Labbu

Also Known As: Akkadian *labbu*, a poetic word for “lion”; called MUŠ, “serpent,” in its own text, and sometimes read *kalbu*, which is why the poem is occasionally listed as the Kalbu Myth
Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Akkadian/Assyrian/Babylonian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A sea-born dragon of colossal recorded dimensions, named a serpent in one line of its poem and a lion six lines later.
Role in Mythos: It is the adversary of a broken Akkadian combat poem in which the god Tishpak kills it with one arrow and is offered kingship over the land he saves.
Relation to Humans: The poem opens on emptied cities and a falling population, and the creature is the likeliest cause of both. No mortal acts anywhere in the surviving text, and the rescue is arranged entirely between gods.

In water nine cubits deep it still dragged. The scribe who set that line down was not reaching for a metaphor, he was giving a figure, the way frightened people give figures, and he kept going. Fifty bēru from end to end. A full bēru across. Six cubits of open mouth, ears twelve cubits around, and at sixty cubits it could take a bird out of the air. When it raised its tail, the tail swept the sky.

Every one of those numbers sits on a tablet with its edges gone. The myth survives on a single piece of clay from the libraries of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, catalogued as CT 13.33-34, and not one line on it is complete. What is left is a beginning and an end with the middle torn out, so the story arrives already in pieces: cities in distress, a monster, a reluctant god, a bowshot, and blood that would not stop.

The opening is a catalogue of collapse. The cities are distraught. The lands are thrown into confusion. The nations decreased in number, all of them in upheaval. People cry out, and nothing in the surviving text comes to answer them. Then a question from someone whose name did not make it through the damage. Who created the serpent? The answer takes one line. Sea created the serpent.

Sea, *tamtu*, the salt water, is a dependable mother of monsters in this literature, and nobody in the poem sounds surprised. Enlil’s part is the strange one. Line seven has him drawing or designing the creature’s form up in heaven, and what that means has never been agreed. Jean Bottéro and Samuel Noah Kramer suggested it is an origin story for the constellation the Babylonians called the Dragon, which would make the night sky the monster’s blueprint. Frans Wiggermann read it as Enlil commissioning the thing outright.

This is where accounts of Labbu usually go wrong. Thorkild Jacobsen, restoring the broken opening on the model of Atrahasis, took the people’s clamour for noise that kept Enlil from sleeping, which would make the dragon a cull ordered against a species that talked too much at night. It is a tidy reading and it has been repeated for the better part of a century. Wiggermann took it apart. The cries in those lines are cries of distress, the distress is caused by the dragon, and a monster cannot be the punishment for an outcry it is already causing. Wiggermann’s own restoration has Enlil angered instead by the absence of a divine ruler. The tablet itself says only that Enlil designed the creature. It gives him no anger, no motive, and it never says he sent it.

What the thing looked like depends on which word you follow. Twice it is MUŠ, serpent, flatly. Six other times it is a *labbu*, which in poetry means lion. Alexander Heidel settled on a composite with leonine and serpentine attributes, and Benjamin Foster’s translation simply says lion-serpent. Wiggermann proposed that *labbu* is not a species at all but an epithet, the raging one. Wilfred Lambert wondered whether the sign group should be read *kalbu*, *ribbu* or *tanbu* instead. The creature has ears, a liftable tail, and the reach to pluck birds from the sky, none of which is particularly snake-like, and it is fifty bēru long, a unit the translators put in quotation marks because nobody wants to commit to what it was.

In the shallows the coil moves without hurry, reeds bending aside along its length, brown water sheeting off the back where the back breaks the surface. Something small comes in low over the marsh. The head goes up, and the marsh is quiet again.

In heaven the gods bowed down and took hold of a god’s robe by the hem. Whose robe is a matter of restoration. Heidel and the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary read Sin, the moon, with one reconstruction adding that Sin’s face had gone dark behind the edge of his own garment. Wiggermann restores Aruru. Bottéro and Kramer restore Ea. The gesture survives. The god it was made to does not.

The question they ask is the one these poems always ask. Who will go and kill the raging dragon, deliver the wide land, and exercise kingship afterwards? The name that comes back is Tishpak.

Tishpak was chief god of Eshnunna in the Diyala valley, and he held the post because he had taken it from somebody else. Before him the city belonged to Ninazu, a chthonic god of snakes, and Wiggermann reads the entire myth as that succession written up as theology: an Old Akkadian political fact converted into a dragon and a bowshot, so that Tishpak’s rule arrives as a gift from a grateful divine council rather than as a seizure. The kingship on offer here, he notes, is not rule over the gods, the prize Marduk wins in the Enuma Elish. It is rule over the nation the victor saves.

