Demonic · Mesopotamian · c. 2100 BCE
The Asag
Also called Asakku
A demon that fathers an army out of the mountain stones and makes fish boil in the rivers — and whose name becomes the ordinary Akkadian word for a class of illness.
Well sourced
In Lugal-e the Asag is a presence rather than a person: its heat scalds the rivers, the fish boil, and it begets an army by coupling with the mountain, so that Ninurta has to fight the stones as well as the thing that made them. It is one of the oldest adversaries in the corpus and among the least anthropomorphic.
What happens to the name afterwards is the part worth recording. Asakku passes into Akkadian as a term for a class of sickness rather than for an individual, and turns up in the incantation literature this corpus now carries as a category of affliction. That is the same demotion the Levantine material shows repeatedly — Resheph becoming a word for plague — running here in Mesopotamian instead.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Lugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag) · c. 2100 BCE
- Named there as
- Asag
- Rank
- Demon of Sickness and Stone
- Pantheon
- Mesopotamian
- Era
- c. 2100 BCE
- Traditions
- Mesopotamian
Stats
Known connections
Opposed by
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to The Asag, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- malefic2
malefic
- Causes SicknessLugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag)
- Burns & SlaysLugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag)
Its heat makes the fish boil in the rivers.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names The Asag, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 900 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Asag, asakku
Scalds the rivers so that the fish boil, fathers an army of stones on the mountain, and is destroyed by Ninurta.
The name after the demotion. The monster Ninurta kills in Lugal-e is by this material an ordinary word for a class of illness, addressed in the same breath as the other afflictions the series is aimed at. A defeated adversary surviving as a medical term is the Resheph pattern in a second language.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Asag?
What rank is The Asag?
How else is The Asag spelled?
What is The Asag said to do?
How old is The Asag?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Asag is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Ereshkigal
Queen of the Great Below · Mesopotamian
Sovereign of the underworld who strips Ishtar of a garment at each of the seven gates and hangs her on a hook.
Ishtar
Queen of Heaven · Mesopotamian
Goddess of love, war and the planet Venus, whose descent into the underworld is among the oldest recorded narratives.
Marduk
King of the Gods · Mesopotamian
Splits Tiamat and builds the world from her body, and is voted fifty names and supreme authority for doing it.
Nergal
God of the Underworld · Mesopotamian
God of plague, war and the underworld, consort of Ereshkigal — and one of the few Mesopotamian gods the Bible names directly.
Anzu
Storm Bird · Mesopotamian
The lion-headed eagle who steals the Tablet of Destinies and is shot down for it — a rebellion against divine order predating any biblical account by a millennium.
Enki
Lord of the Sweet Waters · Mesopotamian
God of the abzu and of cunning, who repeatedly saves humanity by finding the loophole in another god's decree.
The books behind The Asag
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Lugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag)
Anonymous; Sumerian composition · c. 2100 BCE · Sumerian
Read Lugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag) in full ↗Udug-hul (Evil Utukku)
Anonymous; canonical series of sixteen tablets · c. 1800–600 BCE · Sumerian and Akkadian
Read Udug-hul (Evil Utukku) in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.