As a grain deity, Nisaba was sometimes regarded as synonymous with the goddess
Ashnan, though most primary sources, including god lists and offering lists, present them as fully separate. It has also been proposed that she was the same goddess as Ezina and
Kusu, but all three of them appear separately in offering lists from
Lagash.
Syncretic associations possibly present in ancient scholarship did not necessarily translate into cultic practice. The goddess
Ninimma, regarded as the personal scribe of Enlil, was sometimes associated with and possibly acquired some of the characteristics of Nisaba due to fulfilling a similar role in the pantheon of Nippur. In god lists she often follows the latter and her spouse.
Family and court Nisaba's husband was
Haia, possibly regarded as a god of
seals. He was a deity of relatively low rank. Compared to other divine couples (
Shamash and
Aya, Ishkur and
Shala,
Ninsianna and
Kabta, Enki and
Damkina,
Lugalbanda and
Ninsun and others) they are invoked together extremely rarely in seal inscriptions, with only one example presently known. In one explanatory text, Haya is described as "Nisaba of prosperity" (
Nisaba ša mašrê). Their daughter was Sud, the city goddess of
Shuruppak, in later periods fully conflated with Enlil's wife
Ninlil. According to the god list
An = Anum, Nisaba had two
sukkals (attendant deities), Ungasaga and Hamun-ana. In god lists, she usually appears in the section dedicated to relatives and servants of Enlil. Multiple traditions regarding Nisaba’s origin are known, and her parentage is not regarded as fixed in ancient tradition. She was described either as the firstborn daughter of Enlil, as his mother in law, or possibly as his twin sister. Her mother is usually said to be
Urash. In a first millennium BCE text from Kalhu, which is also the source attesting that she could be viewed as Enlil's twin, her father is Ea, equated with
Irḫan, in this context understood as a cosmic river, "father of the gods of the universe." Elsewhere Irḫan was often associated with
Ishtaran. Wilfred G. Lambert notes that the text "seems to imply a desire not to have Anu as Nisaba's father," though attestations of the sky god in this role are nonetheless known from other sources.
Nisaba and Nabu Nabu gradually replaced Nisaba as a deity of writing in what has been described by Julia M. Asher-Greve as "the most prominent case of a power transferred to a god from a goddess" in Mesopotamian history. However, the process was complex and gradual. In the Old Babylonian and early
Kassite periods Nabu’s cult was only popular in central Mesopotamia (
Babylon,
Sippar,
Kish,
Dilbat,
Lagaba), had a limited extent in peripheral areas (
Susa in
Elam,
Mari in
Syria) and there is little to no evidence of it from cities such as
Ur and
Nippur. Nabu has relatively few epithets in god lists from the second millennium BCE as well. In late bronze age
Ugarit Nisaba and Nabu coexisted, and colophons of texts reveal that a number of scribes described themselves as "servant of Nabu and Nisaba." Similar evidence is also known from
Emar.
Andrew R. George assumes the reason why Nabu replaced Nisaba, while other deities associated with writing did not, was due to the generalized character of his connection to this art. He points out that while Ninimma and Ninurta were also associated with writing, the former occupied a different niche from Nisaba (which he compares to them functioning as a librarian and as a scribe or scholar, respectively), while the latter was only a divine scribe as an extension of his role as the archetypal good son helping his elderly father with his various duties (in this case - writing down Enlil's judgments on the Tablet of Destinies).
dNISABA as logographic writing of other deities' names In some documents from Syrian cities, for example
Halab, the logogram dNISABA designates the god
Dagan, while in
Hurrian texts -
Kumarbi. According to Alfonso Archi, both of these phenomena have the same source. In cities such as Ugarit, Dagan's name was homophonous with the word for grain (
dgn in
alphabetic Ugaritic texts), and the logographic writing of his and Kumarbi's names as dNISABA was likely a form of wordplay popular among scribes, relying on the fact that Nisaba's name could simply be understood as “grain” too. In theological texts, both Kumarbi and Dagan were compared to each other and Enlil rather than Nisaba due to all three of them playing the role of “father of gods” in their respective pantheons. The name of the Hittite grain goddess
Ḫalki could be represented by the logogram dNISABA too. ==Worship==