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The Heritage of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East

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The ghost Gello (1)

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02 Religious and ideological symbols and iconographic motifs



 		Keywords
Gello
Period
6th century BCE
2nd century CE 		Channel
Greek poets
Helleno-Roman philosophers and scholars

Text
The Mesopotamian Gallû demon was borrowed into Greek as Gello.

Zenobius, Centuries of Proverbs 1.58:
[Quoting Sappho:] “More fond of children than Gello”;
a saying used of those who die young, or of those who are lovers of children but spoil them; for Gello was a girl who died young, and of whom the Lesbians say that her ghost haunts little children, ascribing to her the death of such as die before they are grown up. It occurs in Sappho.

Sources (list of abbreviations) (source links will open in a new browser window)
Sappho 178A
Zenobius, Centuries of Proverbs 1.58

Bibliography

Burkert 1992, 82Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution. Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Period. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1992.
West 1991, 362West, David R. “Gello and Lamia, Two Hellenic Daemons of Semitic Origin.” Ugarit-Forschungen 23 (1991) 361-368.

Links (external links will open in a new browser window)
Sappho on Gello
Cf. The ghost Gello (2)
Cf. The ghost Gello (3)
Cf. The Mesopotamian Gallû demon (1)

Amar Annus


URL for this entry: http://www.aakkl.helsinki.fi/melammu/database/gen_html/a0000196.php

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