Nabu

I. The Name

The name Nabu is written most economically with the two cuneiform signs dAK, and in the Old Babylonian period it is spelled out in full as dna-bi-um. The Akkadian nabû means "the announcer" or "the called one," from the Semitic root n-b-ʾ, "to name, to proclaim, to summon." The same root stands behind the Hebrew nabi, the Aramaic nebiyya, and the Arabic nabiyy, all meaning "prophet." The name marks its bearer as the authorized speaker.^1,2

The earliest secure attestation of the name takes the god out of Babylonia altogether. Nabu appears among the deities of Ebla in northern Syria in the twenty-fourth century BCE. It seems as if his origin was in Syria. He entered Mesopotamia proper only later, carried in by the Amorites at the beginning of the second millennium BCE, probably at the same time and along the same road as Marduk. The two remained linked for the next two thousand years.^3,4

His relation to Nisaba, the older Sumerian goddess of writing, is complicated. Nabu seemingly took over many of her functions, a certain change that did likely follow the political passage from Sumerian to Babylonian dominance. Early sources make him her husband and assistant rather than her replacement, the male scribe who helps the goddess keep the library of the gods, analogous perhaps to Thoth and Seshat. ^4,5

The life of the name is long. It survives in the Hebrew Nebo of the prophets, in the Aramaic nbw carried by expatriate communities into Egypt and Anatolia, and in the theophoric names of kings whose reigns close the history of Babylon, Nabopolassar, Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus. The god outlasted the empire that raised him. Nabu was still worshipped into the second century CE, when the cuneiform that was his gift to men had become a lost art. His name persists even now in the Mandaic Nbu, the planet Mercury.^1,6

Sources: Pomponio, "Nabû A. Philologisch," Reallexikon der Assyriologie 9 (1998–2001); Pomponio, Nabû: Il culto e la figura di un dio del Pantheon babilonese ed assiro (1978); Millard, "Nabû," in Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (1999).^1,3,4

II. Aspects of Mythology

In poems the marriage of Nabu and Tashmetu is the nearest thing to a myth involving Nabu. A love dialogue from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh has the two deities lovingly speaking in their own voices, rejoicing in one another, and the composition is thought to accompany a ritual in which the cult statues of god and goddess were brought together in a ceremonial marriage. Later temple sources name a chamber called the "House of the Bed," a purification room where Nabu and Tashmetu were united.^10,11

Where Nabu appears in the older cosmic literature, it seems as if this comes from a divine sort of inheritance. Marduk took the kingship of the gods from Enlil. The role of the great god's most important son, once held by Ninurta as son of Enlil, passed to Nabu. Ninurta and Nabu seemingly occupied a similar space attenuated by their functions as scribes.^2,12

III. Epithets of Nabu

Source: Grayson, Assyrian Rulers of the Early First Millennium BC II (858–745 BC).¹³

IV. Temples of Nabu

Ezida at Borsippa

Nabu's house was the E-zida at Borsippa, the "true house" or "legitimate house," a few miles south of Babylon. Borsippa was his city. Andrew George recorded the temple among the great sanctuaries of the land, its ziggurat bearing the ceremonial name E-ur-imin-anki, "house of the seven guides of heaven and earth." In his own city Nabu was supreme, second to no god, and the priests who tended his statue there were held in the high honour that a society devoted to the written word reserved for the god who gave it. Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilt both temple and ziggurat, and it was this tower, rising alone from the plain, that later tradition mistook for the Tower of Babel.^7,14

Ezida at Kalhu and the Assyrian Houses

The disproportion between the two ends of his history is striking. In early second-millennium Babylonia Nabu had no temple of his own and did not appear at all in the Old Babylonian royal inscriptions; he was a scribe in another god's house. By the first millennium he owned Ezida at Borsippa, a second Ezida at Kalhu, and sanctuaries across two empires.^7,16

V. Nabu and Kings

No god was closer to the Mesopotamian crown in its last centuries than Nabu in his ascendancy. The kings of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty had theophoric names attesting to his rise in the pantheon. Nabopolassar the founder, Nebuchadnezzar the great builder, Nabonidus the last. To bear the name of the god who inscribed destinies was clearly of high importance. Nabonidus went even further, topping his royal sceptre with Nabu's single wedge.^1,6

