REVIEW ARTICLE

THE FOLK-TALES OF IRAQ AND THE LITERARY

TRADITIONS OF ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA1

AMAR ANNUS

The folklore of modern Iraq consists of an ocean of stories,

popular songs, sayings, and customs, which are of great potential
value for scholars studying ancient Mesopotamia’s intellectual cul-
ture and its legacy. The folktales, in particular, preserve many of
the old intellectual traditions of the region. Recently, Gorgias Press
has done us a great service by publishing the new edition of Lady
E. S. Drower’s (1879-1972) Folk-Tales of Iraq, which originally
appeared in 1931. The new volume contains the tales from the old
book, as well as about 180 pages of previously unpublished mate-
rial, which remained in manuscript. We now have the complete set
of folkloric texts that Lady Drower gathered about 80 years ago
in Iraq, translated into English, and intended to publish. Thus, the
time is ripe to look afresh at the material. Before the First Gulf
War, Iraqi scholars themselves made great efforts to publicize the
popular culture of their country, mostly in the Arabic periodical
al-Turāth al-Sha bī (Baghdad, 1963-1990). A selection of the folktale
material that appeared on the pages of this periodical was published
in a Russian translation by V. A. Yaremenko in 1990.2
It is unfortunate that so little scholarship has been dedicated to
the issue of analyzing modern Iraqi folktales from the historical
and comparative points of view. Very few Assyriologists read folk
literature, and even fewer are prepared to analyze it. Some studies
stand out in this respect, such as H. Vanstiphout’s paper on the

1
This article has grown out of a review of Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, Drower’s
Folk-Tales of Iraq (Gorgias Press 2007), hardback 6 × 9, 490 pages, illustrations,
$139.00. The references with page numbers alone refer to the pages of this book.
The present paper was written with the support of a grant from the Estonian
Science Foundation, no. 6625.
2
V. A. Yaremenko, Skazki i predanija Iraka (Moscow: Nauka, 1990). There
are probably no other translations of this material. See D. Sallum, “Irak,” in
Enzyklopädie des Märchens: Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung,
Band 7 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), cols. 244-248.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 JANER 9.1

Also available online – brill.nl/jane DOI: 10.1163/156921209X449170
88 amar annus

popular Iraqi folktale Story of Shamshum al-Jabbar, quoted from the

first edition of the book under review (pp. 30-35). He observed that
some motifs that have an obvious ancestry in the Sumerian and
Akkadian literature are recombined into a coherent emplotment
in the tale. He pointed out that the way in which certain ancient
themes, which he categorized, create a cohesive thrust in the
modern story as a whole, is of considerable relevance for literary
history.3 Vanstiphout came to quite promising results, although he
did not employ the comparative methods of folkloristic research.
Rather, his methodology was limited to identifying and comparing
six “easily identifiable plot structures” that he found both in the
Iraqi tale and in the literature of ancient Mesopotamia. There is
no fallacy in regard to this methodology, and Vanstiphout’s open-
mindedness to the folklore traditions of modern Iraq is to be com-
mended. The only weakness of his paper is the meagreness of the
material considered, which fails to persuade more skeptical readers.
A much greater body of comparative evidence was taken into
account by the Finnish orientalist Jussi Aro, who compared the
Sumerian epic Lugalbanda and the Anzu Bird and the Akkadian Etana
myth to some Kurdish, Uzbek, and Arab popular traditions.4 More
recently, the studies by M. Haul and W. Henkelman stand out as
having quite extensively addressed the issue of folklore parallels to
Mesopotamian literary traditions.5
On the folklorists’ side of things, there are two papers written
by I. Levin that extensively discuss the structure and the folktale
parallels of the Etana myth.6 In the later contribution, Levin

