
Uṣur-amāssu's name was derived from an ordinary masculine given name known from Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian sources, Uṣur-awāssu, whose historically notable bearers include a king of Eshnunna and an official from Mari. It can be translated as "heed his word." It was already understood as the name of a minor god in the so-called Genouillac god list, also dated to the Old Babylonian period. According to Paul-Alain Beaulieu it can be assumed that Uṣur-amāssu was already a member of a court of another deity at the time, though the god list An = Anum is presently the oldest source to explicitly identify him as a son and courtier of another deity, namely Adad.
At some point, Uṣur-amāssu started to be viewed as a goddess instead.
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This entry incorporates text from “Uṣur-amāssu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.