Lamashtu (Labartu)

Also Known As: now normally read Lamashtu; Akkadian Lamaštu, Sumerian Dimme; also called Pashittu, “the Exterminator”, and Daughter of Anu
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian Mythology, Sumerian Mythology, Mesopotamian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: A goddess in her own right, expelled from heaven for demanding human babies to eat, who kills infants and their mothers by poison and strangling and spreads fever and disease among adults.
Role in Mythos: She is the great child-snatching demoness of Mesopotamia, the named cause of miscarriage, stillbirth and cot death, and the single evil being against whom the Babylonians developed a complete ritual literature, an iconography and a mass-produced amulet industry.
Relation to Humans: She approaches women in childbirth and nursing mothers by posing as a midwife or wet nurse, asking for their sons to suckle and their daughters to nurse, and then takes the child. Households answered with amulets at the bedhead, clay watchdogs at the thresholds, chains of stones around the baby’s neck and wrists, and a three-day rite that gave her food, a comb, a spindle and transport out of the city.

The bronze plaque is smaller than a hand, and the whole underworld is on it. At the top, the symbols of the gods. Below them, seven demons with the heads of panthers and rams and raptors. Below them, a sick man flat on a bed with two priests in fish-skin cloaks stooping over him. And at the bottom, in the river register, the thing everyone in that room was afraid of: a hybrid woman kneeling on a donkey in a little boat, a serpent writhing in each fist, a puppy at one breast and a piglet at the other, being pushed downstream and out of the world. Behind the plaque, gripping the top edge with both hands and peering over it into the room, is Pazuzu. He is there to make sure she keeps going.

She is the only Mesopotamian demon who ever got a face. The others come in vague sevens, interchangeable, barely distinguished from one another in the incantations. She has a personality, a family, a biography, a wardrobe of fixed epithets and a recognizable way of working, and the fear she generated left an archaeological trail: some eighty-five figurative amulets, a canonical three-tablet ritual series six hundred lines long, incantations in Sumerian, Old Babylonian and Old Assyrian, clay dogs buried under doorways, and a small mould for stamping her image out in quantity.

She is a daughter of Anu, the god of heaven, and a sister of Ishtar, which makes her a high-ranking goddess, and the incantations keep insisting on this. Her name is written with the divine determinative. The trouble is her disposition. She was singular among the gods, the texts say, in the sense of being unlike them, and she made a proposal to her father that could not be forgiven: she wanted human flesh, specifically babies, for her dinner. Anu threw her out of heaven. She has been on earth ever since, and everything she does here is the consequence of that expulsion rather than any job the gods gave her. That is exactly why a Babylonian could pray against her. She is not doing her duty. She is an accident that got loose.

One older tradition disagrees, and it is worth knowing. In the Atrahasis myth, after the flood, the gods reorganize humanity on stricter terms and appoint the Exterminator, Pashittu, one of her names, to snatch the baby from the lap of the woman who bore it, as a check on population. In that version she is not a bad apple. She is policy.

Her trick is a job interview. Bring me your sons, she says, that I may suckle them, and your daughters, that I may nurse them, let me put my breasts in your daughters’ mouths. She is no midwife, but she bandages. She is no physician, but she wipes the newborn clean. She counts the months of every pregnant woman one by one, keeping a tally scratched on the wall, and she blocks the gate of the woman in labour. She learned the craft in heaven, an Old Babylonian incantation says, where Ea educated her. It has been turned inside out. One text calls her breasts a weapon.

When she has the child, she kills it with venom or with her hands. Her grip is a net. Her fingers are long and her nails are longer, and the incantation describing her entry through the front door and her seizure of the baby says she grasped him in his belly seven times, once for each of her seven names. She lies in wait like a wolf and sniffs out the trail of her victims. Her passing leaves physical evidence, which the omen priests learned to read: roads become impassable, branches tear from the trees, water turns cloudy, mud appears smeared behind the walls of houses. She carries heat and cold in her hand. She is a dagger that splits the skull, which is to say a headache, and she is fever, and jaundice, and the yellow face and the altered features of a dying child. Babies and small children are her favourites, but the amulets show she took adults too. One surviving amulet was made for a bearded man.

