Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And on today's episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, our month-long celebration of Halloween continues. Now if

you've been a listener for a while, you know what's going on. You know what we do every

October, but if you are new to the show, here's the deal.

Every October we devote all of our core episodes,

our Tuesday and Thursday episodes,

to seasonally creepy subject matter, things about ghosts,

monsters, devils, curses, horrors, and

frights. So last week we talked all about spooky trains, about locomotive

horror stories, ghost trains, and the phenomenon of the Victorian railway madness.

Today we are beginning a new series on the demons and monsters of ancient Mesopotamian religion because they had some really

exquisite demons and as a concrete example to kick things off today, I wanted to start by talking about a specific ancient

artifact. For my money, one of the creepiest looking artifacts from all of Antiquity antiquity and that is a mask of Humbaba.

Ahhumbaba. Humbaba is an old friend of the show. We've talked about Humbaba,

that's stuff to blow your mind before.

One of my favorites, definitely.

Humbaba came up in our series on the origins of the religious imagery of the

halo because Humbaba as described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, famously has these seven auras or radiances that are kind of like an evil halo.

But first I want to talk specifically about this artifact and then we can talk a bit more about Humbaba as an idea.

So this artifact is a baked clay disc depicting a hideous face.

It's roughly 3.3 inches in height and in width, and it was

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