Tishpak does not want it. His reply is one of the more human lines in Akkadian literature. You have sent me against the offspring of River, and I am not familiar with the raging dragon’s ways. Then the tablet breaks.

When it resumes, a god whose name is lost is giving instructions. Burst open the clouds and make a violent storm. The seal of your life before you. Shoot, and kill the raging dragon. The seal is the puzzle. Jacobsen took the cylinder seal of the throat for thunder. Wiggermann reads it as your very own seal. Bottéro and Kramer pointed out that a cylinder seal is a weighted lump of stone on a cord, that it can be swung, and that Rimush, the son of Sargon, was said to have been beaten to death by his own officials with exactly that. Nobody knows.

Tishpak does as he is told, and the poem repeats the instructions back as action, line for line, in the way of its kind. He burst open the clouds and made a violent storm. The seal of his life before him. He shot, and killed the raging dragon. One arrow was enough. Then the last two lines that survive: for three years and three months, a day and a night, the blood of the raging dragon flowed. Under them sits the colophon of the palace of Ashurbanipal, and the tablet ends.

Whatever powers Labbu had were scale and origin. It is a piece of the sea given a body and set down in a country of rivers, canals and standing water, and the damage shows in the poem’s first two lines rather than in any scene of attack. A separate Assyrian fragment describes a close cousin, a *bašmu* sixty bēru long, also born in the sea, and that text is more specific about appetite: it ate fish, then birds, then wild asses, then people, and the gods sent Nergal, or Palil, after it. That fragment is not this one. It is its own composition, usually called Nergal and the serpent, and Labbu’s story is not a variant of it. They are two tellings of a shape the region liked telling.

Against all of that, Labbu is a limited thing. It has no speech in the surviving lines, no cunning, no second body, no bargain to offer. It does not appear to want anything. Its entire defence is its size, and size turns out to be the easiest quality in the world to shoot at. A god who admitted he did not know what he was fighting was told what to do once, by somebody else, and got it right on the first attempt.

What the poem left behind was a template. Sea bears a monster, the gods lose their nerve, a storm-armed champion goes out and comes back a king. Tiamat and Marduk run on it, so do Baal against Yamm and the Hittite Illuyanka, and J. J. M. Roberts went as far as proposing that the name itself belongs to that family, connecting *labbu* to Ugaritic *ltn* and Hebrew *lwytn* through a root meaning to coil or encircle, which would make the creature the twisting one and a relative of Leviathan. Theodore Lewis doubts it, on the grounds that *labbu* in this text is never written with the long vowel such a reading needs. The argument has not been settled. What is left of Labbu is a set of measurements, an arrow, and a stain that took three years and three months to dry.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Labbu?

Labbu is a sea-born dragon from an Akkadian combat myth, called a serpent in one line of the text and a lion, *labbu*, in six others. The poem gives it enormous dimensions, fifty bēru long and one bēru across, with ears twelve cubits around and a tail that sweeps the sky. Scholars have described it as a composite lion-serpent rather than a simple snake.

Who killed Labbu?

Tishpak, the chief god of Eshnunna in the Diyala valley, kills Labbu with a single arrow. He refuses the task at first, saying he is not familiar with the dragon’s ways, and only succeeds after another god whose name is lost on the tablet instructs him to burst open the clouds, raise a storm, hold the seal of his life before him, and shoot.

Where did Labbu come from?

The text says Sea created the serpent, and adds that Enlil drew or designed its form in heaven. It does not say why. The widely repeated claim that Enlil made Labbu to destroy a humanity whose noise disturbed his sleep is a modern restoration by Thorkild Jacobsen based on the Atrahasis epic, and Frans Wiggermann argued against it on the grounds that the outcry in the poem is caused by the dragon rather than being the reason for it.

How complete is the Labbu myth?

Very little of it survives. The myth is known from one damaged tablet from the libraries of Ashurbanipal, catalogued as CT 13.33-34, and not a single line on it is complete. Only the beginning and the end are preserved, so almost every vivid detail in any retelling of Labbu rests on a scholarly reconstruction of broken text.

Is Labbu the same as Leviathan?

No source makes them the same creature, but a connection has been proposed. J. J. M. Roberts linked the name *labbu* to Ugaritic *ltn* and Hebrew *lwytn*, Lotan and Leviathan, through a root meaning to coil or encircle, which would give a sense of “the twisting one.” Theodore Lewis rejected the link because *labbu* is never spelled in this text with the long vowel the proposal requires.