Nabu

In Babylonian tradition Nabu rose to prominence in the 1st millennium BC when he was identified as the son of the chief god Marduk. In that role he becomes the pantheon’s divine scribe and announcer: a cosmic artisan who invents and legitimates writing, records the fates assigned to men, and performs filial and cultic duties in relation to Marduk—most famously by having his cult statue brought from Borsippa to Babylon for New Year rites to pay respects to his father.

Iconographically Nabu is depicted wearing a horned cap and standing with hands clasped in the traditional gesture of priesthood. His common attributes are a stylus and a writing tablet or wedge-shaped signs; he is also shown riding a winged dragon, the sirrush, a creature earlier associated with Marduk and described in sources as originally belonging to Marduk. Regal associations include attestations such as King Nabonidus possessing a royal sceptre topped with Nabu's wedge motif. Clay tablets executed with refined calligraphy were used as offerings at his cult temple.

Nabu functions as a divine scribe who, in Babylonian tradition, 'inscribed the fates assigned to men.' He is credited within cultic ideology as the inventor of writing (an attribution in tradition), the patron of scribes and the rational arts, and a god of vegetation. He serves as an oracle and authoritative announcer—his Akkadian name deriving from a Semitic root meaning 'announcer' or 'authorised person'—and he is integrated into Mesopotamian astral science by identification with the planet Mercury, linking his office to astrological and calendrical divination.