3
H. L. J. Vanstiphout,“Shamshum aj-Jabbar: On the Persistence of Meso-
potamian Literary Motifs,” in W. H. van Soldt et al. (eds.), Veenhof Anniversary
Volume. Studies Presented to Klaas R. Veenhof on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday
(Leiden: Brill, 2001), 515-527; see p. 516.
4
J. Aro, “Anzu and Simurgh,” in B. L. Eichler, J. W. Heimerdinger, and
Å. Sjöberg (eds.), Kramer Anniversary Volume. Cuneiform Studies in Honor of Samuel Noah
Kramer (Kevelaer: Butzon & Bercker, 1976), 25-28.
5
See M. Haul, Das Etana-Epos: Ein Mythos von der Himmelfahrt des Königs von Kiš
(Göttingen: Seminar für Keilschriftforschung, 2000), 75-90; and Wouter F. M.
Henkelman, “The Birth of Gilgameš (Ael. NA XII.21): A case-study in literary
receptivity,” in R. Rollinger and B. Truschnegg (eds.), Altertum und Mittelmeerraum:
Die antike Welt diesseits und jenseits der Levante. Festschrift für Peter W. Haider zum 60.
Geburtstag (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 807-856.
6
I. Levin, “Etana: Die Keilschriftlichen Belege einer Erzählung. Zur
Frühgeschichte von AaTh 537 (= AaTh 222B* + 313B). Eine textkritische
Erörterung,” Fabula 8 (1966) 1-63; and idem, “Über eines der ältesten Märchen der
Welt,” Märchenspiegel 5 (1994) 2-6. See also M. H. Haavio, “Der Etanamythos in
Finnland,” FF Communications, no. 154 (Helsinki 1955).
 review article 89

posited a monogenetic origin for the international folktale type The

Flight on the Grateful Eagle (ATU 537) in ancient Mesopotamia, where
its earliest written form is attested in the Etana myth.7 Levin used
the methods of the Finnish historical-geographical school of folk-
lore research, which attempts to reconstruct the genealogical trees
and original forms of international folktales. In regard to the ques-
tion of origins, I agree with Haul’s criticism of Levin that the fact
that the ATU 537 material is first attested in Mesopotamia does
not prove that the origins of this story should be exclusively sought
in ancient Babylonia.8 In the following pages, I will demonstrate
how the various Iraqi folktales that tell of a hero’s flight on a grate-
ful eagle’s back, either from the netherworld or to heaven, also
contain the motif of enmity between eagle and snake, and often
tend to include the theme of a hero killing an evil snake or eagle
as well. By conducting such an investigation, I will not reconstruct
the original myths or stories in terms of the Finnish geographical-
historical method. Instead, I intend to show the way in which dif-
ferent versions of the stories form interrelated groups, which seem
to belong together historically, even if one cannot determine pre-
cisely how.
As the wide distribution of some of its motifs shows, the folklore
material that is used in the Babylonian myth of Etana is of pre-
historic origin. The most prominent motif of cosmological signifi-
cance is the cosmic tree, the so-called Eagle and Serpent Tree,
occurring in the Etana myth and in very many cosmologies of the
Eurasian peoples.9 This widespread motif of a tree whose roots
are inhabited by a snake and top branches by an eagle makes its
first textual appearance in the Sumerian tale Gilgamesh, Enkidu and

7
I use here and elsewhere in my paper the latest edition of the international
folktale type catalogue and its classification numbers, following the standard
abbreviation ATU; see H. J. Uther, The Types of International Folktales. A Classification
and Bibliography, Parts I-III (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia [Academia
Scientiarum Fennica], 2004).
8
M. Haul (Etana-Epos, 85) rightly observes: “Es wird von Levin nicht in
Betracht gezogen, dass praktisch sämtliche Glieder der Überlieferung zwischen
dem Epos und den Märchen fehlen und das Epos historisch und geographisch
als Zeugnis des Stoffes völlig isoliert dasteht. Ob die heutigen Märchen wirklich
aus Mesopotamien ausgewandert sind oder sich nicht doch von anderswo aus
verbreiteten, auch in welcher Epoche dies geschah—dies lässt sich anhand der
spärlichen Quellen keinesfalls sicher feststellen.”
9
For a paper containing a good overview and bibliography, see W. Fauth,
“Der persische Simurg und der Gabriel-Melek Tā ūs der Jeziden,” Persica 12
(1987) 123-147.
90 amar annus

the Netherworld.10 Lines 27-28 of that composition read: “At that

(primordial) time, there was a single tree, a single halub tree, a
single tree, growing on the bank of the pure Euphrates, being
watered by the Euphrates.” After being uprooted and transplanted
into Inana’s garden, the tree grew tall:
Five years, ten years went by, the tree grew massive; its bark, however, did
not split. At its roots, a snake immune to incantations made itself a nest.
In its branches, the Anzu bird settled its young. In its trunk, the phantom
maid built herself a dwelling, the maid who laughs with a joyful heart. But
holy Inana cried! (lines 40-46)

