Adad

Adad

ADAD is the Old Akkadian and Assyro-Babylonian name of the ancient Middle Eastern storm god, called Adda (Addu) or Hadda (Haddu) in northwest Semitic areas and known later as Hadad, especially among the Arameans. A shortened form, Dad, occurs in personal names. Since the cuneiform sign for the "wind" (IM) was used regularly and as early as the third millennium BCE to write the divine name Adad in Mesopotamia, this is likely to have been its original meaning, just as aḍu, with a pharyngealized dental, means "wind" in Libyco-Berber, which is the Afro-Asiatic language closest to Semitic. The name is also related to Arabic hadda, "to tear down" or "to raze," a verb originally referring to a violent storm.

Extension of Adad's Cult

As a personification of a power of nature, Adad can bring havoc and destruction; on the other hand, he brings the rain in due season, and he causes the land to become fertile. This is why his cult plays an important role among sedentary populations in areas of rain-fed agriculture, such as northern Syria and Mesopotamia. He was not prominent in southern Babylonia, where farming was based on irrigation, and no similar Egyptian deity was worshiped in the valley and delta of the Nile, where agriculture depended on the flooding of the river.

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