Gula

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Gula was the principal healing deity of ancient Mesopotamia: the divine physician, called upon to cure disease, mend the body, and restore the dying, and held in turn to send sickness when she was angered. Her name, often glossed “the great one,” ran through Sumerian and Akkadian worship for the better part of two millennia, and her cult outlasted most of the gods around her.

She was not the only healing goddess, and much of her history is a story of absorption. Several distinct figures — Ninisina, “lady of Isin”; Ninkarrak; Nintinuga; Bau — overlapped with her in function and were gradually drawn into a single composite, so that texts and seals treat names that had once belonged to separate cults as titles of one goddess. Her chief seat was the city of Isin in southern Mesopotamia, where she was the patron deity; later she held an important sanctuary at Babylon as well. Tradition paired her with a warrior god, most often Ninurta, and counted physician deities among her children.

Her emblem was the dog. Images and votive figurines of seated dogs were dedicated to her, and excavation at Isin uncovered a structure with the buried remains of many dogs, taken by archaeologists as evidence of an animal kept or sacrificed in connection with her cult — though precisely what the dog meant to her worshippers, whether guardian, healer’s companion, or something else, the sources do not spell out. Alongside the dog she is shown with the surgical or ritual instruments of medicine.

What her devotees believed of her can be read in the prayers addressed to her and in a long first-person hymn, usually dated to the Kassite or later period and attributed to a scribe named Bulluṭsa-rabi, in which the goddess recites her own powers and absorbs the attributes of her sister-figures. Mesopotamian medicine was at once practical and incantatory — the physician’s craft and the appeal to the deity who governed it were not felt as rivals — and Gula stood at the point where the two met. To invoke her was to ask that the hand of disease be lifted and the body returned to itself.

She belongs to the same religious world that later transmitted Babylonian astronomy and divination westward, and she is among the clearest Mesopotamian parallels to the healing gods of other cultures, the Greek Asclepius foremost among them; the parallel is real, though the lines of any direct borrowing are not established. The temples at Isin fell silent with the rest of the old cults, but the figure of the goddess who heals proved durable across the region’s long memory.

→ Related: Oannes · Mesopotamia