Mesopotamian · Sumerian · c. 2100 BCE
Lugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag)
Anonymous; Sumerian composition
Ninurta kills the demon Asag and its army of stones, then reorganises the world he has wrecked, assigning each kind of stone its fate according to whether it fought for him. A combat myth that ends in administration rather than in kingship.
Read Lugal-e (Ninurta and the Asag) in full at the linked edition →What this text attests · 3
| Name here | Rank given | # | Powers described |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | Listed among the enemies Ninurta has already destroyed, in a poem about a different victory. The corpus keeps it because that is how a defeated monster becomes a credential: the bird is no longer a story here, it is an item in the hero's record. | |
Asag = The Asag | The adversary in the mountain | — | Scalds the rivers so that the fish boil, fathers an army of stones on the mountain, and is destroyed by Ninurta. |
| Lord who is the storm | — | Destroys the Asag and its army of stones, then pronounces the destiny of each kind of stone according to which side it took, and reorders the waters afterwards. |
