A Demoness Named and Fought

Lamashtu appears across Mesopotamian magical and medical texts as one of the most consistently feared supernatural threats in ordinary domestic life, a lion headed, donkey eared demoness shown on inscribed bronze amulets and stone plaques with pendulous breasts she was believed to nurse a pig and a dog from, and credited with causing miscarriage, stillbirth, infant death and maternal illness around childbirth. Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary of Mesopotamian religious iconography treats her as one of the best attested demonic figures in the entire corpus, precisely because the stakes surrounding childbirth generated such a dense body of protective ritual and amuletic material naming her directly.

Protection took concrete, physical form. Small clay or metal figurines and inscribed amulet plaques depicting Lamashtu herself, or protective figures opposed to her such as the demon Pazuzu, were hung near the birthing area or buried at the threshold of the house, while specialist incantations addressed to her by name sought to identify, expel and bind her away from the vulnerable mother and child.