ugurated, the
worship of Mut was discontinued and Tiy went into retirement. In
Akhenaton's time the vulture symbol of the goddess Mut did not appear
above the sculptured figures of royalty.

What connection the god Aton had with Mut during the period of the Tiy
regime remains obscure. There is no evidence that Aton was first
exalted as the son of the Great Mother goddess, although this is not
improbable.

Queen Sammu-rammat of Assyria, like Tiy of Egypt, is associated with
social and religious innovations. She was the first, and, indeed, the
only Assyrian royal lady, to be referred to on equal terms with her
royal husband in official inscriptions. In a dedication to the god
Nebo, that deity is reputed to be the protector of "the life of
Adad-nirari, king of the land of Ashur, his lord, and the life of
Sammu-rammat, she of the palace, his lady".[465]

During the reign of Adad-nirari IV the Assyrian Court radiated
Babylonian culture and traditions. The king not only recorded his
descent from the first Shalmaneser, but also claimed to be a
descendant of Bel-kap-kapu, an earlier, but, to us, unknown,
Babylonian monarch than "Sulili", i.e. Sumu-la-ilu, the
great-great-grandfather of Hammurabi. Bel-kap-kapu was reputed to have
been an overlord of Assyria.

Apparently Adad-nirari desired to be regarded as the legitimate heir
to the thrones of Assyria and Babylonia. His claim upon the latter
country must have had a substantial basis. It is not too much to
assume that he was a son of a princess of its ancient royal family.
Sammurammat may therefore have been his mother. She could have been
called his "wife" in the mythological sense, the king having become
"husband of his mother". If such was the case, the royal pair probably
posed as the high priest and high priestess of the ancient goddess
cult--the incarnations of the Great Mother and the son who displaced
his sire.

The worship of the Great Mother was the popular religion of the
indigenous peoples of western Asia, including parts of Asia Minor,
Egypt, and southern and western Europe. It appears to have been
closely associated with agricultural rites practised among
representative communities of the Mediterranean race. In Babylonia and
Assyria the peoples of the goddess cult fused with the peoples of the
god cult, but the prominence maintained by Ishtar, who absorbed many
of the old mother deities, testifies to the persistence of immemorial
habits of thought and antiq