Theda Bara was a Cincinnati tailor's daughter named Theodosia Goodman who in 1915 stood for a publicity photograph in a leopard skin, in front of a human skeleton, lit from below. The film was called A Fool There Was. She played a character listed in the credits simply as The Vampire. The press shortened it to "vamp," and the word, in that exact sense of the seductive woman who drains and destroys men, has been in English since. Almost every later figure descends from her, from the noir femme fatale in pearls and a cigarette holder to the present-day media cliché of the dangerous woman. None of that, however, is where she comes from. She comes from a clay tablet at Ur, copied around 2000 BCE from a story already old, and behind that tablet stands a Sumerian storm spirit who was already an old idea when no one had yet invented the phonetic alphabet.
Theda Bara invented the word, not the figure
The provenance of the cinema vamp is short and well-documented. In 1897 the painter Philip Burne-Jones exhibited a canvas called The Vampire at the New Gallery in London. It showed a triumphant woman crouched over a fainting man. His cousin Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem for the catalogue, also called "The Vampire," beginning A fool there was, and he made his prayer / Even as you and I. The poem was widely reprinted. In 1909 Porter Emerson Browne turned the poem into a stage play, keeping the line and using it as the title. In 1915 the play was filmed by Frank Powell at Fox, and Theda Bara, in her first major role, played the destroyer. The film is melodramatic and rather bad and was an enormous hit. Out of that one production the entire iconography of the modern femme fatale settled into place. So the word is barely more than a century old.
The figure she was named for is much older than that, and Kipling and Burne-Jones and the Victorian audience knew it. They were not inventing her. They were retrieving her.
Sumer's storm spirits
Around 3000 BCE, in the earliest cuneiform record of southern Mesopotamia, you can already see her shape. There is a class of spirits called the lilitu (the feminine plural of an Akkadian word for wind or night). They are storm spirits. They live in the deserts and on the empty roads outside the city walls. They are associated with lions, with disease, and with the wind that gets into a house at night when nobody has barred the door. They are dangerous specifically to women in childbirth and to infants. Several tablets describe them as having breasts that hold poison rather than milk. They are the wild thing the Sumerian city was built against, with feminine attributes deliberately given.
Alongside them is Lamashtu, a Sumerian mother goddess gone wrong, who steals newborns out of cradles and devours them. And alongside her is Ishtar, the great goddess of love and war, whose erotic power is real and recognised and treated by the priests as the most generative force in the universe and also as the most dangerous. The vamp at her oldest is a composite. Lilitu gives the wildness, Lamashtu gives the child-eating, Ishtar gives the sex. Stack the three and you have, in basic outline, the woman Theda Bara stood for in front of the skeleton.
Lilith, written down at Ur
The first proper name we can read is on a Sumerian poem now called Gilgamesh and the Huluppu-Tree, on a tablet found at Ur and dated to roughly 2000 BCE. The poem describes a single tree growing by the Euphrates. A serpent has made its home in the roots. The Anzu bird, a giant raptor, nests in the branches. In the middle, inside the trunk, lives "the dark maid Lilith." The goddess Inanna wants the tree felled to make her a throne. Gilgamesh, called to do it, kills the serpent, drives off the bird, and Lilith flees to the desert. She is the figure who must be cleared out of the wild middle of the tree before the city can have its furniture.
That is her first appearance under that name, four thousand years ago, and almost everything later attaches to it. She is wild. She is associated with serpents. She lives in a place humans should not be. She must be driven out, and once driven out, she goes to the open country and waits. None of those features will be cut from the figure in the centuries that follow. They will be elaborated.
