Count the legs
Stand in front of one and count: two forelegs, planted side by side. Now walk past and look from the side: four legs in a walking rhythm, the back one pushing off. One foreleg belongs to both views, so the sculptor added a fifth to make each view complete. Seen from an angle, as in most photographs, all five appear at once, which looks odd because the design was meant for the two straight views.
The trick only works if you move, and moving was the whole point. The bulls stood in pairs on either side of a gateway, their bodies running along the passage, so you met the front first and the side as you walked through. On the way in, the guardian confronts you. Once you’re admitted, it walks with you.
A spirit made of several animals
A lamassu is an Assyrian protective spirit: a human head wearing a horned cap, the sign of a divine being, a curled beard, the body and ears of a bull and the wings of a great bird. Its job was to keep evil out of the palace and to bless those who came in.
The figures are carved from the same blocks as the gateway wall, so they aren’t quite free-standing statues. Most of the body is in very high relief, almost in the round, which is why the shift between views reads so clearly. Look closely and every surface is patterned: rows of feathers, tight curls in the beard, the folds of the cap. Between and behind the legs runs a long cuneiform inscription in Akkadian listing Sargon’s titles and describing the building of his new city.
Khorsabad: a new capital and its gates
Khorsabad is the modern name of Dur-Sharrukin, “Fortress of Sargon”, the capital that Sargon II began around 717 BCE in northern Iraq. His palace stood on a raised terrace, and pairs of lamassu guarded the main gateways and the entrance to the throne room. Envoys, officials and servants all took the same route: meet the stare, pass between the bulls, see them walk. The palace rooms beyond were lined with the long carved walls of Assyrian palaces.
Size did the rest. The lamassu now in Chicago, found in 1929 at the entrance to Sargon’s throne room, is about 4.9 m high and weighs about 40 tonnes. You look up at its face, and you stay small as you pass underneath. The bulls also seem to carry the arch of the doorway above them, so they protect the building in more than one sense.
Where they ended up
French excavators led by the consul Paul-Émile Botta began digging at Khorsabad in 1843. Several bulls were shipped to Paris, where a pair now stands in the Louvre’s Cour Khorsabad with reliefs from the same palace around them; others went to the British Museum and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The Chicago bull had broken into more than a dozen pieces in antiquity. They were shipped to the United States and reassembled in 1930 inside the museum of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, where it still stands.
Not all their relatives were so lucky. In 2015 Islamic State militants smashed the lamassu of the Nergal Gate at Nineveh and blew up much of the palace at Nimrud, where similar guardians had stood for nearly 3,000 years.
Where to see them
The Louvre’s Cour Khorsabad in Paris has the most complete setting, with a pair of bulls and the reliefs around them. Chicago’s ISAC Museum has the single largest piece, and the British Museum and the Iraq Museum have pairs of their own. Galleries close from time to time, so check before you go.
Sources
- Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, “Human-Headed Winged Bull (Lamassu), Khorsabad” (OIM A7369).
- Musée du Louvre, “The Palace of Sargon II: Cour Khorsabad” and “Winged human-headed bulls”.
- G. Loud, Khorsabad, Part I: Excavations in the Palace and at a City Gate, Oriental Institute Publications 38 (1936).
- Ministère de la Culture, “Khorsabad: a new city”.
- UNESCO, statements on the destruction of cultural heritage in Nimrud and Mosul (2015).
.jpg){kind=link}