Asag (also Azag; Akkadian Asakku)

The fish came up dead first. They rose belly-pale to the surface and turned in the slack current, cooked through, though no fire had touched the water and the river ran down from snow. This was how the land learned that the Asag had come near. Wherever the demon passed, the channels began to steam, the marsh went sour, and everything that breathed felt the heat of him before they ever saw a shape. He did not need to strike. His nearness was the weapon.

He was born of the highest parents. The poem the Sumerians called Lugal-e names him the child of An, the sky, and Ki, the earth, which makes him kin to the very gods who would later hunt him down. The mountains raised him. He went up into the kur, the stone country at the edge of the known world, and there he mated with the rock itself and fathered a brood of stone, a whole generation of warriors quarried from the slopes. They crowned him king. An army of living stone gathered at his back, and the Asag turned his face toward the plain.

What he threatened was not only war but the unmaking of order. The waters that fed the fields of Sumer came down off those peaks, and the Asag could choke them or send them roaring loose. The crops failed in his shadow. The poem speaks of him with the language people reserve for disease, and that is no accident, because the demon and the sickness were the same thing under two names. In the incantations that outlived the epic, the asakku is the spirit that lays a man flat with fever in the skull, the burning behind the eyes that no poultice cools. Mothers hung amulets, inscribed with the right words, around the necks of the ill. The Asag was the dread that the mountains might come down into the body.

Word of him reached Ninurta, the young warrior god, the son of Enlil. Ninurta carried Sharur, a mace that could speak and fly, and it was Sharur, scouting ahead, that brought back the report of the demon’s strength and counseled retreat. The first clash went badly. The Asag raised a storm of dust that blotted the sun, and the god fell back. Only after Ninurta sent Sharur winging home to Enlil for counsel, and received his father’s word, did he turn and go at the monster again. This time he came with the flood and the storm-wind at his command. He broke the Asag’s army of stone and he broke the Asag, and the chaos that had boiled the rivers went still.

Then came the strange, patient work that makes this myth more than a slaying. Ninurta did not simply walk away from the corpse. He gathered the shattered stones of the demon’s defeated host and piled them into a great barrier, the range called Hursag, and he set it so that the meltwater and the springs no longer ran wild but were caught and guided. He turned the streams and lakes toward the Tigris and the Euphrates and laid them along the fields where farmers needed them. The same waters the Asag had poisoned and trapped were now harnessed to feed the plain. And he held court over the stones themselves, judging each kind for how it had acted in the war. The stones that had stood against him he cursed to be ground underfoot and crushed. The ones that had not he blessed with honor, with a place in the foundations of temples and the polish of fine things. The flint he doomed to shatter. The lapis and the carnelian he raised up.

His powers all run from what he is. A creature whose flesh is contagion poisons whatever he comes near, scalds the water, withers the grain, and seeds the burning fevers that the priests fought with ritual for centuries after. Command of the mountain gave him an army that needed no feeding, soldiers cut from the same rock that bore him. The waters answered him because he held the high ground where the waters were born.

His weakness ran from the same source. He was a creature of brute pressure, of heat and weight and number, and he met a god who fought with counsel as much as force. Ninurta lost the first round and won the second because he stopped to listen, sent his weapon to ask his father what to do, and came back prepared. The demon never adjusted. He had no second plan. He lost. And in the long tradition that followed the epic, the asakku that crept into human bodies could be driven out the same way the great Asag was beaten, not by matching its strength but by the right words said in the right order, the incantation, the amulet at the throat, the ritual that names a thing and so gains power over it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Asag in Mesopotamian mythology?

Asag is a monstrous demon from the Sumerian poem Lugal-e, the offspring of the sky god An and the earth goddess Ki. He is a chaos-monster associated with the mountains, and his defeat by the warrior god Ninurta is one of the central episodes of Sumerian myth. In Akkadian sources his name becomes Asakku, a demon of disease.

What does Asag do?

Asag spreads ruin simply by being present. His power is so hideous that it causes fish to boil alive in the rivers, blights the land, and disrupts the waters that irrigate the Mesopotamian plain. In the form of the asakku, he attacks human beings directly by causing burning fevers in the head.

How was Asag defeated?

Asag was defeated by Ninurta, the son of Enlil, who fought him with the storm and with his talking mace Sharur. After losing the first encounter, Ninurta sought counsel from his father Enlil and returned to destroy the demon and his army of stone warriors. In one variant tradition the Asag is defeated instead by the storm god Adad.

What happened after Asag was killed?

After killing Asag, Ninurta used the stones from the demon’s defeated army to build the mountain range called Hursag, organizing the waters so that streams and rivers flowed into the Tigris and Euphrates for irrigation. He then judged each type of stone for its conduct in the war, cursing the disloyal ones and honoring the faithful with places in temples and fine objects.

Is Asag the same as the Asakku?

Asag is the Sumerian name and Asakku is the Akkadian form, and researchers often treat them as the same figure. In magical texts the asakku is a demon, or a group of demons known as the Seven Asakku, who afflict humans with head fevers and were also said to have been defeated by Ninurta. The single chaos-monster of the Lugal-e and the disease-demons of the incantations belong to one tradition.

Related Entries

Ninurta, Asakku, Enlil, Anu (Mesopotamian), Anzû, Tiamat, Humbaba, Gud-elim, Girtablilu, Anunnaki, Apkallu, Gilgamesh