Humbaba

Also Known As: Akkadian; Sumerian Huwawa, also Ḫuwawa, Ḫumbaba
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Sumerian Mythology, Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He is armoured in seven auras, sometimes called terrors, which paralyse anything that comes near him and which are the whole of his strength.
Role in Mythos: Enlil set him in the Cedar Forest to keep it, and he keeps it until Gilgamesh and Enkidu take his head.
Relation to Humans: He is a dread laid on human beings, and men who go into his forest do not come out of it. He is also the only figure in the story who asks for mercy and is refused.

The first thing he would have heard was the axes. Not a voice, not a footfall, just the flat bite of bronze going into cedar somewhere down the slope, over and over, and behind it the sound of branches being dragged and stacked. The forest around him was never quiet. A recently recovered tablet fills in what the old copies had lost: the Cedar Forest rang all day with birds, with the sawing of cicadas, with monkeys howling in the canopy, and the guardian sat in the middle of that racket like a king being entertained at court. Then one morning the noise changed, and part of it was the sound of his trees coming down.

His name in Sumerian is Huwawa. The Babylonians called him Humbaba, and that is the name that stuck. Enlil put him in the Cedar Forest to be a terror to human beings and to keep the mountain of the gods from being logged, and gave him the equipment for the job: seven auras, rendered in some manuscripts as seven terrors, a wrapping of divine radiance that no one could get through. They are not armour in the ordinary sense. They are closer to atmosphere. Nobody who came within sixty times six yards of him got any further, and the Sumerian text is plain about what happens to anyone who tries. Fear went into the sinews and the feet. The toenails stuck to the path.

What he actually looked like is a question the ancient world answered twice. Enkidu, who had been in that forest before, described him to Gilgamesh in terms that are all mouth: a dragon’s maw, a lion’s grimace, a chest like a flood in spate, a brow that devours reed-beds, a man-eating lion that never wipes the blood from its own slaver. Centuries of Babylonian potters answered differently. They made small fired-clay masks of him, one of which sits in the British Museum, dug out of Sippar and modelled around 1800 BC, and the face on it is a single unbroken line coiling back and forth into a grin. It is a sheep’s gut. Diviners cut open animals to read the future in the coils of the intestines, and when the coils came up in that particular knotted pattern they had a name for it. They called it the face of Humbaba, and it meant revolution, upheaval, the fall of a ruling house. The mask in London was made by a diviner named Warad-Marduk. The Akkadian epic says, in one line that suddenly makes all of this cohere, that Humbaba’s face keeps changing.

The Sumerian version of his death is the stranger one, and the crueller. Gilgamesh, having crossed seven mountain ranges to find the cedars, is caught flat-footed when the guardian looks at him, and does the only thing left. He starts talking. He offers Huwawa his big sister as a wife in the mountains. He offers his little sister as a concubine. He offers flour, which is the food of the gods, and a waterskin of cool water, and big shoes for big feet, and tiny shoes for tiny feet, and rock-crystal and lapis lazuli out of the hills, and each time he asks the same thing in the same friendly voice: hand over your terrors, I want to be your kinsman. And each time Huwawa hands one over. Down at the foot of the hills, while this is going on, fifty men from Uruk are quietly stripping the branches off his trees.

He gave them away himself.

When the seventh terror is gone Gilgamesh walks straight up to him, makes as if to kiss him, and punches him in the face. They put a halter on him like a captured bull. Then Huwawa sits down in the ruins of his own authority and weeps, and says the thing that has kept scholars uncomfortable for a hundred years: he never knew a mother or a father, he was born in the mountains, the sun-god raised him. Gilgamesh takes pity and orders him released. Enkidu refuses. A captured bird does not go home, he says, and cuts Huwawa’s throat, and puts the head in a leather bag.

