1. Wandering Monsters: Mesopotamia’s Influence on Later Magic and Religious Traditions
Clay Mask of Huwawa
British Museum: ME

3. Mesopotamian Chronology: 2nd to 1st
Old Babylonian: c – 1595 B.C.
Kassite Babylonia: c – 1150
Assyria: 1363 onwards:
Neo-Assyrian:
Hittite Kingdom(s): c
Syro-Palestine:
Amurru, Ugarit, Canaan
“The Levant”

5. - Efficacy and control – power of the agent - Means
How do we define magic?
- Efficacy and control – power of the agent
- Means
- source of ability? Divine or not?
- status of caster
- sympathetic magic and (demonic) possession
- Intent
- malevolent or antagonistic
- apotropaic
- curative
- divinatory (magic?)

6. Magic and Control Magic as a ‘savage belief’ problem
Defining Magic: “The use of ritual activities or observances which are intended to influence the course of events or to manipulate the natural world, usually involving the use of an occult or secret body of knowledge; sorcery, witchcraft” (OED)
μαγικὴ τέχνη = magic art/craft

7. One supernatural universe Primeval monsters and elements/nature
What About Demons?
One supernatural universe
Primeval monsters and elements/nature
Demonic diseases - Vectors of Death/Illness
Transgressive Individuals/Ghosts
What role do monsters and demons play?

8. Mushhushu – Demons and Monsters in the desert/steppe

9. "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion...human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

11. Huwawa
Pazuzu
Witch / ardat-lili
Lamashtu

12. The Ashipu (āšipu) - ashipu = the exorcist
"I am the exorcist, the chief temple administrator of Enki, the Lord Enki has sent me to the sick man. He has sent me to him as a messenger of Enki's temple."
- Exorcist as legitimate magical practitioner

13. Key characteristics
- "The maiden lilî who blew into a man's window, the maiden of the steppe, when blowing through the window in the wind, is the maiden who flitted about...she is a maiden of the steppe..."
- "The maiden is one who was forced out of her wedding house, who was forced out of the window like the wind...she always prowls about in the broad steppe, she stands about and crosses over from roof to roof."
- Wind – lilu - associations

14. - Through sympathetic magic
Witchcraft attacks
- Through sympathetic magic
- Figurines, bound to victim
- Attacks victim:
- zikurudû (throat-cutting) magic
- impotency spells
- necromancy
- the evil eye
- marry figurine to corpse

15. Diagnosing and Exorcising the Ardat-Lili
“If the top of his head feels split in two all day long, his head burns, he continually has sexual desires, and the bedding is continually turned around him, (and) like one who lays himself down on top of a woman, he has an erection, hand of ardat-lili”
- Ghost Marriage!
- Sending her back to the netherworld

16. Lamashtu Divine origin – "Anu's terrible daughter” Cast out of heaven
Or! Part of cosmic plan?
Connected to 7 names
Defined iconography:
2nd Mill (Southern (A) or Assyrian (B)) and 1st (Assyrian or Babylonian) B A

17. Lamashtu in Incantations:
“She came up from the marshes…Her feet are those of the Anzû-bird, her hand spells decay…Dark corners are her dwelling, on thresholds she sits. Very long are her fingernails…In view of her unseemly deeds, Anu forced her to step down from heaven and denied her a place of worship on earth…
The Daughter of Anu follows behind the women about to give birth. She counts their months, marks their days on the wall: “Brings me your sons – I want to suckle (them)! In the mouth of our daughters I want to place (my) breast.” She holds in her hand fever, cold, chills…she spatters venom, snake’s poison and scorpion’s poison…An open house she enters and she slithers into a locked house and strangles the youth…”
-Farber, Lamashtu p. 157: Incantation 5

18. Amulet (fragment)
First Millennium B.C.
Metropolitan Museum:

19. Expelling Lamashtu
“You make a figurine of Lamashtu as a prisoner…You libate well water for her, you make her sit at the head of the sick person for three days. You place a piglet’s heart in her mouth, pour hot soup for her. Give her a flask of oil, provide her with travel provisions…In the morning, at noon, and in the evening, you recite the incantation to her. On the third day, move her out and bury her in a corner of the city wall.” -Farber, Lamashtu, p. 147: Rit. 2a

21. Mold, Early First Millennium
Mass Production
Mold, Early First Millennium
British Museum: 91904

22. Considering these Figures
What do they have in common?
What underlying fears do we see?
How could these representations change?