According to the story, Inana has transplanted the tree in order to

get wood for her luxuriant chair and bed, but she is unable to cut
the tree down. The hero Gilgamesh comes to help and “took his
bronze axe used for expeditions, which weighs seven talents and
seven minas, in his hand. He killed the snake immune to incanta-
tions living at its roots” (lines 138-140). The snake is killed, while
the Anzu bird with its young and the phantom maid are chased
away, respectively, to the mountains and to the wilderness. Thus
far we can recognize in this story an ancestor of the modern inter-
national tale type ATU 317, The Tree That Grows up to the Sky.11
Folktales of this type are documented from the early 19th century
onwards, but their roots appear to go back much earlier.
In the story of Shamshum, which was analyzed by Vanstiphout
(see n. 3), the eagle-serpent tree episode is told as follows: The hero
and his son wander all over the earth, until they come to the great
sea beyond which lies an island. On the seashore there is a large
tree and around its trunk is coiled a serpent, which feeds upon the
young of an eagle nesting in the treetop. Shamshum kills the ser-
pent, but when the mother eagle returns, she mistakes Shamshum
for the human being who comes and kills her young each year.
The eaglets correct their mother, reporting that Shamshum saved
them by killing the serpent. The grateful eagle promises to grant
the hero whatever he desires. Shamshum’s only wish is to be taken

10
The Sumerian sources are quoted in this paper according to the transla-
tion in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), http://etcsl.orinst.
ox.ac.uk/.
11
See Uther, The Types of International Folktales, vol. 2, 204. The rest of the
Sumerian story, and its parallel in the 12th tablet of the Standard Babylonian
Epic of Gilgamesh, is comparable to the modern folktale type ATU 470, Friends in
Life and Death. Thus, one can describe the Sumerian poem as an ancestor of the
modern tale type ATU 317 + 470.
 review article 91

with his son to a far island. The eagle does this, carrying both the
hero and his son on its wings.12
I am confident that by using comparative folkloristic material
one can demonstrate how the literary motifs that occur in diverse
Mesopotamian myths could be closely related in the living oral
tradition. The use of comparative material will eventually show
that the myths committed to writing in ancient Mesopotamia were
merely redacted remnants of a vast ocean of widely variegated
oral narratives.13 By means of this kind of comparative research,
one may be able to reconstruct, in part, the oral traditions of
ancient Mesopotamia. In the story of Shamshum and its parallels,
which I will discuss below, one can see how the motif of killing the
dragon or serpent, as well as the other favors performed on behalf
of the eagle’s young, are prerequisites to the hero’s journey on the
grateful eagle’s back. The slaying of a dragon and the hero’s jour-
ney on an eagle’s back are motifs encountered in different literary
compositions in ancient Mesopotamia, but as the evidence from
modern folktales indicates, the two may belong to one coherent
narrative. The comparative evidence suggests that an original tale,
which combines the two motifs, also may have existed orally in
ancient Mesopotamia.14
In regard to ancient Mesopotamia, scrutiny of the nature of the
mythological lion-headed bird Anzu can supply additional data for
comparison and confirmation. Anzu can be both good or evil,
according to the literary texts and iconographic representations.
The hero in the Sumerian narrative poem Lugalbanda and the
Thunderbird feeds Anzu’s young and so earns the gift of supernatu-
ral speed and strength from the bird. In contrast, it is the monstrous

