was seen as a goddess of love and war) and their own primary seats of worship (Ninurta was for instance primarily worshipped at Nimrud and Ishtar primarily at Arbela). Quintessentially Babylonian deities such as Enlil, Marduk, and Nabu were worshipped in Assyria just as much as in Babylonia, and several traditionally Babylonian rituals, such as the akitu festival, were borrowed in the north. Ashur's role as the chief deity was flexible and changed with the changing culture and politics of the Assyrians themselves. In the Old Assyrian period, Ashur was mainly regarded as a god of death and revival, related to agriculture. Under the Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empire, Ashur's role was expanded and thoroughly altered. Possibly originating as a reaction to the period of suzerainty under the Mittani kingdom, Middle Assyrian theology presented Ashur as a god of war, who bestowed the Assyrian kings not only with divine legitimacy, something retained from the Old Assyrian period, but also commanded the kings to enlarge Assyria ("the land of Ashur") with Ashur's "just scepter", i.e. expand the Assyrian Empire through military conquest. This militarization of Ashur might also have derived from the Amorite conqueror Shamshi-Adad I equating Ashur with the southern Enlil during his rule over northern Mesopotamia in the 18th and 17th centuries BC. In the Middle Assyrian period, Ashur is attested with the title "king of the gods", a role previous civilizations in both northern and southern Mesopotamia ascribed to Enlil. The development of equating Ashur with Enlil, or at least transferring Enlil's role to Ashur, was paralleled in Babylon, where the previously unimportant local god Marduk was elevated in the reign of Hammurabi (18th century BC) to the head of the pantheon, modelled after Enlil. Assyrian religion was centered in temples, monumental structures that included a central shrine which housed the cult statue of the temple's god, and several subordinate chapels with space for statues of other deities. Temples were typically self-contained communities; they had their own economic resources, chiefly in the form of land holdings, and their own hierarchically organized personnel. In later times, temples became increasingly dependent on royal benefits, in the shape of specific taxes, offerings and donations of booty and tribute. The head of a temple was titled as the "chief administrator" and was responsible to the Assyrian king since the king was regarded to be Ashur's representative in the mortal world. Records from temples