Summary
The Asag is a monster born of the Earth in the mountains, which Ninurta fights in the Sumerian poem Lugal-e, "O king". In incantations and in Akkadian it is asakku, an evil demon, and the disease it brings on whoever it touches.
The poem opens with Ninurta seated at a feast held in his honour, handing down decisions. His weapon Šarur, the mace that speaks, looks towards the mountains and cries out: my master, Heaven copulated with the verdant Earth and she has borne him a warrior who knows no fear, the Asag, a child who sucked the power of milk without ever staying with a wet-nurse, knowing no father, a murderer from the mountains, whose face knows no shame. It has sired offspring in the mountains and spread its seed; the plants have unanimously named it king over them, and like a great wild bull it tosses its horns among them; its warriors the stones keep raiding the cities; it has set up a throne dais and decides the Land's lawsuits just as you do, and it means to lay hands on the powers you received in the Abzu.
Ninurta goes out. The Asag leaps up at the head of the battle: for a club it uproots the sky and takes it in its hand, slides its head along the ground like a snake, howls like a storm, dries up the waters of the mountains, drags away the tamarisks, tears the flesh of the Earth and sets the reed-beds on fire, until the fields are black as potash. Ninurta smites the mountains with his weapons but does not shake the Asag's heart, and Šarur tells him: it is a blister whose smell is foul, like mucus from the nose; its words are devious and it will not obey you. Ninurta attacks again, pounds it like roasted barley, piles it up like a heap of broken bricks, and says: "From today forward, do not say Asag: its name shall be Stone. This, its entrails, shall be the underworld." Lugal-e, 168–186 and 265–330.
Before this, the good water coming forth from the earth did not pour over the fields; the cold water piled up in the mountains, the Tigris did not bring up its flood in its fullness, and the gods carried hoe and basket as forced labour. Ninurta makes a pile of stones in the mountains, bars the front of the Land with a great wall, blocks the waters with stones so that they never again go down from the mountains into the earth, gathers the scattered lakes and leads them down to the Tigris, pours water over the fields, and the barley grows. Then his mother Ninmah comes to him, and he names the pile "Mountain", hursag, and her its lady, Ninhursag. Then Aruru reminds him that he has not yet fixed the destinies of the warriors he has slain, and he stands before each stone of the Asag's army and judges it by what it did in the battle.
The idea the story turns on is that the enemy of order becomes its material. The Asag is the mountain when it rises against the plain: stones rolling down, water held back, wild plants no one sows, and sickness that comes from where it cannot be seen. Ninurta does not kill it to erase it; he changes its name, so that it becomes "Stone"; its body becomes a dam that leads the water to the fields, its heap becomes a mountain for his mother where herbs, cedars and honey grow, and each stone of its army becomes a craft: a stone for polishing cornelian, a stone for carving statues, a stone to be ground.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as the Sumerian essay reads it. It is written in Sumerian á-sàg and in Akkadian asakku. The essay reads it ʿasiq, the clinging illness. In the Arabic dictionaries ʿasiqa bihi is to be attached to something, to keep to it and cling to it, and fī khuluqihi ʿasaq is a twist and harshness in his nature. The a at the start of the name stands where ʿ dropped, since neither Sumerian nor Akkadian writes ʿ; s is s; and the Sumerian g answers q, since cuneiform writes q with the g-signs. That is what the Asag does in the texts: the illness that seizes and does not let go, and Šarur says its words are devious.
Linguistic Root
Forms of the name
| Form | Use |
|---|---|
| á-sàg | Sumerian, in Lugal-e and incantations |
| asakku | Akkadian: an evil demon, and the disease it causes |
| Á.ZAG | Logographic writing of the Akkadian word |
ʿAsiq
The Sumerian essay derives the name from ʿasiqa, to stick fast, making the Asag the clinging illness, the monster that causes disease by its touch. Lane lacks the root; the Arabic dictionaries gathered on the Hawramani site have it: al-Jawharī's Ṣiḥāḥ gives ʿasiqa bihi, he was attached to it, he kept to it and clung to it, and al-Khalīl's ʿAyn gives fī khuluqihi ʿasaq, a twist and harshness in his nature. Both senses are in the Asag: it clings to whoever it touches, and its words are devious, as Šarur says. When Enkidu is held fast below in Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, the text says: Namtar did not seize him, the Asag did not seize him, but the kur has seized him. The Asag is one of the things that seize a man and hold him.
The consonants: the a of the name stands for ʿ, which cuneiform does not write. S is s. The g of á-sàg answers q, since cuneiform writes Akkadian q with the g-signs, as the sign GA is read qa. But Akkadian took the word with k, asakku, and Akkadian does not confuse q and k; that is the weak point of the reading. Á is the Sumerian sign for arm and strength, so the name may be a compound that the reading takes as one word.
The essay's other readings
The essay also offers sakhula for illness and fever, sajaʿa by metathesis for "struck with heat", and ʾask. Lane gives sakhalahum, he drove them away, and sakhla, a lamb or kid; sajʿ, rhymed speech and the cooing of doves; and al-iskatān, the two sides of the vulva. None carries the sense of illness the essay seeks, and ʿasiq is the strongest.
Key Mythic Narratives
Judging the stones
Ninurta stands before the stones one by one and fixes each destiny by what it did in the war. The emery stone, which rose against him in the mountains, barred his way and swore to put him to death, he curses: its brothers will heap it up like flour, it will be chased like a dog, and it will be called by the name of the cornelian polished with it, so that when it touches cornelian it pierces it. The diorite, which did not lift its hand against him and said that Ninurta alone is the hero, will be brought from Magan, carved into kings' statues and set in the place of libations in his temple. The haematite, which was not among his enemies, he makes a judge in foreign lands, valued by the craftsman like gold. The minerals and stones in people's hands, what is polished, carved and ground, each have their reason in the poem: what they did on the day they stood with the Asag.
At the end of the poem Ninurta recalls what he did: he killed the Asag, made the pile of stones, ordered it to be called stone, traced the way of the waters down from above and brought them to the fields, made the plough famous, and then entrusts the granaries to Nisaba. Lugal-e, 698–711.
Symbolic Reading
The Sumerian essay reads the Asag as the illness that comes by touch, at whose approach the waters boil. The poem gathers into its figure what comes down from the mountains on the people of the plain: flood and stones, water that piles up and does not reach the fields, heat that blackens the land. Ninurta who fights it is the warrior farmer, so the fight ends with a dam built and a plough shown, and this is the Mesopotamian form of the chaoskampf: chaos is not merely killed but put back to work.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
In India Vṛtra lies on the mountain holding back the waters, and Indra kills him with the thunderbolt, and the waters run to the sea like cows to their pasture. Both are stories of water held by the mountains and released by the warrior god who kills the one holding it. They differ in that Indra frees the water by the killing, while Ninurta after the killing builds a dam that gathers the water and leads it.
Among the Greeks Earth bears Typhon as Zeus's last enemy, as Earth bears the Asag in Lugal-e; in both, the son of the high god defeats a monster born from the ground, and Typhon is struck down until the earth melts with the heat and is hurled into Tartarus, as the Asag's corpse is heaped up in the mountains.
In the North Hrungnir is a giant of stone: stone head, stone heart, stone shield, a whetstone for a weapon; Thor's hammer breaks the whetstone, and the half that falls to the earth becomes all the whetstone rocks. As the Asag's warriors become stones with a use, Hrungnir's weapon becomes rock that people put to use.