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Updated: June 24, 2025
Whether this festival of Bau was recognized as the New Year's Day throughout Babylonia, we do not know, but it must have been observed in a considerably extensive district, or Gudea would have made the attempt to give some festival connected with his favorite deity Nin-girsu this character.
He is a solar deity identified in the theological system of the Babylonians with Nergal, but originally distinct and in all probability one of the numerous local solar deities of Babylonia like Nin-girsu and Nin-gishzida, Ishum and others, whose rôles are absorbed by one or the other of the four great solar deities, Shamash, Marduk, Ninib, and Nergal.
It is interesting to note that Gudea mentions a hall of judgment in the temple to Nin-girsu at Lagash. The number of such buildings attached to the temple precinct varied, of course, according to the needs and growth of each place. In Nippur, the numbers appear to have been very large.
One of these is the zikkurat to Nin-girsu at Lagash, which Gudea describes as 'the house of seven divisions of the world'; the other, the tower at Uruk, which bore the name 'house of seven zones. The reference in both cases is, as Jensen has shown, to the seven concentric zones into which the earth was divided by the Babylonians.
It is, in fact, one of the three towns that combined with Shirpurla to create the great capitol bearing the latter name; and Jensen has called attention to a passage in one of Gudea's inscriptions in which the goddess is brought into direct association with the town, so that it would appear that Ninâ is the patron of Ninâ, in the same way that Nin-girsu is the protector of Girsu.
The rulers of Lagash declare themselves to have been chosen for the high office by Nin-girsu, and as if to compensate themselves for the degradation implied in being merely patesis, or governors, serving under some powerful chief, they call themselves the patesis of Nin-girsu, implying that the god was the master to whom they owed allegiance.
It is noticeable that these four deities, Nin-girsu, Nin-shakh, Nin-gish-zida, and Nin-ib, who are thus associated together, all contain the element Nin in their names, a factor that may turn out to be of some importance when more abundant material shall be forthcoming for tracing their development in detail.
Gal-alim may have been again a merely local deity belonging to one of the towns that fell under Gudea's rule, and whose attributes again were so little marked that this god too disappeared under the overshadowing importance of Nin-girsu. He and another god, Dun-shagga, are viewed as the sons of Nin-girsu.
By the side of Nin-girsu and Nin-gish-zida appears Nin-shakh, who, as Oppert has shown, is like Nin-girsu the prototype of the well-known god of war, Ninib.
In the chapter on the pantheon before Hammurabi, the identity of Nin-ib with the chief god of Gudea's district, Nin-girsu, has been pointed out. The solar character of the latter being clear, it follows that Nin-ib, too, is originally a personification of the sun, like Nin-gish-zida and Nin-shakh, whose rôles are absorbed by Nin-ib.
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