12
Vanstiphout, “Shamshum aj-Jabbar,” p. 32.
13
The question of why these and not other variants were committed to writing
can be answered by pointing out the importance that certain stories may have
had to the social groups involved in literary production. Comparative folkloristic
research may help to discern more precisely the agendas and intentions of par-
ticular literary compositions.
14
Existence of such oral narrative plots in ancient Mesopotamia can be assumed
indirectly. In some Mesopotamian iconographical representations, the defeat of the
monster Humbaba is sometimes combined with the motif of the hero’s ascension to
heaven on an eagle’s back. See A. Green, “Myths in Mesopotamian Art,” in I. L. Finkel,
M. J. Geller (ed.), Sumerian Gods and Their Representations (Groningen: Styx, 1997),
135-158, esp. 138-139. For more oral variants attested in iconography, see
P. Steinkeller, “Early Semitic Literature and Third Millennium Seals with
Mythological Motifs,” in P. Fronzaroli (ed.), Literature and Literary Language at Ebla,
Quaderni di Semitistica 18 (1992): 245-83, esp. 248-255.
92 amar annus

bird Anzu who steals the Tablet of Destinies from Enlil in the
Akkadian epic Anzu and is subsequently slayed by Ninurta. Although
not explicitly given the name Anzu in the surviving part of the
epic, the eagle in the Etana myth is initially inimical with respect
to the snake, whose young he ate, but is subsequently kind toward
Etana, whom he carries to heaven in order to fetch the “herb of
birth.” It is Ninurta who kills the evil Anzu; it is Etana who flies
on the eagle’s back to heaven; and it is Lugalbanda who curries
favor with the eagle by feeding its young. All three literary compo-
sitions have different agendas and objects of praise—Lugalbanda,
Ninurta, and Etana—but all three also feature an eagle or bird,
who seems to have been the same mythological figure, but has
varying characteristics and deeds attributed to it in these texts. The
differences in the story lines may have been dictated by the differ-
ent intellectual agendas of each composition. In the oral lore of
ancient Mesopotamia, these three stories may have belonged to the
same heroic cycle. The name of the bird, who is invariably called
Anzu, seems to indicate that the three different stories share a com-
mon background in folklore.
There are cycles of stories among the Iraqi folktales that contain
the characteristic motifs of the three ancient Mesopotamian myths—
the slaying of a monster, the feeding of the eagle’s young, and the
hero’s transport on the grateful eagle’s back. The new edition of
Drower’s folktales includes “The Story of the Fisherman and the
Sultan,”15 where the fisherman Mahmud has the task of building
the sultan’s castle out of ivory and lion’s milk. After a series of
encounters, Mahmud finds the tree familiar from the stories dis-
cussed above:
[The hero] reached a tree, a palm tree so tall that when he gazed upwards
to its summit, his turban fell from his head. Yes, it was tall, that tree! A
thousand ram, and it rose from the earth to the heaven—it was so tall! In
the palm tree he saw an eagle’s nest with her brood in it, and close to them
was a seven-headed serpent of immense size—as big as Allah! . . . He cut
off its seven heads with one thrust of his sword. . . . When the monster was
dead, he divided its body into morsels and threw them up to the eagle’s
brood in the tree above. The eaglets ate and were satisfied, all of them.
The remaining morsels they put aside for their mother, who had gone into
the mountains to hunt for food. The eagle was not like other eagles, but
was a simurgh.16