The Akkadian retelling is grimmer and more military. There the two heroes fight him, the mountains split under their heels, and the sun-god Shamash lets loose thirteen winds at once, the south wind and the north, the ice wind, the sandstorm, the whistling wind, the demon wind, until they have wrapped themselves around Humbaba’s face and he can neither push forward nor scramble back. Pinned, he bargains. He offers to become Gilgamesh’s servant, to cut as many trees as the king wants, to guard timber fine enough for a palace. Gilgamesh wavers. Enkidu tells him to finish it, and Humbaba, who has understood exactly what is happening, spends his last breath cursing the one who talked: may the two of them not grow old together, may Enkidu never have the better share. Then they open him up and pull out his insides, including his tongue. They fell the tallest cedar, cut it into a door seventy-two cubits high, and float it down the Euphrates to Nippur.

Enlil, when the head is tipped out of the bag in front of him, does not congratulate anyone. He wants to know why. Humbaba should have sat in front of them. He should have eaten their bread and drunk their water and been honoured. Then, since the auras have to go somewhere, he gives them away: the first to the fields, the second to the rivers, the third to the reed-beds, the fourth to the lions, the fifth to the palace, the sixth to the forests, and the seventh to Nungal, the goddess who keeps the prisons. The terror that used to live in one body is dispersed into the landscape, and it is still there, in the water and the reeds and the dark under the trees.

His powers were never really his own. The auras came from Enlil, the forest was Enlil’s property, and Humbaba was a fixture in it rather than a hero of it, which is why he has no parents and no myth of his own outside this one. He was unapproachable, unkillable, unbeatable in his own ground, and none of it survived contact with a man who was willing to lie to him. That is the shape of his weakness: he could be flattered, he could be bought, he could be persuaded to unbuckle his own defences one at a time in exchange for shoes. He also had a mouth on him, and used it to insult Enkidu at the worst possible moment, and Enkidu was the one holding the knife. The new tablet lines suggest the two of them had known each other when Enkidu was young in the wild. If so, the guardian of the Cedar Forest was killed by an old acquaintance who wanted to be sure the gods heard about it from him first.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Humbaba?

Humbaba, called Huwawa in Sumerian, is the guardian of the Cedar Forest in Mesopotamian myth, appointed to the post by the god Enlil and killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. He is protected by seven auras or terrors that make him impossible to approach, and his death is one of the central episodes of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

What did Humbaba look like?

Ancient descriptions of Humbaba are more about menace than anatomy: the Sumerian poem gives him a dragon’s maw, a lion’s grimace and a chest like a flood. The most concrete evidence is a series of Old Babylonian clay masks, one of them excavated at Sippar and now in the British Museum, which render his face as a single coiling line, the pattern of a sheep’s intestines. Diviners who found that pattern in a sacrificed animal read it as an omen of revolution.

How was Humbaba killed?

In the Akkadian epic the sun-god Shamash pins Humbaba down with thirteen winds so that Gilgamesh can reach him with his weapons, and after Humbaba begs for his life Enkidu insists on finishing him. In the older Sumerian poem Gilgamesh tricks him out of his seven terrors with gifts and false promises of kinship, then captures him, and Enkidu cuts his throat when Gilgamesh moves to let him go.

What are Humbaba’s seven auras?

The seven auras, also translated as terrors or radiances, are the divine protection Enlil gave Humbaba to make the Cedar Forest unenterable. They are the entire basis of his power, and once he surrenders them he is helpless. After his death Enlil distributes them across the world, giving them to the fields, the rivers, the reed-beds, the lions, the palace, the forests, and Nungal, the goddess of prisoners.

Was Humbaba a monster or a victim?

The texts themselves are divided, which is why the question keeps being asked. Humbaba is introduced as a terror set over human beings, but he weeps, pleads, points out that he was orphaned and raised by the sun-god, and offers to serve. Enlil’s reaction to seeing his severed head is fury at Gilgamesh, not gratitude, and newly recovered lines of Tablet V show the heroes themselves uneasy at having reduced the forest to a wasteland.