Humbaba

Humbaba — Huwawa in the older Babylonian and Sumerian texts — is the guardian whom Enlil set over the Cedar Forest to keep mortals from its timber. The epic gives him a terrifying kit: 'his voice is the Deluge, his speech is fire, his breath is death,' and no stirring in his forest at sixty leagues escapes his ears. His face became a thing in its own right: Old Babylonian clay masks render his features as a single coiled intestine, for diviners read entrails that curled 'like the face of Huwawa' as an omen; the British Museum keeps one such inscribed mask.

Tablets III to V of the Epic of Gilgamesh tell of his end. Gilgamesh and Enkidu march to the forest, and Shamash the sun god pins the guardian with thirteen winds. His seven auras of terror are his armor — in the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh and Huwawa he is coaxed into trading them away one by one for gifts, and discovers the trick only when the last is gone. On his knees he offers cedar and lifelong service; Gilgamesh wavers, but Enkidu presses him to strike before the gods learn of it. Dying, Humbaba curses them both. They carry his head to Enlil in a leather sack, and the god is furious; the deed weighs heavily when the gods later condemn Enkidu to death.

A tablet acquired by the Sulaymaniyah Museum in 2011 restored lost lines: the din of birds and monkeys in the cedar canopy, and the heroes' unease after felling the sacred trees.