Documented: Lamashtu appears across incantation series and hundreds of bronze and stone amulets, with ritual instructions to banish her, offerings, a black dog, a transit provisioned for the road back to the underworld. The canonical series was edited by Walter Farber (2014). Pazuzu amulets, heads, plaques, pendants, were worn against her specifically, the demon invoked to hunt the demoness. The Metropolitan Museum and the Louvre hold the plaques.
The popular genealogy: Lamashtu and the lilitu demons of Mesopotamia flow into the Jewish Lilith, first wife, night-hag, infant-killer, and from there into every vampire and witch of the medieval imagination. The resemblance is real; the lilitu connection is textually documented, and Lilith's single biblical appearance (Isaiah 34:14) sits in that neighborhood. The direct line, Lamashtu becomes Lilith, is asserted more often than proven.
The interesting claim: Lamashtu is infant mortality made governable. Her portrait isolates real risks, snakes, pigs, dogs, donkeys, the animals of the fever swamp and the dirty floor, and her rituals quarantine the sick room, restrict visitors, and date the danger to the days around birth. Read this way, demonology is a risk model wearing a mask, and the mask worked for two thousand years.
When a civilization gives infant mortality a face, a name, and a counter-spirit, is that superstition, or public health before the microscope?