At the Akitu the statue of Nabu came from Borsippa to Babylon. There the king's legitimacy was renewed before the son as much as the father, for it was Nabu who was thought to speak the king's name before Marduk in the divine assembly where destinies were fixed. A building inscription of Nebuchadnezzar II, appended to his work on the ziggurat of Ezida, closes with a prayer that puts the whole theology in the king's own words.^9,17

"On your unchangeable tablet, which establishes the boundaries of heaven and earth, proclaim length of days for me, inscribe long life."
Nebuchadnezzar II, building inscription for E-zida

The Assyrian kings made Nabu a royal patron. The dedications from the Kalhu Ezida are addressed to the god for the life of the king. It appears the twin statues set at the gate of the temple also carried inscriptions binding the god to Adad-nirari III. Where Marduk was the god of the Babylonian state, Nabu was increasingly the god of the literate bureaucracy.^13,15

The desire to enforce a rigidly bureaucratic order had its dark sides. An inscription from Ezida threatened that whoever erased the king's name and set his own in its place, or stole the tablet from the temple, would have his name erased by Nabu from the Tablet of Life and be deprived of light.^14,18

In the royal inscriptions of the Neo-Babylonian kings Nabu is sometimes given precedence over Marduk. In the popular devotion of the last centuries of Babylon it was Nabu, the son who knows all and sees all, who stood as one of the highest deities. The very last royal inscription from Babylonia concerns him: a report by Antiochus I Soter, the Seleucid king, on his restoration of Esagila and Ezida, found in the temple at Borsippa. The line of kings who served Nabu closes with a Greek writing in Akkadian for the god of the scribes.^4,7

VI. Nabu and the Scribes

Nabu was the god of the men who could write. In a world where writing was the rare and guarded craft of a trained few, that made him the god of a powerful guild. The scribe who sat with the wet clay and the reed stylus practised the art that Nabu had invented and over which he presided. Tools of the trade, the tablet and the stylus, were the god's symbols before they were the scribe's instruments.^1,7

The devotion of the scribes to their patron is written into the archaeology of his temples. Excavators working at Ezida found tablets of unusual calligraphic skill, deposited as ex-voto offerings. A scribe honored Nabu with a beautifully made tablet; the craft itself was the offering.^6,7

The custom of ending a composition with a phrase of praise to the patron of writing was old, taken over from the Sumerian hymns that had praised Nisaba in the same place. In the first millennium, it was Nabu who received the closing benediction. The scholars of the Assyrian court, the men who copied the omen-series and the rituals and the astronomical compendia, worked under his name and signed it at the foot of their labor.^5,15

Those scholars were among the most important men in the state. Evidence is evocative of the fact the chief scribe and the chief exorcist of the Assyrian court, men whose letters to the king survive in quantity, were servants of Nabu whose skills were predictably trained to a high level. The tablet-stores of the Kalhu Ezida, tended by named scholars across generations, do show the god of writing at the center of an actual working apparatus of knowledge.^15,16

The reach of the scribal god extended past the borders of the empires that raised him, carried by the men who wrote. Names compounded with Nabu are the most common Semitic theophoric names among the Aramaic-speaking communities of Egypt, and the god was worshipped at Elephantine beside Yahweh and Anat and the rest. The patron of the Babylonian stylus became a familiar name in the account-books of a Jewish garrison on the Nile.^6,19

VII. Nabu and Wisdom

Wisdom in the Mesopotamian sense was a mastery of a vast inherited body of learning so naturally Nabu was its lord. The rational arts, the ordered disciplines of the scholar, were his province: the omen-series by which the future was read, then he astronomy by which the heavens were tracked., then the mathematics and the medicine in which the scribes were trained, while each realm represents a sort of knowledge.^4,8

The link between writing and destiny gives his wisdom its particular character. Nabu did not merely know. Like Thoth he inscribed, what he inscribed was said to come to pass as divinatory wisdom. His wisdom is administrative rather than contemplative, the wisdom of a record-keeper, and the Tablet of Destinies in his possession made his records binding.^8,20

The Greeks matched Nabu to Apollo as a giver of prophecy and to Hermes as the god of wisdom and the divine messenger; the Romans set him beside Mercury; the reflex that paired the Egyptian Thoth with Hermes reached also for Nabu.^2,6

