Gula

A dog lies under the ramp. Then another beside it, and another, more than thirty of them in the earth below the approach to the great temple at Isin, laid down over the years by people whose names nobody wrote. Some of the animals had broken bones that had knitted. Some were plainly ill when they died. Worshippers walking up to the house of the healing goddess passed over them every day, with the smell of river mud and baked brick in the air and the sound of barking somewhere inside the precinct.

The goddess they were climbing toward was Gula. Her name first appears in the records of the Third Dynasty of Ur, near the end of the third millennium BCE, and nobody is certain what it means. Babylonian scribes heard the Sumerian word for great in it, which suited her, and may or may not be right. She had a second name, Ninkarrak, which probably means Lady of Kar, and a long list of titles that describe the work: lady of health, great healer of the land, great physician of the black-headed people, grower of herbs, the one who makes the broken whole again.

Her family was arranged with a certain civic tact. Every account makes her a daughter of Anu, the sky. Her husband depended on the city. At Isin she was married to Pabilsag, at Nippur to Ninurta, at Lagash to Ningirsu, and at Umma to Shara, each of them the local warrior god. The physician goes home to the soldier in every town. Her children carried on the practice: Damu, who shared her title of great healer, Ninazu, and Gunura.

She was also several goddesses at once. Ninisina, the Lady of Isin, was an older healer with her own hymns and her own sharpened scalpel. Nintinugga worked at Nippur. Baba belonged to Lagash. In the early second millennium BCE these figures were steadily read as one, and by the time the Kassite kings ruled Babylonia it was Gula’s name that had absorbed the rest. Her popularity climbed sharply in those centuries and held through the first millennium, with three temples each at Babylon, Borsippa and Assur.

The longest portrait of her is a hymn of two hundred lines linked to a man named Bullutsa-rabi, probably composed in the Kassite period. In it the goddess speaks for herself. She goes through her own names one after another, and with each one she praises herself and then praises the husband attached to that name. She says outright that she is a physician and knows how to heal. She describes carrying her herbs with her, a bag of spells that work, bandages for a wound, and a touch that brings a dying man back. At the end the poem turns, and asks her to look kindly on Bullutsa-rabi himself. It is a prayer wearing a very grand coat.

On an ordinary day her house did not work like a hospital. No text shows patients being treated inside it. The healing happened at home, where a practitioner mixed plant remedies and recited incantations that called on her as the lady of health. The temple was for asking and for thanks. A woman with a pain in her side might bring a small terracotta figure of a person clutching the same place, press it into the hands of a priest, and go back out into the heat. A man who had recovered brought a clay dog, sometimes with a short prayer scratched into it. In the Neo-Babylonian period people also sought her in sleep, hoping she would appear in a dream.

The dog is her animal everywhere. Old Babylonian clay plaques already show a seated figure with a dog. Kassite boundary stones carve her on her throne with the animal stretched at her feet, and one Assyrian stamp seal sets the throne directly on the dog’s back. The temple complex at Isin included a building whose name means dog house, raised by King Enlil-bani in the nineteenth century BCE. Why the dog, nobody recorded. Guesses include the way a dog licks a wound clean and the plain fact of a guard animal at the door. The dogs under the ramp may have been sacrificed, or they may have been strays the temple looked after until they died. The bones do not say.

There was another side to her, and kings relied on it. Gula knew every disease, which meant she could send one. When Hammurabi closed his laws with a list of curses on anyone who defaced the monument, he called on Ninkarrak, daughter of Anu, to put a fever and a festering wound into that man’s body, a sore that no physician could understand or soothe with dressings, until it finished him. Later rulers copied the idea in their treaties and on their boundary stones, and her dogs appear in those curses beside her. One description calls her a queen whose storm makes heaven and earth shake. The Ninisina hymns she inherited speak of the scalpel as something that can also tear flesh.

So her power was knowledge of the body, complete and in both directions. She grew the herb, knew the spell, bound the wound, raised the nearly dead. She could keep a sore open as easily as she could close one.

Her limits are written into the same record. She has almost no stories. Other gods fight monsters and go down to the underworld, and Gula appears mostly in prayers, remedies and oaths, which is where a doctor would be. Her cures needed human hands and the right plant. And she could be outranked by the thing she fought: the texts that call on her were written by people who were still sick.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Gula in Mesopotamian mythology?

Gula is the Mesopotamian goddess of healing, called the great physician of the land. She is a daughter of the sky god Anu and the patron of doctors, herbs and medical incantations. Her worship is first recorded in the Third Dynasty of Ur and lasted through the first millennium BCE.

Why is Gula associated with dogs?

The dog was Gula’s sacred animal, and she is usually shown seated on a throne with a dog at her feet. Her temple complex at Isin had a building called the dog house, and more than thirty dogs were buried beneath the ramp leading to it. No ancient text explains the link, so whether it comes from dogs licking wounds or from their role as guards is not known.

Who was Gula’s husband?

Gula’s husband changed from city to city. She was the wife of Pabilsag at Isin, Ninurta at Nippur, Ningirsu at Lagash and Shara at Umma, all of them local warrior gods. Her children were the healing deities Damu, Ninazu and Gunura.

Are Gula and Ninisina the same goddess?

Gula and Ninisina began as separate healing goddesses and were merged in the early second millennium BCE. Ninisina was the Lady of Isin, and Nintinugga of Nippur and Baba of Lagash were folded into Gula in the same way. From the Kassite period onward, Gula was the name that covered all of them.

Could Gula cause disease as well as cure it?

Yes. Kings invoked Gula in curses because a goddess who understood every illness could also inflict one. Under her name Ninkarrak, the laws of Hammurabi ask her to give anyone who damages the monument a fever and a wound that no physician can treat.

Related Entries

Ninurta, Anu (Mesopotamian), Enlil, Inanna, Ishtar, Enki, Marduk, Ningishzida, Lamashtu (Labartu), Pazuzu, Asclepius, Sekhmet, Dian Cécht, Babalú-Ayé