Gilgamesh refuses Ishtar
The earliest standoff between hero and seductress is also in Gilgamesh, on Tablet 6 of the Standard Babylonian version. Ishtar watches Gilgamesh wash off the blood of the giant Humbaba, finds him beautiful, and proposes marriage on the spot. He refuses, and the speech he gives is the first surviving "I know better than to sleep with you" monologue in literature. He lists her previous lovers and what happened to each. Tammuz, mourned every year, dead. The bright-coloured shepherd bird, wing broken. The lion, dug into traps. The horse, lashed and spurred to ruin. The gardener, turned into a mole. The shepherd, transformed by his own dogs into the wolf they hunted. Each man she loved, in his telling, ended in some animal form, ruined. Ishtar listens, goes up to heaven, demands the Bull of Heaven from her father, and sends it down to destroy him. That is the urtext of the standoff. The figure was complete enough in the second millennium BCE to have a refusal speech written for her.
Greece specialises her
By the time you reach the Greek material the figure has been split into about six versions, each carrying one piece of the original. Lamia is a Libyan queen Zeus loved. Hera, in revenge, killed her children. Lamia went mad and became a child-eating monster wandering the Mediterranean. The Greeks said she removed her own eyes at night so she did not have to see what she had done. Empusa, an attendant of Hecate, has one bronze leg and one donkey leg, and devours travellers on lonely roads. The Sirens sing sailors to death. Circe, on her island, drugs men and turns them into pigs. Calypso keeps Odysseus on hers for seven years. Medea kills her own brother and later her own children. Each one is a single facet of the older composite. Greek mythology is not introducing this figure. It is sorting her into species.
Down through the middle
In Roman folklore the lamia becomes a stock witch in the corner of a story. In late antiquity she fuses with the succubus, the female demon who visits sleeping men. In the Talmud and especially in the medieval Kabbalah, Lilith is read back into the Book of Genesis as Adam's first wife, made of the same clay he was, who refused to lie beneath him, left Eden, and became the mother of demons. None of that is actually in the biblical text. It is a thousand-year-old commentary layered over a single ambiguous Hebrew word in Isaiah 34. The figure kept moving, kept attracting new material, kept being recognisable.
The Decadents put her back in the gallery
The nineteenth century rediscovered her on purpose. Gustave Moreau painted Salome dancing for Herod and reused her in seventy other canvases. Oscar Wilde wrote Salome as a play in 1891 in French. Aubrey Beardsley illustrated it. Richard Strauss made it an opera in 1905. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted the same woman with the same red hair and the same long neck looking out of half his canvases. Edward Burne-Jones, Rossetti's friend, was working in the same vein when his son Philip painted The Vampire that Kipling wrote his poem for. By the time Theda Bara stood in front of her skeleton in 1915, the Decadents had spent forty years reassembling the figure out of every available historical part, putting her back into European visual culture in full archaic regalia. The cinema vamp was not invented at Fox in 1915. She was handed to Fox by Symbolism with a complete iconography already in place.
What stayed the same
Across five thousand years she keeps her core properties. She lives in the wild country outside the city. Her sexuality is real and is treated as dangerous in particular to children and to men who do not have the sense Gilgamesh had on Tablet 6. She is associated with the night, the desert, the moon, the lion, the serpent. She moves between the human and the not-quite-human in ways that do not stay stable. The clothes change. The technology changes. The body of the photograph changes. The figure does not. A Sumerian incantation tablet asking a god to keep the lilitu away from a sleeping infant, and a 1915 publicity still of a Cincinnati tailor's daughter draped in a tiger skin in front of a stage skeleton, are doing exactly the same job. They are turning the same long anxiety into a stylised object you can look at without it killing you.
The longer shelf
Storica's Sumerian Myths at B1 is where the oldest version of all of this lives, with Inanna and Ishtar and the dark maid in the tree. Gods and Mortals at A2+ is where the Greek inheritors are sorted out by name, the Sirens and Circe and Lamia and Medea each holding their slice. And Dracula at A2+ is where the figure crosses into the modern novel almost intact, in the three brides and in what Lucy Westenra becomes after she is bitten. Read in any order they trace the same outline across four millennia, in a slightly different costume each time.
I build Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. We adapt the classics, including the ones whose central figures have been migrating, more or less unchanged, for five thousand years, into short daily readings of about fifteen minutes, from A0 up to B2, in seven languages.