The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria

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 of Ashurnasirbal.[263]