protective · c. 900–600 BCE
The Lamassu
A human-headed winged bull carved at palace gates, up to five metres high, and given a fifth leg so it reads correctly from two angles.
What the sources claim for it
Guardianship of a threshold, at the scale of an empire's front door.
History
Where does the Lamassu come from?
Assyrian palaces set colossal human-headed bulls or lions at their entrances, in pairs, facing outward. The carving convention is a deliberate trick: seen from the front the creature stands still on two legs, seen from the side it strides on four, and the sculptor supplies five legs so that neither view is wrong.
They are protective spirits rather than gods, and Akkadian texts treat lamassu as a class of being that can be assigned to a person or a building. This is apotropaic architecture at state scale — the same reasoning as a Pazuzu head at a doorway, executed in twenty tonnes of gypsum.
1 figure
Who is it attached to?
Figures whose own seal this is
The mark belongs to the spirit: it is drawn, worn or engraved as that spirit's own token.
Afterwards
What did it turn into?
Excavated in the 1840s and central to European museum collections since; several surviving examples at Nineveh and Nimrud were destroyed by ISIS in 2015, and the form is now also an emblem of Assyrian and Iraqi cultural identity.
Which texts describe it?
Oldest first, with what each one does with the mark. A mark described in a Bronze Age incantation and a mark first drawn in a seventeenth-century manuscript are different kinds of claim, whatever the shape has in common.
Akkadian Incantation Series & Amulet Inscriptions
Anonymous; recovered from Assyrian and Babylonian sites · c. 1800-600 BCE · Akkadian and Sumerian
Protective spirits of this class are named in the household incantation material.
Read Akkadian Incantation Series & Amulet Inscriptions in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Robert William Rogers (1864–1930) · Wikimedia file page
Nearby
Related marks
The Star of Ishtar
Eight points for the planet Venus, and the standard way of writing a goddess into a scene without drawing her.
The Winged Disc
A sun with wings, borrowed by every empire in the region in turn — and the direct ancestor of the Persian faravahar.
The Rod and Ring
The objects a seated god hands to a standing king at the top of Hammurabi's stele — most likely a measuring rod and a coiled line.
The Spade of Marduk
A builder's tool as a god's signature — Marduk is identified on boundary stones by a spade, not by a weapon.
The Mušḫuššu Dragon
A scaled dragon with a lion's forelegs and an eagle's hind claws, set in glazed brick along the processional way into Babylon.
The Pazuzu Head
A demon's face worn to keep a demon out — the clearest surviving case of a malevolent spirit hired as a doorman.