Inshushinak

Inshushinak (also Šušinak, Šušun; Linear Elamite: 90px Insušinak, Cuneiform: dInšušinak) was the tutelary god of the city of Susa in Elam. His name has a Sumerian etymology, and can be translated as "lord of Susa". He was associated with kingship, and as a result appears in the names and epithets of multiple Elamite rulers. In Susa he was the main god of the local pantheon, though his status in other parts of Elam might have been different. He was also connected with justice and the underworld. His iconography is uncertain, though it is possible snakes were his symbolic animals. Two Mesopotamian deities incorporated into Elamite tradition, Lagamal and Ishmekarab, were regarded as his assistants. He was chiefly worshiped in Susa, where multiple temples dedicated to him existed. Attestations from other Elamite cities are less common. He is also attested in Mesopotamian sources, where he could be recognized as an underworld deity or as an equivalent of Ninurta. He plays a role in the so-called Susa Funerary Texts, which despite being found in Susa were written in Akkadian and might contain instructions for the dead arriving in the underworld.

==Name== Inshushinak's name can be translated as "lord of Susa". It is a loanword which originated in Sumerian, with apheresis, otherwise rarely attested in this language, resulting in the shift from dnin-šušinak to Inshushinak. As suggested by Frans Wiggermann, Inshushinak's name might have originally developed in the Uruk period, when according to him Mesopotamians established a colony in Susa. He proposes that alongside Ninazu, Ningishzida, Ishtaran and Tishpak he can be considered one of the members of a category of deities he refers to as the "Transtigridian snake gods", who likely developed on the border between the cultural spheres of Mesopotamia and Elam.