VIII. The Son of Marduk

The making of Nabu into Marduk's son is the central event of his theology, and it happened in step with Marduk's own rise. When Marduk climbed from city-god of Babylon to king of the gods, taking Enlil's place and titles, the pantheon reorganised around him, and the vacant role of the great god's heir was filled by Nabu. He was not born Marduk's son in the oldest sources; he became so, by the same political theology that made Marduk supreme, and from the Kassite period onward the sonship was fixed.^2,4

The stages of the ascent can be traced. Samsu-ditana, last king of the First Dynasty of Babylon in the late seventeenth century BCE, introduced a statue of Nabu into Esagila, Marduk's temple, giving the god a foothold in his father's house. Nabu began as Marduk's minister and scribe, the servant who kept the master's records, and only across the second millennium did the servant become the son. The chapel Ezida within Esagila, where Nabu lodged at the New Year beside Marduk, gave that sonship visible form.^4,21

By the first millennium the two were joined as the heads of the pantheon, Bel and his son, co-rulers whose names ran together through the royal inscriptions. Marduk kept the theoretical precedence as his father, yet in the devotion of the people it was the intercessor, the mediator god who was looked for first. Nabu's mother in this theology is Sarpanitu, Marduk's consort, called also Erua, and his own consort Tashmetu completes the divine family between Babylon and Borsippa.^4,10

The relationship gave the state a working image of succession. Where in Egypt the dying god is restored to power, in Mesopotami the royal prince Nabu is an avenger and support, coming at the New Year to free his father from the ritual confinement of the festival and to stand beside him in triumph. In the Babylonian pattern the son stands beside the father. The arrangement modelled the passage of the crown.^9,12

Nabu was also shown riding the mushhussu, the horned serpent-dragon, the creature that had belonged to Marduk.^2,22

IX. Nabu and the Planet Mercury

The planet Mercury was the star of Nabu. In the astronomical tradition of the MUL.APIN compendium the planet had been assigned to Ninurta, of whom it was said that Mercury, whose name is Ninurta, travels the same path the moon travels. When the role of the great god's son passed from Ninurta to Nabu, the planet passed with it.^2,23

A planet closest to the sun, quick and elusive in its motion, hard to catch low on the horizon, made a fitting star for the god of the swift stylus and the messenger's errand, and the same quality that later drew the Greeks to equate Nabu with Hermes and the Romans with Mercury was already legible in the Babylonian sky. The planet's moon-like path, noted in the compendia, tied Nabu also to a faint association with the moon-god Sin and the oracular knowledge that clung to the night sky.^2,24

Ninurta was never wholly displaced, and the planet could carry more than one divine name in the scholarly texts. Nabu was equated Mercury as part of the same scheme that made him Marduk's son and heir to Ninurta.^2,23

X. Nabu in the Bible

Nabu enters the Hebrew scriptures under the name Nebo. The prophet of the exile, writing as Babylon's power broke, pictures the city's gods hauled away on the backs of beasts, unable to save even themselves: "Bel bows down, Nebo stoops" (Isaiah 46:1). The insult is aimed: the verse names the father and the son, Marduk and Nabu, the two heads of the Babylonian pantheon, and topples them together.²⁵

The scene is a polemic against the whole theology traced above. The gods who inscribe destinies and rule the New Year are shown as dead weight. The Hebrews of the Bible cast them images that must be carried and cannot carry, a burden to the weary cattle that bear them into captivity. The sarcasm turns precisely on Nabu's true cult, the annual procession in which his statue was carried in triumph; in vituperative inversion the prophet takes the great processional image and makes of it a helpless load.^25,26

Mount Nebo, from which Moses looked upon the promised land, carries the same consonants, and the god's name stands inside the biblical Nebuchadnezzar. Whether the mountain was named for the god has never been settled. The Nebo of Isaiah, at least, is beyond doubt the Nabu of Babylon, caught in scripture at the instant of his fall.^25,27

XI. Festivals of Nabu

The great occasion of Nabu's year was the Akitu, the New Year festival of Babylon. On the appointed day his statue was brought out of Ezida at Borsippa and carried by boat downstream to Babylon, there to enter his chapel within his father's temple and to stand beside Marduk through the days of the rite. The visit of the son to the father was among the fixed hinges of the Babylonian year.^6,9

On the sixth day of the celebrations he arrived with other gods and dignitaries; on the following days he was held to free his father from the ritual confinement that the Akitu enacted, and father and son proceeded together to the determination of destinies, the fixing of the fates for the year to come.^9,17