Nabu

For twelve days each spring, once the barley was in, the roads out of Babylon filled with people waiting for a boat. The god was coming up from Borsippa, and he came by water, on a barge, with his priests around him and incense smoke sliding off across the canal ahead of him. He was the son of the city god and the patron of everyone in the empire who could hold a stylus. Until he arrived and was set in his shrine, the year could not properly start.

Nabu was the god of writing, and in a civilisation that had invented writing he was therefore the god of nearly everything that mattered. He was also, less obviously, a god of vegetation and the harvest, which sounds like an odd pairing until you consider that both jobs come down to the same thing: something is set down, and later it comes up. His name is built on a root meaning to call or to announce. He speaks; the world takes the shape of what he has said.

He did not begin as anyone’s son. The oldest scribal deity of Mesopotamia was a Sumerian goddess, Nisaba, who kept the accounts and the measuring reed, and whose hymns ended with the ritual line “Praise be to Nisaba.” By the reign of Hammurabi, male gods were being lifted over older goddesses across the region, and Nabu took her work and her closing formula with it. Compositions began ending “Praise be to Nabu” instead. Samsuditana, the last king of Babylon’s first dynasty in the sixteenth century BC, had a statue of Nabu installed in Esagila, Marduk’s own temple. He started there as the vizier who wrote things down for his master. Within a few centuries he was Marduk’s son, and in the affection of ordinary Babylonians he had quietly overtaken his father, who remained the theoretical superior in the way that a chairman is the theoretical superior of the man who actually runs the company.

His holy city was Borsippa, a short way south of Babylon and grand enough to be called a second Babylon in its own right. There his temple was Ezida, and there he was not a subordinate to anyone. He kept a chapel inside Esagila that carried the same name, so that when he came for the New Year he was lodged under his own roof inside his father’s house. His wife was Tashmetu, whose Akkadian name means something close to Hearing, or Favour. She was almost never petitioned on her own. The division of labour was tidy: Nabu speaks, Tashmetu listens.

In Kalhu a scribe presses the reed into damp clay, the wedges going in with a small wet sound, and at the end of the tablet he writes that he is the servant of Nabu, and means it. The library shelves above him are stacked with baked tablets that will survive fire, flood and the collapse of the empire that made them. That was the god’s steady business: not thunder, not war, but the dull sacred act of recording, which is the only reason any of the rest of Mesopotamian religion is known at all.

The Akitu festival was where he did his loudest work. On the fourth day the king of Babylon left the city and went down to Borsippa to fetch him personally. On the fifth, once the shrine had been cleansed and canopied in gold, the high priest stripped the king of his crown and sceptre, slapped his face, and forced him onto his knees in front of Marduk’s image, where he had to swear he had not abused the city or its people. The priest then struck him again, harder, until the king wept, because tears were the proof the contrition was real. Two small wooden figures made earlier in the week were brought out and offered to Nabu, and their heads were cut off, and they were burned. Nobody now knows what they were for. Then the gathered gods were carried out to the Shrine of Destinies beside Nabu’s sanctuary, and Nabu gave the prophecy for the king and for the coming year, and the priests wrote it down. It stayed sealed until the eleventh day, when it was read aloud to the whole city. On the twelfth the god went home to Borsippa by ship.

All of it depended on Marduk’s statue being physically present in Babylon, and several times over the centuries it was not, having been carried off by Hittites, Elamites or Assyrians. In those years the festival simply did not happen, and the chronicles record the fact with a flat, devastating phrase: Nabu did not come from Borsippa. A god who cannot get out of his own temple is a god with a real and specific weakness, and his priests never pretended otherwise.

