Ilabrat

Ilabrat was a Mesopotamian god who in some cases was regarded as the sukkal (attendant deity) of the sky god Anu. Evidence from the Old Assyrian period indicates that he could also be worshiped as an independent deity.

==Name== Multiple etymologies have been proposed for Ilabrat's name, including "god of (the land/city) Iabrat" (suggested by Ignace Gelb) and "tutelary god of the simple people"(suggested by Thorkild Jacobsen), but none are universally accepted, and it is not certain that it came from a Semitic language as presumed in these two proposals. Some late lexical lists connect the element -labr with the Sumerian word labar, "servant", treated as a synonym of sukkal in this context, which lead Frans Wiggermann to propose that Ilabrat's name was Sumerian in origin, and that the hypothetical older form of the name might have been Nin-labrat. In most cases due to Akkadian grammar it is possible to determine with certainty that Ilabrat was considered a male deity, but as argued by Grégoire Nicolet, the occasional alteration between the base form of the name and the variant Ialbra can be compared to the cases of Kubabat/Kubaba and Ḫebat/Ḫeba where the optional t was a feminine suffix, which according to him would indicate that this deity was perceived as female at least in the northwest of Mesopotamia in the Old Babylonian period.