15
Buckley, Drower’s Folk-Tales of Iraq, 387-406.
16
Ibid., 391.
 review article 93

This part of the new story is very close to certain episodes in

Lugalbanda and the Thunderbird, where Lugalbanda, the youngest of
the officers of the army of Uruk, falls ill en route to conquer the city
of Aratta. He is abandoned by his comrades in the Zabu mountains,
as they assume that he will soon die. Lugalbanda overcomes his
illness with divine help, and finds himself near the place where
“Enki’s mighty Eagle tree” stands. While Anzu and his wife are
foraging for their young, Lugalbanda beautifies the fledglings and
treats them to a sumptuous meal. Although he is at first disturbed
when his sated offspring do not respond to his call, Anzu’s gratitude
knows no bounds when he finds them regaled and their nest splen-
didly adorned. In the Sumerian tale, the hero earns the bird’s
gratitude by feeding its young, rather than by killing the bird’s bit-
ter enemy. In the story of the fisherman Mahmud, as in the story
of Shamshum, the hero kills the snake or dragon, but in the former
he feeds the eagle’s young with the flesh of the prey. In the
Lugalbanda story, the hero himself prepares a meal for Anzu’s
fledgling (lines 50ff.), which makes the account less coherent. If
Anzu and his wife were foraging for their young while Lugalbanda
actually fed them, it becomes more difficult to explain the immense
measure of gratitude on Anzu’s part when he finds his fledgling
safe and sound. Anzu’s gratitude in this version is explicable mostly
in terms of his subsequent relief after his initial fright when his
young did not respond to his call.
In the story of Mahmud, the hero, after killing the serpent, falls
asleep beneath the tree. The eagle returns and angrily seizes a
mountain in her claws in order to hurl it upon him, thinking that
he is the criminal who had been killing her fledglings. The eaglets
fly to their mother, exclaiming: “This son of Adam killed the
serpent, and cut it into morsels which we ate, putting a portion
aside for you.”17 The eagle is extremely grateful and cries to
Mahmud: “Son of Adam! Ask and desire!” Mahmud responds that
he needs the milk of a lioness for his building project. The eagle
responds: “I would gladly have given you jewels or gold, or precious
stones! I cannot give you that! Ask me anything in the world but
that!” The reward that the hero asks from the grateful eagle is
almost always rejected by the bird as being too grievous in the
variant stories. This is also the case in the Sumerian Lugalbanda poem,
where the bird offers three different rewards to the hero before
17
Ibid., 392.
94 amar annus

Anzu finally consents to bestow on him the gift of supernatural

speed, following from the air the hero’s journey back to his broth-
ers who are besieging Aratta.18
In the story of Mahmud, the eagle finally states: “Son of Adam,
ride on my back!,” and when in the air, the bird asks him repeat-
edly while gaining altitude: “What does the world look like?”
Mahmud gives three different answers—the earth is like a table,
the sea like a mirror, etc.19 This dialogue motif describing the earth
and ocean from above is also encountered in Etana’s flight to heaven
in the Akkadian epic, and it often occurs in folklore parallels.20
From the discussion presented above, one can already draw the
conclusion that motifs present in some ancient Mesopotamian liter-
ary works are still current in the folklore of the contemporary
Middle East. Moreover, it seems that the data gathered from mod-
ern folklore informants may, in certain cases, help to recover oral
traditions that may have been current for thousands of years. Both
ancient and modern traditions seem to combine motifs from the
same resources, namely from interrelated groups of folkloristic
motifs and narratives. This assessment, if true, would make the
study of modern Iraqi folklore important for scholars of ancient
Near Eastern religion and literature.
The following example of an Iraqi folk narrative parallels the
previous tales, and, in addition, it features a sacred tree as well as
a descent to a netherworld that comprises seven levels. Both the sacred
tree and the netherworld imagery are also prominent themes in
ancient Mesopotamian art and literature. The tale of “The King and
His Three Sons” (ATU 301) is reported to be quite popular in Iraq:21
In the old times there was a mighty king, who had three sons: Ahmad,
Mahmud, and the youngest, Muhammad. This king had a great tree that
grew in the royal garden, and every spring it brought forth beautiful blossoms.
The king took meticulous care of the tree, but one day he noticed that the
tree’s blossoms were quickly decreasing by the day. He ordered his sons to

18
See J. Aro, “Anzu and Simurgh,” 27, for parallels.
19
Buckley, Drower’s Folk-Tales of Iraq, 392.
20
See Aro, “Anzu and Simurgh,” 27; Haul, Etana, 79-81. This motif also occurs
in animal fables; to Haul’s remark on p. 79, n. 288, can be added as evidence
the Iraqi tale “The Stork and the Jackal” (80-81). An eagle carries a man also on
pp. 422 and 451 of the Gorgias edition of Drower’s book.
21
The following tale was translated from Arabic to Russian by Yaremenko
(as in n. 2), and is retold here by me. The Arabic original has been published
by Y. A. al-Qasir, al-Hikaya wal-insan (Baghdad, 1970), 54-59, and discussed by
D. S. al-Shwaili in the journal al-Turāth al-Sha bī (1977, no. 2): 169-171.
 review article 95

