The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

260 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

En-lil was accordingly the sovereign of the dead as well as of
the spirits of the underworld. The Sumerianlilmust therefore
have once included the ghosts of men as well as other ghosts
which never had a material existence in the flesh. Thelilmust
[283] once have meant that immaterial part of man which, after death,
had its home in the underworld, from whence it issued at night
to satisfy its cravings for food with the garbage of the streets. By
the side of the Zi there must also have been the Lil; but we must
wait till more monuments of Sumerian antiquity are discovered
before we can define the exact relationship between them.^225
In the Epic of Gilgames it is said that when the shade of
Ea-bani was called up from the dead, like that of the shade of
Samuel by the Witch of Endor,“it arose from the earth like a
cloud of dust.”^226 It was fitting that the ghost should be likened
to a dust-storm. Its home was in the ground; and there, in the
dark underworld, its food, we are told, was dust. But the word
used by the poet for the ghost of Ea-bani is notlil. It is another
word, utukku, which occurs frequently in the magical texts. Here
theutukkuis a general name for a demon, and we hear of the
utukku“of the field,” “of the mountain,” “of the sea,”and“of the
grave.”The“utukkuof the grave”must be the restless ghost of
some dead man which has become a spirit of darkness, working
evil to mankind. The ordinaryutukku, however, had no human
ancestry; it was a demon pure and simple, which sat upon the
neck of the sufferer and inflicted upon him pain and death. It
corresponded with the vampire of European folk-lore; and just

simply a means of predicting the future.

(^225) At Eridu the Zi seems to have taken the place occupied by the Lil at Nippur;
at all events, just as En-lil was the chief Lil or Lilla at Nippur, so Ea seems to
have been the chief Zi at Eridu. On this see the next lecture.
(^226) Zaqiquis of course a“cloud of dust,”not“a wind,”as some scholars have
translated it. A wind does not rise up out of the earth, but comes from the air
or sky. InWAI.v. 6, vi. 64, the meaning ofzaqiqican be“dust”and nothing
else:ilâni-su istarâti-su amnâ ana zakiki,“its gods and goddesses I reduced to
dust.”