THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Anzu — Sumerian Anzud or Imdugud — is a colossal bird with a lion's head and eagle's body, whose wingbeats raise whirlwinds and dust storms and whose cry is a lion's roar. He is among the oldest monsters in Mesopotamian art: a copper lintel of about 2500 BCE from the Ninhursag temple at Tell al-Ubaid, now in the British Museum, shows him with wings spread, gripping a stag in each talon, and he recurs on the silver vase and reliefs of Lagash.
The Akkadian Epic of Anzu records his crime. Posted at the door of Enlil's chamber, he covets the Tablet of Destinies — 'I will take it, and the command of the gods will be mine' — and snatches it while Enlil bathes, flying off to his mountain. With destiny in his grasp his word comes true: arrows shot at him are talked back into their parts, 'shaft, return to the reed; feathers, to the birds!' Adad, Girra, and Shara each decline the fight; at last the mother goddess commissions Ninurta, and Ea supplies the trick — force the bird to spread its wings in the gale, and shoot the instant it calls its feathers back to itself. Ninurta clips his pinion, pierces heart and lungs, and carries the tablet home.
In the Sumerian Lugalbanda poems the great bird shows another face: the hero, stranded in the mountains, feeds his chick, and Anzud in gratitude grants him superhuman speed to fetch help for Uruk. In the prologue of another Sumerian poem he nests, unwelcome, in Inanna's huluppu tree. Bane and benefactor by turns, he keeps reappearing across Mesopotamian literature.
