Belus (Assyrian)

Belus or Belos in classical Greek or classical Latin texts (and later material based on them) in an Assyrian context refers to one or another purportedly ancient and historically mythical Assyrian king, such king in part at least a euhemerization of the Babylonian god Bel Marduk.

Belus most commonly appears as the father of Ninus, who otherwise mostly appears as the first known Assyrian king. Ctesias provides no information about Ninus' parentage. But already in Herodotus there is a Ninus son of Belus among the ancestors of the Heraclid dynasty of Lydia, though here Belus is strangely and uniquely made a grandson of Heracles. See Omphale for discussion.

A fragment by Castor of Rhodes, preserved only in the Armenian translation of Eusebius of Caesarea, makes Belus king of Assyria at the time when Zeus and the other gods fought first the Titans and then the Giants. Castor says Belus was considered a god after his death, but that he does not know how many years Belus reigned.

Belus elsewhere is a vague, ancestral figure. It was suggested in The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop that he was originally a conqueror who fathered king Ninus the first, and that after Ninus' death his wife Semiramis began to claim Ninus as a Sun god, Cush (Belus) as the Lord God, herself as the mother goddess and her son Tammuz as the god of love, in an effort to control her subjects better after the death of her husband, and to allow her to rule as her newborn son's regent.

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