Nabu

← Encyclopedia

Nabu was the Mesopotamian god of writing, scribes, and wisdom: the divine keeper of the cuneiform record, and in the theology of later Babylonia a deity whose standing rose until he ranked among the highest in the land. His name comes from a Semitic root meaning to call or announce, and it marks what he was thought to hold — the authoritative word, set down and made permanent in clay.

He emerges into clear view in the early second millennium BCE, when he appears at Borsippa, the city just south of Babylon that remained his cult center. There he was worshipped in the temple called Ezida, and was reckoned the son of Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, and of the goddess Sarpanitu; the goddess Tashmetu was named as his consort. As Marduk’s prestige climbed with Babylon’s own, Nabu rose with him, so that father and son together came to dominate the Babylonian pantheon. Personal names invoking Nabu — Nebuchadnezzar and Nabonidus among the kings of the Bible’s pages carry the element — testify to how widely his cult spread.

What the texts make of him turns on the act of writing. Nabu was held to keep the tablets of destiny, the records on which the fates allotted to gods and mortals were inscribed; to write a thing, in this scheme, was close to fixing it. He was the patron of the scribal craft, and scribes — the literate administrators on whom the temple and the state depended — looked to him as the master of their art. By the first millennium he had been given the stylus as his emblem and the planet Mercury as his celestial body. In the great procession of the Babylonian New Year festival, the akitu, Nabu’s image traveled from Borsippa to Babylon to stand beside his father’s, a yearly enactment of the bond between the two cities and the two gods.

The figure of the wisdom-god who governs writing recurs across the ancient Mediterranean, and the resemblances are worth marking as resemblances rather than identities. Egypt’s Thoth and the Greek Hermes were likewise reckoned masters of script and reckoning, and the later identification of Nabu with Mercury set him in the same astral company as the Greco-Roman Hermes-Mercury. Whether these were felt as the same power under different names or as distinct gods that a shared function drew together is a question the sources leave open; what they share is the conviction that the written word was no neutral tool but something divine, and that the one who held it held a measure of fate. Nabu’s cult outlasted Babylon itself, persisting into the early centuries of the Common Era before it faded with the world that had kept it.

→ Related: Ashur · Dagon · Berossus · Mesopotamia · Hermes Trismegistus