discover the reason. His two elder sons guarded the tree on two successive
nights, but both fell asleep while the blossoms again decreased. The third
son guarded the tree; towards the morning he saw a huge monster (marīd),
who stealthily approached the tree, took a big bunch of blossoms, and
then swiftly disappeared. Muhammad pursued it and saw how the monster
descended into a deep well outside the city. He went to his father and told
what he saw. The father gathered a large army and approached the well. He
ordered his eldest son to descend to the bottom of the well and to avenge
the thief of blossoms. The two elder brothers unsuccessfully tried to descend
to the well’s depth, becoming frightened by their mirror image in the water.
When Muhammad descended to the bottom of the well, he found himself
in front of a great palace. He entered it and saw a beautiful girl, sitting on
a bed, and in her hand she held the blossoms from the tree. She smiled
at Muhammad and with her eyes she pointed to the monster, which was
sleeping beside her. She stood up and went to the monter’s sword, which
hung on the wall. The hero took the sword, and after a fierce battle, killed
the monster. He took the girl, who had been abducted from her people,
and left the palace. On the road they met an old man with two rams—one
black and one white. The old man explained that whoever sat on the back
of the white ram would be brought back up to the earth. The girl did so
and above ground she met Muhammad’s brothers, who brought her to
their father’s palace. They told the king that they had killed the monster
but that Muhammad perished in the battle. Meanwhile in the underworld,
Muhammad sat upon the black ram and was brought down to the seventh
underworld kingdom. He started to walk aimlessly, until he saw a great
snake in a tree trying to devour a fledgling eagle. He took his sword and
killed the snake, cut it into pieces, and fed the pieces to the eagle’s young.
But one eaglet who was saved by Muhammad concealed its piece. When
the mother eagle returned and saw a man standing behind the tree, she
took a large stone and hovered above Muhammad, thinking that he had
come to steal her young. The eaglet, who had concealed his piece of meat,
showed it to his mother and so was able to prove that the man had saved
them. The eagle exclaimed: “Ask for whatever you desire!” Muhammad
asked to return to the upper world. The eagle stated that this was a very
difficult task and that she must eat first. The eagle then ascended from the
netherworld and brought Muhammad to his father’s palace, whereupon
his brothers fled from his presence. Thus he married the girl that he saved
from the monster.

The last part of this tale is frequently found in Oriental versions

of the tale type ATU 301, The Three Stolen Princesses, where the hero
is abandoned in a well or a cave by his treacherous companions.
According to some Jewish versions, the hero is advised by the res-
cued princess to climb onto a white sheep in order to reach the
upper world. However, he accidentally sits upon the black one
and so ends up in the netherworld. There the hero undertakes
actions familiar from the previous tales: he kills a snake which yearly
devours the fledglings of an eagle, and/or he rescues a princess
from a water-guarding dragon. The eagle, who is fed the hero’s
96 amar annus

own flesh, finally brings him to the upper world and restores him
corporally.22 The European variants of the type ATU 301 are often
combined with ATU 537, to form one coherent story, ATU 301+ 537.
According to its many variants, the episode in which the hero kills
the snake and rescues the eagle’s young takes place in a subterra-
nean world, while the grateful eagle serves as the vehicle for the
hero’s return journey to the upper world. As a parallel, we recall
that the wounded eagle in the Etana myth was also cast into a pit,
whence it was rescued by the hero. The pits, wells, and black color
were all associated with the netherworld and its deities already in
the ancient Near East.23
The Middle Eastern versions of the tale ATU 301 are often
combined with ATU 551, in which a sick king can only be healed
by a miraculous remedy. His three sons go on a quest, and as
expected, the two elder haughty ones are diverted from their goal.24
The variant versions of this tale from Iraq, where the blind sultan
is to be cured with lion’s milk, contain an episode in which an old
man shows the brothers three roads. The hardest path to follow in
searching for the remedy is predictably also the most rewarding; it
is called in Iraqi Arabic Sadd-u-mā-Radd, “he went and returned
not.”25 The name of the road is reminiscent of the ancient Sumerian
and Akkadian literary descriptions of the netherworld—“the land
of no return,” or “the road whose journey has no return.” The
classic description of the Mesopotamian netherworld is the begin-
ning of Ishtar’s Descent to the Netherworld, where the dead “are clothed
like birds”:
To the netherworld, land of n[o return], Ištar, daughter of Sin, [set] her
mind. Indeed, the daughter of Sin did set [her] mind to the gloomy house,

