Girtablilu

The heat comes off the rock before the light does. Mount Mashu stands twin-peaked at the edge of the map, its roots pushed down into the land of the dead and its summits scraping the underside of heaven, and each morning the doors set into its flank are hauled open so that the sun can climb out and begin work. The things that open them have a man’s face and a man’s beard and a man’s arms, and behind that the taloned hindquarters of a bird and a scorpion’s tail curled up over the back, held ready, glossy as wet horn.

The Sumerian name is a plain compound: gír-tab, scorpion, and lú-ùlu, untamed man. The Akkadians said girtablullû, and also aqrabu amēlu, which means the same thing with the same lack of ceremony. Mesopotamian scribes were not poets when it came to naming monsters. They looked at what was in front of them and wrote it down.

Gilgamesh met a pair of them, and the encounter is the reason anybody remembers the creature at all. He came to Mashu half mad with grief for Enkidu, having decided that death was a thing that could be argued with, and found the gate held. The text does not soften them. Trembling terror they inspire, it says, and the sight of them is death, and their frightening aura sweeps over the mountains. The male one spoke first, and what he said was not a challenge but an observation, called across to his wife: the one who comes to us, his body is the flesh of gods. She corrected him. Two-thirds of him is a god, one-third is human. That is the whole texture of the scene. Two guardians on a doorstep at the end of the world, quietly disagreeing about the composition of the man in front of them, while the man himself stands there with terror all over his face and does not run.

Then he told them why he had come, and they warned him that no mortal had ever crossed, that the road under the mountain runs twelve leagues in a darkness so thick it gives you nothing ahead of you and nothing behind. He said he would go anyway. They let him through. He walked eleven leagues in the dark with the north wind licking at his face and came out on the twelfth into a garden where the trees carried lapis lazuli for leaves and the fruit was carnelian.

They were not born doorkeepers. That was a sentence. In the Babylonian creation epic Tiamat, made furious by the killing of her consort, breeds an army out of her own body to destroy the younger gods, and the scorpion-man is one of the eleven she makes, listed there between the savage dog and the fish-man. The army loses. Marduk breaks their weapons, binds the eleven to his feet as trophies, and then does something stranger and more lasting: he makes images of them and stations the images at the Gate of the Apsû, to be a sign never to be forgotten. The monster is defeated, carved, and nailed to a doorway. Everything the scorpion-man does for the rest of Mesopotamian history he does from that position.

He does it in a bewildering number of shapes. The oldest scorpion hybrids, going back to around 2500 BCE, are recognized not by their bodies but by their posture: arms or pincers stretched above the head, holding something up. A throne. The rim of a vessel. The winged disc of the sun. Underneath is an older idea still, of the scorpion as a cosmic functionary that handles the heavenly bodies with its claws and sees to it that the sun rises and sets on time. Later, two more forms separate out. One keeps a full scorpion or bird body and stands on lion feet, and it is frankly horrible, and it is meant to be. The other is the classic girtablullû, human to the hips, and it turns up everywhere in the first millennium, most thickly between the eighth and sixth centuries. That one usually holds its hands in the karābu gesture, the greeting pose used by the little house gods who stood by doors. The most frightening doorman in the ancient Near East is, on inspection, waving you in.

The scale of him swings wildly with the medium. In the Louvre there is a limestone scorpion-man cut for the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud in the ninth century BCE, and he stands over two metres tall. In the British Museum there is a pair of them carved in jasper on a Neo-Elamite stamp seal, and they are under three centimetres, small enough to lose in a fold of cloth. He appears on palace reliefs, on temple gates, on cylinder seals, on thrones and furniture, on musical instruments, on the boundary stones that recorded land grants and were meant to terrify anyone who thought about moving a marker. He assists Shamash, whose doors he keeps, and he attends Ishtar, who in one of her aspects was represented by a scorpion outright. The animal itself was burned so its ashes could be ground into protective drawings, which is the same logic scaled down: take the thing that kills you, and set it facing outward.

His powers follow from his sentence and from the ground he stands on. He has the aura, which is a weapon in itself and does its work before he moves. He has the doors of the sun, and can open them or leave them shut. He carries the sting, though no story records him using it, which may be the most eloquent thing about him. And having once served chaos, he is uniquely qualified to recognize it coming and to turn it back at the threshold.

His limits are just as plain. He was beaten, disarmed, bound and carved, and the carving is the point: he is stationed. He belongs to a doorway and does not leave it, which means the whole of his terror operates in a band about a metre deep. He is not a hunter. He has no myth in which he pursues anyone, no tale of a scorpion-man loose in a city. And he can be reasoned with. Gilgamesh, a man with nothing left to lose and a good line in argument, walked up to a creature whose glance was supposed to kill him, made his case, and was waved through the gate.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Girtablilu?

A Girtablilu, or girtablullû, is the scorpion-man of ancient Mesopotamian myth: a hybrid with the head, torso and arms of a bearded man, the hindquarters and talons of a bird, and a scorpion’s tail. It appears in Akkadian-language texts including the Babylonian creation epic Enūma Eliš and the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, and it is common in Assyrian and Babylonian art of the first millennium BCE.

Where do the scorpion-men appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

A male and female pair guard the gate of Mount Mashu, the twin-peaked mountain through which the sun rises and sets. Gilgamesh meets them on his journey to find Utnapishtim, and the text says their terror is awesome and the sight of them is death. They question him, warn him that the road beneath the mountain runs twelve leagues in total darkness, and then open the gate and let him pass.

Why was the Girtablilu created?

In the Enūma Eliš, the scorpion-man is one of eleven monsters bred by the primordial goddess Tiamat to fight the younger gods. Marduk defeats them, breaks their weapons and binds them to his feet, then makes images of them and stations those images at the Gate of the Apsû as a permanent sign. That defeat is what turned a creature of chaos into a guardian of doorways.

Is the scorpion-man evil?

No. Despite being born on the losing side of the war in heaven, the girtablullû was treated as a protective figure. Assyrian and Babylonian artists carved it at palace gates, temple entrances, thrones and boundary stones precisely so that its terrifying appearance would turn demons and evil away, and the human-bodied form is usually shown with its hands raised in a welcoming gesture.

What did the Girtablilu actually look like?

There was no single form. The oldest scorpion hybrids, from around 2500 BCE, are identified by their pose, with arms or pincers raised to support the sun-disc or a throne. A second type keeps a full scorpion or bird body on lion feet. The classic first-millennium girtablullû is human from the waist up, wearing the horned cap of divinity, with wings, bird hindquarters and talons, a serpent-headed phallus, and a scorpion’s tail.

Related Entries

Tiamat, Marduk, Kingu, Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Utnapishtim, Humbaba, Shamash, Ishtar, Ninurta, Sirrush, Pazuzu, Lamassu, Shedu, Apkallu, Utukku