Kassite deities

Overview

Around two dozen of names Kassite deities have been identified in texts written in the Kassite language, a language isolate only known from references in Mesopotamian lexical texts and from personal names. Detailed study is not possible due to lack of any sources preserving its grammar and syntax.

Much of the evidence of Kassite culture pertains to the Kassite dynasty of Babylon. Those kings adopted both the languages (Sumerian and Akkadian) and religion of the Babylonians, and were actively involved in maintaining temples of Mesopotamian deities, for example Eanna in Uruk. For this reason, Nathanael Shelley notes it would be more accurate to refer to it as a dynasty whose members had Kassite names, rather than a strictly Kassite dynasty. Starting with Kadašman-Enlil I, some of them started to include the names of Mesopotamian gods in their names, though only after the invasion of Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta I examples include deities other than Enlil, such as Marduk, Adad or Zababa. They also attributed their royal legitimacy from Mesopotamian Enlil, rather than from a Kassite deity. There is no evidence that the Kassite dynasty built any temples of Kassite gods in Babylonia, with the exception of one dedicated to the dynastic tutelary deities Šuqamuna and Šumaliya in Babylon. Despite their role, these two deities do not appear in the names of any of its members.

The archives from Nuzi in northeastern Mesopotamia are considered to be a valuable resource in the study of Kassite onomastics, even though only two percent of the city's inhabitants bore Kassite names, and there is no indication that they had any larger impact on the culture of its other inhabitants.

The ordinary Kassites living in Babylonia came to be gradually assimilated, and by the first millennium BCE only around fifteen percent of them bore Kassite names. Some of the names invoked Mesopotamian, rather than Kassite, deities: Adad, Enlil, Ištar of Agade, Ištaran (^dKA.DI), Laguda, Marduk and Urash. Babylonian and Assyrian rulers most likely tolerated the worship of Kassite deities, and some of them are still attested in sources from Mesopotamia from the first millennium BCE. It is possible that their role was limited to domestic religion, where they may have played the role of a marker of distinct Kassite identity. However, they are entirely absent from non-royal personal votive inscriptions.

Most Kassite deities are only attested in personal names. It is often difficult to tell which elements of them should be interpreted as names of deities, and which are actually linguistically Kassite (rather than just not recognizably Babylonian). Furthermore, some of the words identified as names of individual deities might also be epithets. While it has been argued in the past that all the names of early Kassite rulers were theophoric, this theory is now regarded as implausible. An example of a most likely non-theophoric name is that of Kurigalzu, which means "shepherd of the Kassites." The name Karaindaš is also assumed to not be theophoric.

With the exception of Šuqamuna and Šumaliya, names of Kassite deities were always written without the dingir sign, so-called "divine determinative," which was used to designate names gods in Mesopotamian texts. Sporadic exceptions from this rule involving the names of Maruttaš and Kamulla are known, and in a single instance Buriaš is preceded by the dingir sign in a god list: ^dbur-ia-aš, explained as ^dIŠKUR kaš-šu-u₂, "the Kassite weather god." Occasional references in literature to a singular instance of Saḫ written with a dingir in a personal name, Kadašman-Saḫ, are the result of an erroneous restoration. With the exception of Ḫarbe, Šuqamuna and Šumaliya, no Kassite deities have known iconography.

Lexical lists at times attest equivalencies between Mesopotamian and Kassite deities. Most of those texts likely postdate the Kassite period. It is possible that in some cases Kassite deities mentioned in them were assimilated into Mesopotamian ones, and lost their uniquely Kassite traits.

A few kings from later periods had Kassite theoporic names. The founder of the Second Sealand dynasty bore the name Simbar-Šiḫu (or Simbar-Šipak), invoking the Kassite deity Ši-ḪU, though inscriptions pertaining to his reign only mention his involvement in the worship of Enlil and Shamash, and it is possible that he saw himself as a successor of the First Sealand dynasty, rather than the Kassite one, as chronicles call him a "soldier of the dynasty of Damiq-ilīšu". The last king of the so-called Bazi dynasty, which might have had Kassite origin, bore a theophoric name invoking Šuqamuna, Širikti-Šuqamuna. He reigned for only three months in 985 BCE, no inscriptions attributed to him survive, and it is assumed he was a brother of the previous king, Ninurta-kudurri-usur I.

Disproved theories

In nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship, attempts were made to prove that some of the Kassite deities, namely Buriaš, Maruttaš and Šuriaš (argued to be cognates of Greek Boreas and Vedic Maruts and Surya, respectively), were derivatives of Indo-European deities. Such theories, formulated for example by Georges Dumézil, were labeled as far-fetched as early as in 1954. As noted by John A. Brinkman, the similarities between names "even if accepted, need not to imply more than temporary and perhaps mediate contact between the various groups or their cultural forebears." Furthermore, possible Kassite etymologies have been proposed for the names Buriaš and Šuriaš, while proposed Vedic connections of Maruttaš are no longer accepted in modern scholarship.