22
See Heda Jason, “Types of Jewish-Oriental Oral Tales,” Fabula 7 (1965), 115-
224, esp. 145. A similar tale from Armenia, where the hero is lost in a cavern, is
told by E. T. Harper as a parallel to the Etana myth; see Beiträge zur Assyriologie
und semitischen Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1894): 405.
23
For Gilgamesh’s association with wells and well-digging, see A. R. George,
The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 94-95.
The well is a point of contact with the netherworld, and belongs to Gilgamesh
in his capacity as ruler of the domain. I thank Jerrold Cooper for pointing this
out to me.
24
See H.-J. Uther (n. 7), 320-21.
25
A road with this name is attested in Drower’s tales “The Blind Sultan” (58-73)
and “The Story of the Fisherman and the Sultan” (390); in the tale “The Brave
Prince,” from the collection Folk-Tales from Iraq (London: Books & Books, 1995),
59-73; and in the tale published in al-Turāth al-Sha bī (1970, no. 12): 78-86, and
translated by Yaremenko (as in n. 2), 93-102.
 review article 97

seat of the ne[therworld], to the house which none leaves who enters, to the
road whose journey has no return, to the house whose entrants are bereft
of light, where dust is their sustenance and clay their food. They see no
light but dwell in darkness, they are clothed like birds in wings for garments,
and dust has gathered on the door and bolt (lines 1-11).26

Witches and demons were closely associated with the netherworld

in the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia. Only inhabitants of the
netherworld, deities, or demons were depicted as possessing wings
in Mesopotamian literature and art. The tradition still often ascribes
a birdlike appearance to demons in modern Iraq, which can be
taken, perhaps, as a continuation of the old tradition. Various
demons and supernatural beings often appear in the folktales of
Iraq as birds, and already Drower saw a continuity here:
jānn, or fairy-folk, don at will the appearance of birds. . . . When one finds
them in ‘Iraq, one is bound to recall the bird-men of the early cylinder-
seals, and the representations of men dressed in bird’s plumage which one
finds from time to time on Sumerian objects. (xiv)

In the large repertoire of demonic creatures in Iraq, there are

several specimens comparable to winged dust-eaters in the
Mesopotamian netherworld. For example, the demon dāmi is,
according to Drower, “a half-bestial ogress which haunts the out-
skirts of towns. Like Babylonian and Assyrian demons, its usual
food is dirt, refuse, and leavings of all kinds” (p. xvi). One may
recall here the fate of A ushunamir in Ishtar’s Descent to the Netherworld,
a creature made by Enki to rescue Ishtar from the Land of No Return.
Ereshkigal, queen of the netherworld, ordained for A ushunamir
a fate never to be forgotten: “May the city garbage dump be your
food, may the city sewer pipes be your drink, the shadow of a wall
be your dwelling!”27
The difficult road of “no return” in Iraqi folktales is invariably
occupied by demonic inhabitants. In the story “The Blind Sultan”
(58-73) there is a description of this perilous road, which strikingly
recalls the geography of the netherworld in ancient Mesopotamian
texts. At the end of the road there is “a large castle surrounded
by a wall, which has seven gates, each guarded by a deywa.”28

26
The translation is from B. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian
Literature (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 1993), 404.
27
Ishtar’s Descent, lines 104-107. For the interpretation, see R. Biggs, “Descent
of Ištar, line 104,” NABU 1993, no. 74.
28
Deywa is a Persian loanword meaning “demon.” They are found chewing gum
before the seven gates. Drower remarks that chewing gum to prevent thirst is not
98 amar annus