23. The Terrifying Woman: Lamashtu, the Witch, and Lilith
Base fear of Lamashtu
Early amulets/texts – development/spread
1st mill. incantation series – 600 lines
Middle Babylonian (2nd mill) forerunner from Ugarit – lacks ritual
First millennium equate Lamashtu and Lilîtu-demons
Later sources (Aramaic, Syriac) Lamashtu + Lilîtu convergence to Lilith

24. Lilith Mesopotamian roots – Isiah 34:14 - Dead Sea Scrolls:
Lilitu-demons, ardat-lili, lamashtu
Isiah 34:14 -
"Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, and goat-demons shall call out to one another. There too, Lilith (lit: lilit) shall repose, and find a resting place."
Dead Sea Scrolls:
'the spirits of the destroying angels, the spirits of the bastards, demons, Lilith, howlers, desert-dwellers."

25. Lilith Talmud – three mentions Imagery of Adam's first wife
"R. Hanina said: One may not sleep in a house alone, and whoever sleeps in a house alone is seized by Lilith." (Tractate Shabbath 151b)
Imagery of Adam's first wife
Alphabet of Ben Sira ( CE)
Evil offspring
'And from them are born demons, spirits, and the lilim, the plagues of mankind.'
Later (17th c. CE) – Lilith paired with Samael – mother of monsters

26. Faust and Lilith (1831). Lamia and the Soldier (1905). Richard Westall
Faust and Lilith (1831) Lamia and the Soldier (1905) Richard Westall John William Waterhouse

27. John Collier, Lilith (1892) Dante Gabriel Rosetti, Lady Lilith, 1863

28. La Belle Dame Sans Merci

29. Pazuzu
“I am Pazuzu, king of the evil wind-demons (lilû), I ascended a mighty mountain that quaked, and the (evil) winds that I ran into there were headed West. One by one, I broke their wings.”
Earliest representations:
Nimrud, late 8th c. B.C.
Most 7th – 6th B.C.
Last two in Seleucid times
Textual – earliest 670 B.C.
Widespread – central Babylonia/Assyria, Western Iran, Levant, Samos
Bronze Pazuzu, (15 cm by 8.6 cm)
Early 1st mill. B.C.
Musée du Louvre: MNB 467

30. Pazuzu: Personal Protector
Worn on amulets
Protection during preganancy
Bronze Pendant, Head of Pazuzu
Neo-Assyrian

34. Traveling Monsters

35. Huwawa/Humbaba, Guardian of the Cedar Forest
“Humbaba, his voice is the Deluge, his speech is fire, his breath is death. He hears the forest’s murmur for sixty leagues…in order to keep the cedars safe, Enlil made it his destiny to be the terror of the people.”
“Gilgamesh struck [Humbaba] in the neck, Enkidu pulled out the lungs…from the head he takes the tusks as booty.”

36. Different Uses/Representations of Huwawa
Representing local stories with an international motif (Syrian-style cylinder seals)
Old Assyrian (20th – 16th c) seals –
Temple of Tell al-Rimah – c. 1475
Late Bronze (c. 1400) seals from Nuzi and Emar
LB –
Nuzi
Anatolian – OA – Kültepe to Hattusa
LB - Emar
Tell al-Rimah ca. 1475

37. Further (later) Representations of Huwawa
Carchemish – Limestone Relief, Iron Age
Relief, Tell Halaf, Syria
c. 9th-8th B.C.

38. Mediterranean Monsters - A Broader Arc
Direct transmission
Influence and ideas
Orientalizing Period
Huwawa-Bes figurine
Cyprus, 1st Mill.
Bes, Egypt c
MMA:

40. Pazuzu Pazuzu 9th-7th c. B.C. British Museum: 132964 Pazuzu Macehead
Samos, Heraion, 9th-7th c. B.C.
Archaeological Museum, Vathy, Samos

41. Huwawa/Humbaba Huwawa Sippar, 1800-1600 B.C. British Museum: 132964
Plaque with Huwawa
Crete, Gortyn, acropolis sanctuary
Archaeological Museum, Vathy, Samos

42. Plate with Gorgon Medusa
Rhodes, Kameiros, ca B.C. (British Museum)

43. Magic and Transmission
What happens to cuneiform culture?
Astronomical text c. 75 CE
Survival of Mesopotamian ritual and traditions in Syria
Echoes of religious worship – continued use of temples
Biblical and Classical references
Later Archaeological excavations

44. Graeco-Babyloniaca Akkadian and Sumerian with Greek transliteration
Hellenistic period to Seleucid/Parthian
Teaching pronounciation
Religious/ritual texts