Mesopotamian roots

Your goal in this lesson: to know what the oldest Lilith-like evidence says, and to spot the claims that go beyond it.

The lilû spirits

Historical Mesopotamian incantations and medical-magical texts, from the third and second millennia BCE, name a group of spirits: the male lilû, the female lilītu and the ardat-lilî, “maiden of the lilû”. Their Sumerian names use the element líl, which can mean “wind”, “air” or “breath”, and by extension something ghostly.

The texts are fragmentary, but patterns recur. These spirits were linked with young people who died before they could marry or have children. Their ghosts were thought to roam restlessly and to trouble the living of their own age, often in sexual ways, a little like the incubi and succubi of later European folklore. They were also blamed for illnesses that baffled healers.

Is the Hebrew lilit the same word? Scholars debate it. It may come from these spirits, from the Semitic word for night (Hebrew laylah), or from both through confusion. Many think the Mesopotamian spirits at least shaped the later figure.

The phantom maid in Inanna’s tree

Historical The Sumerian poem Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, known from Old Babylonian copies of the early second millennium BCE, is often called the first Lilith story. In paraphrase: the goddess Inanna rescues a huluppu tree from the Euphrates and plants it in her garden in Uruk, hoping to make a chair and a bed from its wood. When it grows, a snake lives at its roots, the Anzud bird nests in its crown and a female being lives in its trunk. The hero Gilgamesh drives them out, and she flees to the wild.

That female being is called ki-sikil-lil-la. The Oxford Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature translates her as “the phantom maid”. Translators in the 1930s rendered the name “Lilith”, and that choice spread. Most specialists now treat her as the Sumerian counterpart of the ardat-lilî, a related spirit rather than Lilith herself.

Lamashtu

Historical Lamashtu was a fearsome female demon, called a daughter of the sky god Anu. Incantations say she attacked pregnant women, caused miscarriage and harmed newborns. Families protected themselves with amulets showing her being driven away, often with the wind demon Pazuzu as protector. Lamashtu is a separate figure. But her role, a threat to mothers and babies, is exactly the role later given to Lilith, and scholars see a link in function.

The Burney Relief

Historical The image most often printed as “ancient Lilith” is the Burney Relief, also called the Queen of the Night, a fired clay plaque in the British Museum, dated to about 1800 to 1750 BCE. It shows a winged female figure with bird talons, a horned headdress, a rod and ring in each hand, standing on two lions between two owls. The link to Lilith was first proposed in 1937. Today most specialists think she is a goddess, perhaps Inanna or Ereshkigal, because horned crowns mark deities in Mesopotamian art. I describe it in words only here. You can see it on the British Museum website.

Try this

Today’s exercise: write one sentence for each of these. What do we know about the lilû spirits? What is debated? What is a later guess? Keep the three sentences side by side. You will use the same three-step habit in every lesson.

Quick recap

• The lilû, lilītu and ardat-lilî are Mesopotamian night spirits.
• The phantom maid in Inanna’s tree is related to them, not clearly Lilith.
• Lamashtu shares the role of threatening mothers and babies.
• The Burney Relief probably shows a goddess, not Lilith.

Keep going

Press “Mark as done” and continue with Isaiah and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Need a refresher? Go back to Meeting Lilith or see the whole course.

Sources

• Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (University of Oxford), https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/
• British Museum, the Burney Relief (Queen of the Night), collection record.
• Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd enlarged edition (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).

Go deeper: the Lilith pages on this site

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