Nisaba- Mesopotamian GodDeity"Lady of Scribes"

The Scribal Colophon

Every Sumerian text ended the same way. Royal hymns and grain receipts alike: "Praise be to Nisaba!" The goddess of writing received this acknowledgment from every scribe who set stylus to clay. Students who spent years mastering cuneiform's hundreds of signs worked under her patronage. The finest compliment one scribe could pay another was to say the writing was "like Nisaba's own hand."

A hymn describes what that hand looked like: "The reed stylus she holds is lapis lazuli, and the holy tablet in her hand shines like the sun." Other texts call her "the great wild cow who reveals the holy tablets" and "she who opens the ear of understanding." Grain stalks grew from her shoulders. She held the stylus in one hand and a tablet inscribed with the stars in the other.

Grain and Stylus

Nisaba was a grain goddess before she was a scribal one. The earliest cuneiform signs were pictographs for quantities of barley and emmer wheat, scratched into clay by temple administrators tracking harvests. The reed stylus came from the same marshes that bordered the grain fields. The tablets were baked earth. Nisaba blessed the field, and then blessed what the field required: a record of itself.

The stars, too, were writing. Celestial patterns were divine messages inscribed across the sky, and Nisaba presided over their reading as she did over earthly tablets.

Nabu's Shadow

As Babylonian culture supplanted Sumerian, Nabu, Marduk's son, took over Nisaba's role as god of writing. By the first millennium BCE, Nabu's temples stood where scribes once invoked her name. But the old colophon survived in some scribal traditions. The phrase "Praise be to Nisaba!" continued to close texts long after the goddess who inspired it had been overtaken.