The seven gates of this castle correspond exactly to the seven gates
of the netherworld and their guards in the ancient Mesopotamian
tradition. While the “seventh underworld kingdom” in Iraqi folktales
is reachable by holes in the ground like wells, or by riding upon a
black animal, the road of “no return” is yet another survival of
the ancient Mesopotamian netherworld imagery. In the aforemen-
tioned story, an old man teaches the hero how to journey upon
that road:
If you take the road “Went-and-Returned-Not” which is perilous, you may
perish. . . . I will tell you what you must do. When you go along the road you
will be attacked on all sides, and beaten, and hit with stones, but you must
not turn round, or you will die. Go straight on, looking neither to left nor
right, and at the end of the road you will find a large castle surrounded by
a wall, in which are seven gates, each guarded by a deywa. These deywāt
are fierce and will eat you, should you try to enter, but I will give you seven
hairs from my beard, and you must make nooses with them, to draw from
the mouth of each deywa the gum which she is chewing. As soon as the
gum is removed she will fall asleep, and will not harm you. When all the
seven deywāt are asleep, you can enter the courtyard of the castle, in which
you will find lionesses in plenty. They will not harm you, for a lioness does
not eat the children of Adam, it is only the male which does this. Kill and
skin one beast, and milk another, then place the skin of milk on the back
of a cub, and return by the road by which you came, taking care that you
look neither to the right nor left when you are beaten and stoned.29

The hero follows the instructions given by the old man, and the
mission is brought to a successful end. These precautions are partly
similar to those given to Enkidu by Gilgamesh, in the Sumerian
tale Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld, lines 188-193:
You should not hurl throw-sticks in the netherworld: those struck down by
the throw-sticks would surround you. You should not hold a cornel-wood
stick in your hand: the spirits would feel insulted by you. You should not
put sandals on your feet. You should not shout in the netherworld.

The cosmological notion of the “netherworld” as a dwelling place

for the dead was not any more relevant to the worldview of the
Iraqi storyteller. Still, the perilous but rewarding journey to a far-
away land of winged demons along the road with the name “went
and returned not” remains a part of Iraqi folklore in modern times.
In a variant Iraqi folktale, published in al-Turāth al-Sha bī 1970,

an American innovation in Iraq, but has been customary in Arab countries for
centuries (Buckley, Drower’s Folk Tales of Iraq, 116).
29
Ibid., 66. Note that the 66th page of Drower’s original book is missing from
the Gorgias edition, probably because of a scanning error.
 review article 99

no. 12 (see n. 19), a hero encounters on the road of “no return”

three successive palaces inhabited by jinns; by sucking the breasts
of the mother of the jinns in the first palace he becomes a brother
of all three. The hero covers the distance between the three palaces
by riding the back of the local winged jinns. After having returned
from the successful adventure, he meets his brothers again, who
had chosen to take a different road. On the return journey to their
father, they become thirsty and encounter a well. The hero descends
into the well in search of water and encounters an evil eagle, who
holds a maiden in confinement. He battles with the eagle, using its
own sword, and kills it.
The eagle in this story is clearly analogous to the monster in the
bottom of the well in the previous story, who stole blossoms from
the king’s tree, while the battle itself is comparable to Ninurta’s
battle with Anzu in the Babylonian myth. Here we can plainly see
how the killing of a snake and the killing of an eagle are variants
that belong to a heroic cycle, and constitute modern parallels to
the ancient myths of Anzu and Etana.
Subsequently in this Iraqi folktale, the maiden is taken out of
the well, while the hero is kicked by a black goat and finds himself
in the seventh underworld kingdom. The rest of the story is typical
of ATU 301. The hero kills a dragon, who has been withholding
water from the netherworld inhabitants and demanding maidens
from among them to satisfy his carnivorous appetite. In return
for this service, the king of the seventh netherworld kingdom gives
him a demonic vehicle, which the hero has to feed with seven
food items—apparently in accordance with the seven levels of the
netherworld—during the return journey. At the end of the journey,
he runs short of food and is forced to feed the flying demon with
his own flesh. As we have seen, this is a common element in story
type ATU 301.
When one views all of the stories discussed here from a com-
parative perspective, it is easy to see that they form a body of
interrelated texts, but one that is extremely difficult to define, espe-
cially in terms of which elements are “more original” or “earlier,”
and which might be “later.” In addition, many of the texts discussed
in these pages seem to be related to the ancient cycle of stories
concerning heroes and the monster bird Anzu. More research will
no doubt help to define more precisely the individual histories of
the motifs embedded in these stories and to describe their mutual
dynamics and interrelations from different perspectives.