Scorpion People

The heat comes off the twin peaks before the sun does. Long before first light reaches the plain, the mountain called Mashu already burns at its summit, and two shapes stand in the gap between the peaks where the gate is set. From the waist up they are men, bearded, crowned, their arms thick as a smith’s. Below that they are scorpion, a segmented trunk ending in a tail that curves over the back with the sting held ready, and where a man would have feet they have the clawed toes of a bird. To look at them directly is said to kill.

Their brilliance is the first problem. The old lines say their terror is frightful and their glare is death, that the radiance of the pair overwhelms the mountains themselves. They keep this watch without rest. From the moment the sun leaves the country of the dead in the east to the moment it sinks back through the western gate, the scorpion-folk stand over its passage, and the light that pours off them is part of the sun’s own light, borrowed and dangerous.

They were not always doorkeepers. In the Babylonian poem of creation, when the sea-mother Tiamat set out to destroy the younger gods for the killing of her husband Apsu, she bred an army to fight for her. Eleven kinds of monster came out of that rage: venomous snakes, a great dragon, a lion-headed storm demon, a bull-man, a fish-man, and among them the scorpion-man, girtablullû in the Akkadian. Marduk broke that army when he split Tiamat’s body to make the sky and the ground. What became of her surviving brood the poem does not spell out, but by the time the scorpion-folk appear again they are no longer soldiers of chaos. They are sentries of the sun. The texts that survive do not narrate the change. The creatures simply stand on the other side of it, keeping the order they were made to overthrow.

How they looked was never quite fixed. Carvers set them on boundary stones and among palace guardians across Mesopotamia for well over a thousand years, and the body shifted with the century. Sometimes the whole lower half is scorpion. Sometimes a human torso rises from a bird’s body and only the arched tail and the clawed feet mark the scorpion in them. Often the figure draws a bow, one arrow nocked, the horned cap of a divine being on his head. One reading of the oldest images has the creature using its pincers as instruments of the sky, reaching up to move the sun and moon and stars along their tracks. Whatever the shape, the scorpion never left it, and neither did the tie to the heavens.

The most famous of them keep a gate that only one living man ever asked to pass. Gilgamesh, two-thirds god and sick with grief and the fear of his own death, walked east until the world ran out and the mountain rose in front of him. The scorpion-man saw him coming and called across to his mate. The one who approaches, he said, the flesh of his body is the flesh of gods. She looked and answered plainly: two-thirds of him was divine, one-third was human. They let him come close, these things whose glance was supposed to be death, and they asked him why a man would travel so far, over such mountains, on a road no mortal had walked.

He told them. He was going to Utnapishtim, the one man who had lived through the flood and been given life without end, to learn how a person might not die. The scorpion-man did not mock him and did not stop him. He warned him instead. The path ahead ran clean through the mountain, the road the sun itself travels between setting and rising, and no one had ever gone that way. Twelve leagues of it, and every league total darkness, no light ahead and none behind. Then he opened the gate. Gilgamesh went in and ran through the black, hour after hour with the sun’s heat gathering at his back, until on the twelfth league the dark broke and he came out into a garden where the fruit on the trees was cut from carnelian and lapis.

Their power is mostly a kind of pressure. They do not chase and they do not hunt. They hold a threshold, and the threshold they hold is the seam between the day-world and the country of the dead beneath it. Their radiance can flatten a mountain range and kill a man who meets their eyes, which is a strange gift for a doorkeeper and a useful one. Bound up with the sun, they carry something of its authority; on the boundary stones they guard property and sworn oaths the way they guard the mountain, and the small figurines of them buried at doorways were set to turn back whatever evil tried to come through.

For all that, they are servants. Whatever they were under Tiamat, the scorpion-folk end as subordinates, keeping someone else’s door on someone else’s schedule, fixed to the post that the sun’s passage assigns them. Their menace is real, but it is also leashed. When a grieving king with a little god in his blood asked to go through, the terror that was death to behold talked with him, weighed what he was, and stepped aside. A guardian who can be reasoned past is only as strong as the rule he keeps. What they cannot do is choose. The gate opens for the sun whether they will it or not, and it opened for Gilgamesh because two-thirds of him outranked them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Scorpion People in Mesopotamian mythology?

The Scorpion People, called girtablullû in Akkadian, are composite guardian beings with a human head, torso, and arms and the body and stinging tail of a scorpion. In myth they watch over the gate of Mount Mashu, the mountain through which the sun-god Shamash rises and sets each day.

What do the Scorpion People do in the Epic of Gilgamesh?

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a scorpion-man and his mate guard the gate of Mount Mashu when Gilgamesh arrives on his search for immortality. They recognize that he is part divine, question his journey, warn him that the road through the mountain is twelve leagues of total darkness, and then open the gate to let him pass.

Where did the Scorpion People come from?

According to the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, the scorpion-man was one of eleven kinds of monster created by the sea-goddess Tiamat to fight the younger gods. After Marduk defeated Tiamat’s army, the Scorpion People later appear as guardians of the sun’s gate rather than agents of chaos, though the surviving texts do not narrate how that change happened.

Are the Scorpion People dangerous to humans?

Yes. Ancient texts say their terror is frightful and that their very glare is death, and their radiance is described as overwhelming the mountains. Even so, in the Epic of Gilgamesh they do not harm Gilgamesh but instead speak with him and grant him passage through their gate.

What is another name for the Scorpion People?

The scholarly Akkadian term is girtablullû, meaning “scorpion-man.” The name “aqrabuamelu” also circulates widely in modern popular sources, but girtablullû is the form found in the cuneiform texts and used in academic study.

Related Entries

Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Shamash, Utnapishtim, Humbaba, Tiamat, Marduk, Lamassu, Fish-man, Sirrush, Anzu, Pazuzu, Nergal, Ereshkigal