ABSTRACT
The personal interest of the great Assyrian kings is remarkable: Sargon was sufficiently interested to go in person to metal-working centres in Syria and to watch the men at work with their furnaces. This chapter suggests that there may be a direct connection between a campaign which brought new supplies of copper and bronze to Assyria, and objects dedicated to the gods, especially to Nergal at the Tabira Gate. A group of evidence indicates that Nergal was the patron deity of foundry-workers, and that copper and bronze were stored in buildings dedicated to him in Ashur, Nimrud and Nineveh. Nergal is the god of the basic extraction and processing, whereas anything that was shaped into the form of men and animals was worked with the skill of Ea, regardless of the process or the material involved. Sargon ends the passage with a statement that the price of silver and bronze was made equal in Assyria.
