Mukīl rēš lemutti, inscribed in

cuneiform Cuneiform is a Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

Sumerian

syllabogram Syllabograms are graphemes used to write the syllables or morae of words. Syllabograms in syllabaries are analogous to letters in alphabets, which represent individual phonemes, or logograms in logographies, which represent morphemes. Syllab ...

s as ^(d)SAG.ḪUL.ḪA.ZAThe ''lù = zitàte'' lexical list (published in MSL 12), and meaning "he who holds the head of evil", was an ancient

Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...

n winged leonine demon, a harbinger of misfortune associated with benign headaches and wild swings in mood, where the afflicted "continually behaves like an animal caught in a trap." It was one of the two demons that followed people around, an “evil accomplice” also referred to as ''rabis lemutti'' (“he who offers misfortune”), with its auspicious alter-ego ''mukīl rēš daniqti'' or ''rabis damiqti'' (“he who offers good things”).

Textual references

Although it features in the Exorcists Manual, the list of works of the craft of the ''āšipūtu'', in the part attributed to

Esagil-kin-apli Esagil-kin-apli, was the ''ummânū'', or chief scholar, of Babylonian king Adad-apla-iddina, 1067–1046 BCE, as he appears on the Uruk ''List of Sages and Scholars'' (165 BCE)W 20030,7 the Seleucid ''List of Sages and Scholars'', obverse line 16 ...

himself, there is no extant work dedicated to this demon, or to the disorders it was thought to have promulgated. Instead, references to ''mukīl rēš lemutti'' are scattered among diverse texts. The earliest appearance of this demon comes in Old Babylonian

lecanomancy Lecanomancy (Gr. λεκάνη, "dish, pan" + μαντεία, "divination") is a form of divination using a dish, usually of water, which, like many ancient forms of divination, has multiple forms. The earliest form of lecanomancy appears to have c ...

omen collections. The demon features in the Diagnostic Handbook. In the chapter on infectious diseases, tablet 22, lines 62 to 64 read: In the chapter concerning neurological syndromes, on tablet 27 a variant of line 4 provides the omen: The demon frequently appears in prescriptions such as those for the fashioning of a figurine for a neurological disorder caused by a pursuing ghost, where “The evi confusional stat (causing ghost or) ''mukīl rēš lemutti''-demon

hich Ij () is a village in Golabar Rural District of the Central District in Ijrud County, Zanjan province, Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq ...

was set n(personal name) son of (personal name)–he is your husband. You are given him (as wife).” In a burial ritual, where the malady is that “a person continually sees dead persons,” the text entreats the god

Šamaš Shamash (Akkadian language, Akkadian: ''šamaš''), also known as Utu (Sumerian language, Sumerian: dutu "Sun") was the List of Mesopotamian deities, ancient Mesopotamian Solar deity, sun god. He was believed to see everything that happened in t ...

: “a ghost (or) ''mukīl rēš lemutti'' which was set on me and so continually pursues me – I am continually frightened and terrified (about him).” The demon is a harbinger of evil in the apodoses of omens, such as in the ''šumma padānu'' ("the path") chapter of the Bārûtu compendium: It makes an appearance in both

Šumma ālu Šumma ālu ina mēlê šakin is the title for a series of a collected number of cuneiform texts of ancient Mesopotamia amounting to one hundred and twenty clay tablets. The title translates as ''If a City is Situated on a Height'', and it lists o ...

, the monumental compendium of terrestrial omens, and the

Iškar Zaqīqu The Dream Book, iškar dZaqīqu (“core text of the god Zaqīqu”), is an eleven tablet compendium of oneiromancy written in Akkadian. Tablets two to nine form the manual of deductive divination, while tablets one, ten and eleven provide ritua ...

, dream omen series. The '' Religious Chronicle'' records a unique appearance of this demon in the bed chambers of Nabû as one of the inauspicious omens encountered during the troubled reign of

Babylon Babylon ( ) was an ancient city located on the lower Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, within modern-day Hillah, Iraq, about south of modern-day Baghdad. Babylon functioned as the main cultural and political centre of the Akkadian-s ...

ian king

Nabû-mukin-apli Nabû-mukin-apli, typically inscribed dAG-DU-A, “ Nabû (is) establisher of a legitimate heir,” ruled 974–939 BC, founded Babylon’s 8th dynasty, the so-called ''Dynasty of E'', and ruled for thirty-six years.''Babylonian King List A'', t ...

(978 – 943 BC).

Notes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mukil resh lemutti Akkadian literature Mesopotamian demons