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As it is, he can only combine Bau's festival with the cult of Nin-girsu, by making the New Year's Day the occasion of a symbolical marriage between the god and the goddess. Nin-girsu is represented as offering marriage gifts to Bau, on the Zagmuku. How early Bau came to occupy so significant a rank has not been ascertained.
To distinguish it from other festivals, Marduk's festival is sometimes spoken of as the "great" or the "lofty" Akitu. The first day was properly the Zagmuku, whereas the Akitu itself extended at least over the first eleven days of Nisan and may indeed have lasted the entire month; but Zagmuku was also used for the festival period. The New Year's Day was marked by a solemn procession.
After the ancient religious and political centers of the south yielded their privileges to Babylon, it was natural for the priests of Marduk to covet the honor of the New Year's festival for the new head of the pantheon. Accordingly, we find the Zagmuku transformed into a Marduk festival.
That among the Babylonians the seventh month also had a sacred character may be concluded from the meaning of the ideographs with which the name is written. The question may, therefore, be raised whether at an earlier period and in some religious center Nippur, Sippar, or perhaps Ur the seventh month may not have been celebrated as the Zagmuku.
The deliberate transfer of the Zagmuku to Marduk is also indicated by the fact that the festival of Nisan has another name by which it is more commonly designated, Akitu.
The Zagmuku festival in its developed form has striking points of resemblance to the Jewish New Year's Day. On this day, according to the popular Jewish tradition, God sits in judgment with a book before Him in which He inscribes the fate of mankind. Nine days of probation are allowed, and on the tenth day the Day of Atonement the fates are sealed.
The old Zagmuku festival in honor of Bau and the Tammuz festival, celebrated in spring and summer, respectively, are also closely associated with agricultural life. The spring as the seedtime is, as we have seen, a natural period for beginning the calculation of the New Year, while a first harvest of the wheat and barley is reaped in Babylonia at the time of the summer solstice.
However this may be, the double ceremony became to such an extent the noteworthy feature of the Zagmuku or Akitu that when the chroniclers wish to indicate that, because of political disturbances, the festival was not celebrated, they use the simple formula: Nabu did not come to Babylon. The Akitu festival brought worshippers from all parts of Babylonia and Assyria to the capitol.
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