Adad, Sumerian Ishkur, West Semitic Hadad, is the Mesopotamian god of storm, rain, thunder and wind, and his cult everywhere reflects the ambivalence of weather in a land that depended on it: the same god brings the rains that make the barley grow and the floods, hail and destructive downpours that ruin it. He is shown wielding forks of lightning and standing on or beside a bull, whose bellow is his thunder. Because the sky was read for the will of the gods, Adad was, with the sun-god Shamash, one of the two great patrons of divination, the baru priests who inspected the entrails of sacrificial animals and read omens invoked the pair as the lords of judgment. His worship spread far beyond Babylonia; as Hadad he was a chief god of the Aramaeans and of much of the wider Near East, and his temple stood beside that of the sky-god Anu at the city of Assur.
Adad's western form Hadad had one of the most important storm-god temples of the ancient Near East at Aleppo, on the citadel mound, where a Syrian-German excavation begun in 1996 uncovered, over many seasons, a monumental sanctuary whose core goes back to the third millennium BCE, with cuneiform texts from nearby Ebla already naming a temple to the storm-god there in the mid third millennium. The excavators recovered carved stelae and statue fragments recording dedications to the god under his various regional names, Adda, Teshub, Tarhunta and Hadad, physical testimony to how one storm-god cult was worshipped and renamed across shifting Syrian, Anatolian and Mesopotamian populations for some two thousand years.