Sources of Evil

Abstract

The female demon whose Sumerian name was written d DÌM.ME was believed to be the source of a very specific evil. She preyed mostly on women in childbirth and newborn babies and was held responsible for infant mortality generally. Her child-snatching activities have been well explored recently, and it is not the purpose of this paper to consider her history, mythology, iconography, and character (see Wiggermann 2000), nor to comment on the magic rites and spells deployed to counter her evil (see Farber 2014). The intention here is to clarify her name. Ever since Myhrman's pioneering edition of the Standard Babylonian "Labartu" incantation series (1902), the Akkadian and Sumerian pronunciations of this demon's names have given trouble. The dispute over whether the Akkadian should be read as Lamaštu or Labartu was settled by the syllabic spelling d la-ma-aš-tim in an Old Babylonian legal document pointed out by Ungnad in 1925 (see further Farber 2014: 41 n. 10), and confirmed by la-ma-aš-tam in an Old Babylonian incantation published by Böhl in 1934 (now Geller and Wiggermann 2008: 150 line 7). However, the pronunciation of d DÌM.ME in Sumerian texts continued to elude definitive explication (Farber 1983: 439). Were the signs to be read phonetically ("Dimme") or did they conceal some other reality? Farber's new edition of the Lamaštu incantations (2014) is a great step forward in the scholarly presentation of this corpus. In introducing the "female spirit named Dimme," however, he offers no new discussion of the interpretation and pronunciation of the spelling d DÌM.ME but refers to a previous statement of the evidence by Wiggermann (2000). Wiggermann noted that the name "Dimme" had resisted interpretation, but that the element written ME must be a phonetic indicator. This is plausible, for DÌM appears with other additional signs to signify other demons, who often This is the version of the book chapter accepted for publication in Sources of Evil published by Brill: