The Ardat Lili

The ardat lili belongs to a small group of night spirits — the lilu, the lilitu and this one — whose common feature is an interrupted life rather than an evil nature. She is characteristically an unmarried woman who died young, and what she is said to want is the marriage and the children she did not have, which she pursues among the living at night.

The reason this corpus carries her is comparative. The nocturnal visitation of a sleeper who cannot move or speak is reported in Akkadian here, in Latin as the incubus, in Germanic as the mara that gives English its nightmare, in Arabic as the qarin, and in modern English as the Old Hag and the shadow figure. The phenomenon is continuously reported across four thousand years and the interpretation changes every few centuries, which is a finding about interpretation rather than about spirits, and it is one this corpus is unusually well placed to show once the other ends of the chain are seeded.

She is also the most plausible ancestor of Lilith by way of the shared lil- element, though the corpus states that as the standard proposal rather than as a derivation it can source — see the note on Lilith's own etymology.