an epithet referring to Nisaba and Aruru in their respective vegetation-related roles. Worship The Mesopotamian grain goddess was already worshiped in the Uruk period. According to the Archaic City List, a settlement named after her existed somewhere in Mesopotamia, though the reading of its full name remains unknown. She is one of the oldest attested city goddesses, with Nisaba, Nanshe, Inanna of Uruk and Inanna of Zabalam being the only other ones present in texts of comparable age. In an Early Dynastic zame hymn, her city is instead AB×ŠUŠ (U2), but the reading of this name also remains unknown. She is also present in the Fara and Abu Salabikh god lists. She was worshiped in Lagash, Adab, Umma, Ur, Nippur and Shuruppak. Joan Goodnick Westenholz suggested that in Nippur she was worshiped in the temple of Kusu, which according to Andrew R. George likely bore the name Esaĝĝamaḫ, "house of the exalted purifier." Alfonso Archi notes that she also occurs in a bilingual lexical list from Ebla, which gives the equation dAšnan = A-za-na-an, but she is absent from the administrative texts from this city. Theophoric names invoking her are known from various sources from the third millennium BCE. For example, multiple individuals named Amar-Ashnan ("young bull of Ashnan") appear in texts from Adab from the Early Dynastic and Sargonic periods. The same name, as well as other ones, such as Ashnan-amamu ("Ashnan is my mother"), are also attested in texts from Lagash. A formula from the reign of Ishme-Dagan refers to Ezina, Enki, Ishkur and Šumugan as the "lords of abundance" (en ḫegallakene). The name Ashnan appears in a curse formula of Yahdun-Lim of Mari, in which she is invoked alongside Šumugan to punish anyone who would remove this king's foundation deposits by impoverishing his land. Some attestations of Ashnan are available from the corpus of Old Babylonian personal letters as well, where she appears with comparable frequency to Bau or Nisaba, though less often than the most popular goddesses, such as Ishtar, Annunitum or Aya. Seals inscribed with the formula "servant of Ashnan" or "servant of Ezina" are known too. Mythology The debate poem Debate between Sheep and Grain involves Ashnan arguing with Laḫar (U8), a sheep deity, over which of them is more important. The text begins with an account of creation, which relays that both of them were created because mankind had no food to eat