Tishpak (Tišpak) was a Mesopotamian god associated with the ancient city Eshnunna and its sphere of influence, located in the Diyala area of Iraq. He was primarily a war deity, but he was also associated with snakes, including the mythical mushussu and bashmu, and with kingship. Tishpak was of neither Sumerian nor Akkadian origin and displaced Eshnunna's original tutelary god, Ninazu. Their iconography and character were similar, though they were not formally regarded as identical in most Mesopotamian sources. Origin It is commonly assumed that initially the tutelary deity of Eshnunna was Ninazu, worshiped in the temple Esikil. From the Sargonic period onward, Tishpak competed with Ninazu in that location, and the latter finally ceased to be mentioned in documents from it after Hammurabi's conquest. While similar in character, Ninazu and Tishpak were not fully conflated, and unlike Inanna and Ishtar or Enki and Ea were kept apart in god lists. It is generally agreed by scholars that Tishpak had neither Sumerian nor Akkadian origin. Fritz Hommel suggested in 1904 that he was analogous to the Hurrian weather god Teshub. This theory was also supported by Thorkild Jacobsen at first, though he later abandoned it and proposed that Tishpak's name had Akkadian origin, which is now regarded as implausible. Jacobsen’s second theory relied on the assumption that Tishpak's name, which he argued meant "downpour," would have similar meaning to an etymology he proposed for the name of Ninazu, "The Water-Pouring Lord," according to him an indication he was the god of spring rains. However, it is now agreed that Ninazu's name means "Lord Healer," and that he was considered a god of the underworld and vegetation and sometimes a divine warrior, not a weather deity. Elam has also been proposed as Tishpak's point of origin. Modern authors who support this view include Marten Stol, who considers it a possibility that Tishpak's name has Elamite origin, Manfred Krebernik, who also classifies the name of his son Nanshak as Elamite, and Irene Sibbing-Plantholt. In 1965 Dietz-Otto Edzard combined both theories, arguing that Tishpak was an Elamite form of Teshub. Frans Wiggermann proposes that Tishpak was one of the deities he describes as "transtigridian snake gods," a group which he assumes developed on the boundary between Sumero-Akkadian and Elamite culture to which he also assigns gods such as Ninazu, Ningishzida, Ishtaran (the tutelary god of Der) and the Elamite Inshushinak (the tutelary god