High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A ur is the head of the Assyrian pantheon. His origins are unknown but he is one of the Mesopotamian city gods, namely of the city Assur (pronounced Ashur), once the capital of the Old Assyrian kingdom. It might therefore be that he was a personification of the city itself. From about 1300 BC priests attempted to replace Marduk with Ashur in Enuma Elish. From the reign of Sargon II he was identified with Anshar[citation needed] (An- àr) the father of An or Anu, probably because the similarities of the names. In this version of the Enuma Elish Marduk does not appear and instead Ashur slays Tiamat as Anshar. Some scholars have claimed that Ashur was represented as the solar disc that appears frequently in Assyrian iconography. However evidence points out that it is in fact the sun god Shamash. Many Assyrian kings had names that included the name Ashur, including, above all, Ashurnasirpal, Esarhaddon (Ashur-aha-iddina), and Ashurbanipal. Epithets include bêlu rabû "great lord", ab ilâni "father of gods", adû rabû "great mountain", and il a urî "god of Ashur".