Nobody could ever agree on what she looked like, and the disagreement is itself informative. The head is a lion’s, or a dog’s, or a wolf’s, or a bird of prey’s, or a snake’s. Her face is that of an Anzu bird. Her teeth are a donkey’s teeth, her hair hangs loose, her breasts are bared, she is spotted like a leopard or scaled like a fish, sometimes winged, rarely tailed. What stays constant on the Bronze Age amulets is the posture, arms flung wide, fingers spread and empty, and the objects floating in the field around her that identify her without being held: a comb, a spindle, a puppy, a piglet, occasionally a scorpion, a snake, the lower leg of a donkey. Her feet are talons. Her evil eye is a separate creature, flying loose around the house, setting the toddlers quarrelling. By the Iron Age the image settles into the one on the Louvre plaque, and only then does she start gripping the snakes herself.

Between attacks she is out past the edge of the settled world, in the desert, the canebrake, the mountains, where she lives with the animals and is a kind of mistress of them, and where the incantations keep trying to send her back: climb your mountain like a wild ass. Play midwife for the beasts of the steppe. Behind seven rivers and seven mountain chains and stay there.

Against a goddess, no one is going to win a fight. So the Babylonians did not fight her, they evicted her. The exorcist made three clay figurines, one for each of her three commonest names, Lamashtu, Daughter of Anu, and Dimme, and worked on them for three days while the house filled with smoke from the fumigations. The first figurine he married to a black dog and buried in a corner of the city wall. The second he equipped like a departing traveller, with food, an oil jar, a comb, a spindle and the means of transport, and sent out through the desert and across the river Ulaya to her mountain home. The third he stabbed to death with a thorn and buried in the wall like the first. Meanwhile the child wore chains of amuletic stones on his neck and hands and feet, and a clay cylinder seal inscribed with her seven names, because knowing the names is the whole of the power. At the head of the bed hung the plaque, and at every threshold in the house sat little clay dogs with their orders written on their flanks: chase away the daughter of Anu. Stand watch during the night. Do not fail at your watch.

The name at the top of this page is itself a fossil of the same anxiety, transmitted through scholarship rather than magic. When David Myhrman published the first large edition of her incantations as a Leipzig doctoral dissertation in 1902, he called them the Labartu texts, and Thureau-Dangin was still writing about rituals and amulets against Labartu in 1921. The cuneiform is now read Lamaštu, and Walter Farber’s 2014 edition of the canonical series settles the matter. The Louvre catalogues her as Lamashtu and lists Thureau-Dangin’s Labartu in its own bibliography, one shelf below. She has been thrown out of heaven once and out of the dictionary once, and she is still on the plaque, still holding the snakes, still going down the river.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Labartu?

Labartu is the child-killing demoness of ancient Mesopotamia, better known today as Lamashtu. She was a daughter of the sky god Anu and a goddess in her own right, expelled from heaven after demanding human babies to eat, and she was blamed for miscarriage, stillbirth, cot death and childbed fever across more than a thousand years of Babylonian and Assyrian record.

Is Labartu the same as Lamashtu?

Yes. Labartu is an older Assyriological reading of the same cuneiform name, used by David Myhrman in his 1902 edition of her incantations and by François Thureau-Dangin in 1921. Assyriology now reads the name Lamaštu, or Lamashtu in English spelling, and that is the form used in Walter Farber’s standard 2014 edition and in museum catalogues.

What did Labartu look like?

The texts describe her with the head of a lion or a dog, the face of an Anzu bird, donkey’s teeth, loose hair, bared breasts, a body spotted like a leopard and the talons of a bird of prey instead of feet. The early amulets vary wildly, especially the head, but by the first millennium she is shown kneeling on a donkey in a boat, holding a snake in each hand and suckling a piglet and a puppy.

How did people protect themselves from Labartu?

Households hung a bronze amulet at the head of the bed, tied chains of stones and a clay seal inscribed with her seven names to the baby, and placed clay watchdogs at the doorways. The full exorcism ran three days: three clay figurines of the demoness were made, one married to a black dog and buried in the city wall, one given food and travel gear and sent away across the river to her mountain home, and one stabbed with a thorn and buried.

Why is Pazuzu shown with Labartu?

Pazuzu is the demon invoked to drive Labartu away, and on the famous Louvre plaque his head appears in relief on the reverse, gripping the top of the plaque and looking over it into the sickroom, while a smaller Pazuzu inside the scene chases her downriver. He is not her opposite so much as her match, an evil thing enlisted against a worse one.