riting, but the source of all wisdom, and for
this reason he is spoken of as the son of Ea. Attributes of mere brutal
force are rarely assigned to Nabu, but as befits a god of wisdom, mercy,
nobility, and majesty constitute his chief attractions. By virtue of his
wisdom, Sargon calls him 'the clear seer who guides all the gods,' and
when the last king of Assyria--Saracus, as the Greek writers called
him--invokes Nabu as the 'leader of forces,' he appears to have in mind
the heavenly troops rather than earthly armies. Such patrons of learning
as Sargon and Ashurbanabal were naturally fond of parading their
devotion to Nabu. The former significantly calls him the 'writer of
everything,' and as for Ashurbanabal, almost every tablet in the great
literary collection that he made at Nineveh closes with a solemn
invocation to Nabu and his consort Tashmitum, to whom he offers thanks
for having opened his ears to receive wisdom, and who persuaded him to
make the vast literary treasures of the past accessible to his subjects.

Tashmitum.

The consort of Nabu was permitted to share the honors in the temple of
Nabu at Calah, but beyond this and Ashurbanabal's constant association
of Tashmitum with Nabu in the subscript to his tablets, she appears only
when the kings of Assyria coming to Babylonia as they were wont to
do,[308] in order to perform sacrifices, enumerate the chief gods of the
Babylonian pantheon.

Ea.

Ea takes his place in the Assyrian pantheon in the double capacity of
god of wisdom and as a member of the old triad. Ashurnasirbal makes
mention of a sanctuary erected to the honor of Ea in Ashur. A
recollection of the role that Ea plays in Babylonian mythology survives
in the titles of 'creator' and 'king of the ocean,' which Shalmaneser
gives him,[309] and of the 'one who opens the fountains' as Ashurbanabal
declares.[310] He is also, as in Babylonia, the one who determines the
fates of mankind. As the one who has a care for the arts, he is the wise
god, just as Nabu, and under various titles, as Nu-gim-mud,[311]
Nin-igi-azag, and Igi-dug-gu,[312] all emphasizing his skill, he is the
artificer who aids the kings in their building operations. The
similarity of the roles of Nabu and Ea, as gods of wisdom and the arts,
might easily have led to a confusion. Fortunately, the grandiloquent and
all-embracing titles accorded to the former did not alter his character
as essentially the god who presides over the art of