SHAMIR

SHAMIR

"And when We decreed death for him, nothing showed his death to them save a creeping creature of the earth which gnawed away his staff. And when he fell, the jinn saw clearly how, if they had known the Unseen, they would not have continued in despised toil."

The Quran 34:14

"Allah tells us how Sulayman, peace be upon him, died and how Allah concealed his death from the Jinn who were subjugated to him to do hard labor. He remained leaning on his stick, which was his staff, as Ibn `Abbas may Allah be pleased with him, Mujahid, Al-Hasan, Qatadah and others said. He stayed like that for a long time, nearly a year. When a creature of the earth, which was a kind of worm, ate through the stick, it became weak and fell to the ground. Then it became apparent that he had died a long time before. It also became clear to Jinn and men alike that the Jinn do not know the Unseen as they (the Jinn) used to imagine and tried to deceive people."

Ibn Kathir, The Death Of Sulayman

"They told him schamir was a worm of the size of a barley corn, but so powerful that the hardest flint could not resist him."

"Solomon cut the stones of the temple with the blood of a little worm called thamir, which when sprinkled on the marble, made it easy to split. And the way in which Solomon obtained the worm was this. He had an ostrich, whose chick he put in a glass bottle. Seeing this, the ostrich ran to the desert, and brought the worm, and with its blood fractured the vessel."

Sabine Baring-Gould, Curious Myths Of the Middle Ages

 "In Arabic tradition Solomon, under instructions from Gabriel, has recourse to a worm when he desires to bore through a pearl, and to a white worm when he wishes to thread the onyx."

The Jewish Encyclopedia

The Shamir is a worm that can gnaw through stone in both Judaism and Islam. Or is it? Some believe the Shamir is actually a stone itself that can cut other stones. For my purposes, it's a worm because that's way more fun to draw.

A miniature from Qazwīnī’s Book of Marvels showing Solomon with the djinn (one of whom looks a lot like the div I just posted!).

In Islam, the story of the Shamir is used to show that only God knows all. The djinn that teach Solomon the ways of magic, toil away at Solomon's command. He watches over them and leans on his walking stick. Until one day when a creature "like a worm" gnaws through the stick causing Solomon's body to fall to the ground. Solomon had been dead for a full year while the djinn worked away.

Here's a pair of illustrations depicting Solomon's Shamir by Eberhard Werner Happel from 1707.

I kept a few things from this Happel illustration. I loved the multiple eyes and the tiny appendages like a caterpillar as well as the segmented body. I also like coarse spines in the top drawing so I combined the two. Where mine differs is the massive teeth. I figured if this guy is chewing through rock he should have some hefty choppers.

One of the only references I can find to the Shamir in pop culture is these centipede-like creatures from the cartoon Secret Saturdays. 

Tomorrow will be the first of three redrawing but continuing the theme of monsters from the SWANA region.