What he looked like is better attested than most. He is shown as a bearded man in royal dress, holding the stylus, standing on the back of a mushhussu, the scaled snake-dragon that also paces along the glazed brickwork of the Ishtar Gate. His symbol on boundary stones and seals is simpler and stranger: a single wedge, upright or lying flat, sometimes resting on a tablet or a low dais. It is the mark the stylus makes. A god reduced to one stroke of his own handwriting. At Nimrud, two attendant deities nearly six feet tall were set at the gateway of his sanctuary by Bel-tarsi-ilumma, a governor and devotee, for the life of Adad-nerari III and the queen Sammu-ramat. One of the pair reached London in 1856 and stands in the British Museum; its twin is in Baghdad. The dedication on them is unusually direct for a piece of temple furniture. Whoever you are, after me, trust in Nabu. Do not trust in another god.

The Assyrians took him north and made him the son of Ashur instead, and it worked, because unlike Marduk he carried no political baggage from Babylon and could belong to anybody. Temples went up for him at Assur, Nineveh, Kalhu, Dur-Sharrukin, Kurba’il and Guzana. Ashurbanipal, who collected tablets the way other kings collected provinces, was devoted to him. Then the empire fell in 612 BC, and the statues of Ashur and Marduk were pulled down by men who associated them with the boot on their neck, and Nabu’s was left standing. His worship spread into Syria, Anatolia and Egypt, and was still going in the second century AD, long after the ziggurat at Borsippa had begun its slow slump into a burnt mound.

His powers followed from the job. He knew everything, because everything passed through him to be written; he saw across the whole circuit of heaven and earth, and he could lengthen a man’s days by altering what was on the tablet. The planet Mercury was his. His limits followed from the job too. He recorded the fates, he did not choose them; the decision belonged to the assembly of gods and Nabu held the pen. His authority ran through objects that could be stolen, through a statue that had to be fed and carried and escorted by an armed king, and through a class of literate men who could be killed or scattered. Isaiah, writing for people who had watched Babylonian processions with less enthusiasm than the Babylonians, caught the vulnerability exactly and enjoyed it: Bel bows down, Nebo stoops, their idols are loaded on beasts, a burden to the weary animal. The mountain in Jordan where Moses is said to be buried still carries the god’s name, which is a strange afterlife for the patron of scribes, and about as durable as a clay tablet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Nabu?

Nabu is the Mesopotamian god of writing, wisdom and prophecy, the patron of scribes and the son of Marduk. His holy city was Borsippa, near Babylon, where his temple Ezida stood, and he was also worshipped widely across Assyria. He held the stylus and tablet on which the fates decided by the gods were recorded.

What are Nabu’s symbols?

His main symbol is a single wedge, upright or horizontal, often shown resting on a clay tablet or a small dais, representing the mark a writing stylus makes in wet clay. He is also shown as a bearded man in royal robes holding a stylus and standing on the mushhussu, a scaled snake-dragon. The clay tablet and stylus together are his standard attributes.

What did Nabu do at the Babylonian New Year festival?

During the Akitu festival his statue was brought by boat from Borsippa to Babylon, where he was installed in his shrine and asked to give the prophecy for the king and the coming year. The prophecy was recorded by the priests and read aloud to the city on the eleventh day, and on the twelfth Nabu returned home by ship. When Marduk’s statue was absent from Babylon the festival could not take place, and the chronicles noted those years by saying that Nabu did not come from Borsippa.

Who was Nabu’s wife?

Nabu’s consort was Tashmetu, whose Akkadian name means roughly Hearing or Favour, and who was rarely invoked apart from him. Later tradition also pairs him with Nanaya, and in some accounts with the Sumerian scribal goddess Nisaba, whose role in recording and record-keeping Nabu had taken over.

Is Nabu mentioned in the Bible?

Yes. He appears as Nebo in Isaiah 46:1, where the prophet describes the Babylonian gods Bel and Nebo being bowed down and loaded onto pack animals as the city falls. Mount Nebo in Jordan, where Moses is said to be buried, carries the same name.

Related Entries

Marduk, Enki, Ishtar, Shamash, Sin, Ninurta, Nergal, Tiamat, Kingu, Adapa, Apkallu, Lamassu, Thoth, Hermes, Mercury