Gud-elim

Under the gate of a house in Babylon, in a brick-lined box packed into the floor, someone set a clay figure the length of a forearm. It had a man’s beard and a man’s shoulders and, below the waist, the hocks and hooves of a bull. The plaster on it was still tacky. Then the box was closed and the earth was tamped down over it and nobody in that household ever looked at the thing again. That was the point. It was not decoration. It was ordnance.

The Sumerians called him gud-alim, and the word is older and stranger than the picture. Written GU4.ALIM, it turns up in Akkadian as kusarikku, and what kusarikku actually means is bison: a real animal, or the memory of one, out on the edges of the world where herds are large and men are not. The bull-man that everyone recognises came afterward. The image is the second thing; the word came first. In the scribal lists he is set equal to GUD.DUMU.dUTU, the bull who is the child of the sun god, and to GUD.DUMU.AN.NA, the bull who is the child of heaven, which is a great deal of parentage for a creature whose whole recorded career consists of losing fights.

Look at him on a cylinder seal and the anatomy is exactly backwards from the one the Mediterranean would later make famous. This is not a bull’s head on a man. It is a man’s head, bearded, level-eyed, sitting on a man’s chest and arms, and then everything below the belt gives way to coarse hair, to haunches, to a switching tail and two hard hooves planted in the ground. Long horns curve out of the human skull. The ears are an ox’s ears. From the time of the kings of Ur he wears the tiara of stacked horns that Mesopotamian art reserved for gods, which means the scribes and the sculptors both thought of him as something more than an animal and less than safe. The record is not perfectly tidy about him. One omen in the birth-omen series describes a child born with the face of a kusarikku, which sounds like a bovine head on a human body, the opposite of every seal we have. The picture and the word do not quite line up.

What he does, when he is doing anything at all, is stand near the sun. The equations name him the sun god’s bull, and in the visual repertoire he is the creature associated with the far country the sun crosses, the mountains at the eastern rim where the light comes over. Dawn on those ridges is a physical event: the cold breaks, the air moves, the stone goes from grey to bronze in about a minute. He belongs to that hour and to that horizon, which is a long way from any doorway in Babylon.

Then Ninurta comes down out of the mountains and everything changes. In the Sumerian poem of his return to Nippur, the warrior god comes home from the highlands with his kills, and the list is given like an inventory: the Six-headed wild ram, the Warrior dragon, the Magilum boat, the Anzud bird, the Seven-headed serpent, and, out of the churned dust of the battlefield, the Bison. He brought forth the Bison from his battle dust. The chariot that carries him back to the city is a butcher’s cart. The Six-headed ram is lashed to the dust-guard, the dragon to the seat, the Anzud bird to the front guard, and the Bison hangs on the beam, swinging, while the axle creaks and the Anuna gods come out to stare.

Babylon told a colder version. In the creation epic, Tiamat, enraged past bargaining, builds an army out of her own body: she fills the monsters with poison instead of blood, clothes them in dread, loads them with an aura and makes them godlike. The Hydra, the Dragon, the Hairy Hero, the Great Demon, the Savage Dog, the Scorpion-man, the Fish-man, and the Bull-man. Eleven of that kind. They lose, and the manner of their losing is the most important thing that ever happened to any of them. Marduk breaks their weapons and binds them to his feet, and then he does something that is not cruelty and is not mercy either: he makes images of them and stations them at the Gate of the Apsu, to be a sign never to be forgotten.

That single line explains every bull-man ever set into a wall. The guardian at the door is a captured enemy. His terror is real, it is simply no longer his; it has been confiscated and mounted facing outward. The ritual texts follow the same logic with no poetry at all. One of them is titled, in the flat way of a manual, “to block the entry of the enemy in someone’s house”, and it instructs the exorcist to make two statues of the Bison, along with Furious-Snake and Big-Weather-Beast and the Mad-Lions and the Scorpion-Man, out of clay, clad in coloured paste, and to place them right and left in the gate. The words spoken over them are addressed to the figures directly. May anything evil and anything not good recede three thousand six hundred miles for fear of you.

He also went up into the sky. As mulGU4.ALIM he is one of the ten constellations named in the Old Babylonian prayers to the gods of the night, and the Hittites borrowed him too, as kusarihhu. A late star-list carves him up limb by limb, the head of the Bison, the middle of the Bison, his right leg, his left leg, his right hand, his left hand, a whole body pinned out across the stars. Where he is, nobody now agrees. Some put him in Ophiuchus and the front of Serpens, others in Centaurus, and one recent argument drags him south into Norma and Ara. The astronomers have been arguing about his address for a century.

His powers are the plain ones: bull strength, a divine aura of terror, and the standing of a god, since he is invoked in incantations and counted among the gods of Marduk’s temple. His weakness is more interesting, because it is structural. He is never the one who wins. Every narrative appearance has him already beaten, hanging from a chariot beam or roped at the ankles of a better god, and the protection he offers is nothing but the residue of that defeat. The clay figure in the box under the threshold is not a bodyguard. It is a receipt, buried where no one would ever see it, proving that the thing at your door has already been broken by someone stronger, and that whatever comes next will have to get past him first.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Gud-elim?

Gud-elim is the Mesopotamian bull-man, known in Sumerian as gud-alim and in Akkadian as kusarikku. He has the head, torso and arms of a bearded man and the horns, ears, hindquarters and hooves of a bull, and he stands upright. He appears in Sumerian and Babylonian poetry as a defeated chaos-creature and in art and ritual as a guardian of doorways.

Is Gud-elim the same as the Minotaur?

No, and the anatomy is the reverse. The Greek Minotaur is a bull’s head on a human body, while Gud-elim is a human head and torso on a bull’s lower body. Gud-elim is also far older, appearing in Mesopotamian art from the earliest periods, and his role is protective rather than predatory.

What does the name kusarikku mean?

Kusarikku is generally understood to mean bison, an animal rather than a monster, which suggests the word came before the hybrid image attached to it. The Sumerian equivalent, gud-alim or GU4.ALIM, likewise carries plain bovine meaning. Scribal lists also equate him with GUD.DUMU.dUTU, the bull who is the child of the sun god.

Why was Gud-elim placed at doors?

Because he lost. In the Babylonian creation epic, Marduk defeats the eleven monsters born of Tiamat, binds them at his feet, and sets images of them at the Gate of the Apsu as a sign never to be forgotten, and the bull-man is one of the eleven. Mesopotamian exorcists took the same logic into private houses, burying clay statues of the Bison and his fellow monsters in the gateways so that evil would turn back at the threshold.

Is Gud-elim a god, a demon or a monster?

He is treated as all three at different times. He wears the horned tiara of divinity in art, is listed among the gods of Marduk’s temple and named in incantations, yet he is also one of Tiamat’s war-monsters and a trophy hung on Ninurta’s chariot. Mesopotamian thought had no trouble with a beaten monster that was also, in its own right, a minor god.

Related Entries

Ninurta, Shamash, Anzû, Asag, Tiamat, Marduk, Kingu, Girtablilu, Urmahlullu, Sirrush, Lamassu, Shedu, Apkallu, Enkidu, Bull of Heaven