Lamashtu and the Mesopotamian Plaques Protecting Childbirth

In ancient Mesopotamia childbirth was one of the most dangerous moments of life, for mother and newborn alike. Part of this danger was personified in a terrible female figure, Lamashtu, whom Akkadian texts describe as the daughter of the sky god Anu. Against her were produced some of the richest amulets, plaques and incantations of the Near East, which today allow us to reconstruct the fears and hopes of families in Babylonia and Assyria.

A demoness without rules

Unlike many Mesopotamian demons, who acted on the gods' orders to punish wrongdoing, Lamashtu acted on her own initiative. The incantations present her as a creature cast out of heaven for her evil designs, roaming among houses in search of pregnant women and children. Miscarriages, fevers and the sudden deaths of infants were attributed to her: in other words, those ills that a society without modern medicine could neither explain nor prevent, and to which it gave a face.

The appearance of Lamashtu

Images show her with a lion's head, a donkey's ears and teeth, a hairy body and the feet of a bird of prey. She holds snakes in her hands and suckles a dog and a pig, a monstrous inversion of motherhood. She often stands or kneels on a donkey, which in turn rides on a boat: an allusion to the journey by which, according to the incantations, the demoness was to be sent away across the river, towards the desert and the mountains, far from human dwellings.

The Lamashtu plaques

Lamashtu plaques are small rectangular tablets of bronze or stone, dating mostly to the first millennium BC. One of the best known, now in the Louvre, is divided into registers: at the top the symbols of the gods, then a row of animal-headed demons, then the central scene with a sick person on a bed attended by exorcists, and at the bottom Lamashtu on the boat. Over the upper edge appears the head of Pazuzu, whose body extends behind the whole plaque like a shield.

These plaques were hung in homes or near the sick person's bed, by means of a ring or a suspension hole. Some carry short incantation texts in cuneiform on the back, confirming that image and word worked together, and that domestic protection was entrusted as much to sight as to writing.

Gifts to send her away

The incantations also describe gifts intended for the demoness, such as combs, spindles, sandals and waterskins, so that she would leave satisfied and never return. This is a significant feature: Lamashtu was not only fought but also dismissed with presents, following a logic of negotiation with invisible forces found in many ancient cultures. Evil, in this view, could be driven back, but also escorted out of the house with a certain courtesy.

The figure of Lamashtu survived for a long time in the imagination of the Near East, and some scholars have pointed to possible echoes of her in later demonesses linked to childbirth, although the transitions from one tradition to another are debated. Her plaques remain a vivid testimony to the deepest fears of ancient families and to the means by which they sought to face them.