Mesopotamian symbols and gods
Cuneiform, the gods of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria and their emblems, from the star of Inanna to the lamassu that guarded the palace gates.
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Gods and their emblems
- Inanna (Ishtar)Inanna, called Ishtar in Akkadian, was the most important goddess of ancient Mesopotamia: goddess of sexual love and of war, and in the sky the planet Venus. Her emblems were the eight-pointed star and the lion, and in the earliest times a bundle of reeds.
- Star of IshtarThe eight-pointed star was the emblem of the goddess Inanna, or Ishtar, as the planet Venus, the morning and evening star. On Babylonian boundary stones it stands beside the crescent of the moon god and the sun disc of Shamash.
- Enki (Ea)Enki, called Ea in Akkadian, was the Mesopotamian god of the fresh waters beneath the earth, of wisdom and of magic. On cylinder seals he is a bearded god in a horned cap with a stream of water full of fish flowing around him.
- MardukMarduk was the patron god of Babylon, who rose to head the Mesopotamian gods by the first millennium BC. His emblem was a spade with a triangular blade, and his animal the mušḫuššu, the snake-dragon of the Ishtar Gate.
- Mušḫuššu (the Ishtar Gate dragon)The mušḫuššu, “furious serpent”, is the dragon of Babylon: a scaly beast with a horned snake’s head, a lion’s forelegs, an eagle’s hind talons and a stinging tail. It was the animal of the god Marduk, and it strides in rows along the blue walls of the Ishtar Gate.
- Anunnaki (Anunna)The Anunna, Anunnaki in Akkadian, were a group of gods in ancient Mesopotamia: in Sumerian texts the highest gods of the pantheon, or the gods of one city, who decided fates, and in later texts the gods of the underworld. Their name most likely means “those of princely seed”.
Guardians and emblems of kings
- LamassuA lamassu is an Assyrian protective spirit with a bearded human head, the body of a bull or a lion and the wings of a bird. Colossal stone pairs of them guarded the gateways of Assyrian palaces in the ninth to seventh centuries BC, to turn back evil.
- Assyrian winged discA disc with outspread wings and a bird’s tail, often with a god inside it, that hovers above the king and the sacred tree in Assyrian art. It is usually read as the emblem of Ashur, Assyria’s chief god, though on some monuments it is the sun god Shamash.
- Assyrian sacred treeA stylised tree carved again and again in Assyrian palaces between winged figures or kings, often under the winged disc. It is no real plant; the Metropolitan Museum calls it a symbol of the fertility, abundance and prosperity of Assyria.
About mesopotamian symbols and gods
Mesopotamian symbols and gods follows the signs of ancient Iraq back to the clay tablets, carved stones and glazed bricks that carry them. There are ten pages so far. Cuneiform is the writing itself, pressed into clay with a reed for more than 3,000 years. Three are gods and goddesses: Inanna, or Ishtar, goddess of love, war and the planet Venus; Enki, god of the fresh waters and of wisdom; and Marduk, the god of Babylon who rose to rule the others. One more page is about a group of gods, the Anunnaki or Anunna: in Sumerian texts the highest gods taken together, who decided fates, and in later texts the gods of the underworld. Their name most likely means “those of princely seed”. Two are their emblems: the star of Ishtar and the mušḫuššu, Marduk’s dragon on the Ishtar Gate. Three belong to the palaces of the Assyrian kings: the lamassu that guarded their gates, the winged disc that hovers over the king, and the sacred tree.
Sumer, Babylon and Assyria
The British Museum dates the first cuneiform to the Sumerians, around 3000 BC. Babylon became the religious centre of Mesopotamia in the second and first millennia BC, Nicole Brisch writes in the Oracc guide to the gods, and its god Marduk rose with it. Assyria began as the small city-state of Ashur in what is now north-eastern Iraq. Its great age came between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, when its kings ruled from Ashur, Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh and lined their palaces with colossal sculpture. Nineveh fell in 612 BC to the Babylonians and the Medes.
Forgotten and found again
When cuneiform went out of use, Cécile Michel writes, the history of Mesopotamia was almost completely forgotten, except for a few names kept in the Bible and the Greek historians, such as the Tower of Babel and Nineveh. Assyrian palace art was unknown until the excavations of the mid-nineteenth century at Nimrud, Khorsabad and Nineveh; in the Metropolitan Museum’s words, nothing like it had been seen in well over 2,000 years. The reliefs and winged bulls that Austen Henry Layard sent to London caused a media sensation.
Heritage at risk, and the Assyrians today
Michel began her blog on Mesopotamia as a wake-up call about the destruction of ancient sites, monuments and museums in Iraq and Syria. The Penn Museum counts Assyria as part of Iraq’s cultural identity, the heritage that the so-called Islamic State tried to erase by destroying major monuments between 2014 and 2017. These pages treat the images as part of a living heritage. The historian Sargon Donabed, speaking at the Met about the Assyrian reliefs, describes their story as much like that of the Assyrians themselves, a people displaced and forced to flee their land.
Where to see them
The Assyrian sculptures in the British Museum largely stand where they were first installed more than 160 years ago. The Met’s Assyrian Sculpture Court shows reliefs and a winged bull and lion from Ashurnasirpal II’s palace at Nimrud, and the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures in Chicago a 40-ton winged bull from Khorsabad. The Ishtar Gate and the Processional Way of Babylon stand in the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin.
Sources
- Introducing the Assyrians (British Museum blog), British Museum blog, “Introducing the Assyrians”, The British Museum, page text
- Marduk (god) (Nicole Brisch, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Nicole Brisch, “Marduk (god)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2019, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
- The decipherment of cuneiform writing: a complex matter! (Cécile Michel, Mesopotamian Bulletins), Cécile Michel (CNRS; Universität Hamburg), Mesopotamian Bulletins, 8 May 2015, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, page text
- Mesopotamian Bulletins: about this blog (Cécile Michel), Cécile Michel, Mesopotamian Bulletins, index page and author note, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Universität Hamburg, page text
- The Assyrian Sculpture Court (The Met, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, essay “The Assyrian Sculpture Court”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, page text
- Restoring at-risk Assyrian cultural heritage (Penn Museum press release), Penn Museum press release, “Restoring At-Risk Assyrian Cultural Heritage: Archaeologists Recover Remarkably Preserved Shrines from a Temple in Iraq”, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, page text
- Spotlight: Keeping culture alive (The Met, 2022), The Met, Perspectives, “Spotlight: Keeping Culture Alive”, August 2022: Sarah Graff (associate curator, Ancient Near Eastern Art) and Sargon Donabed (Roger Williams University), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, page text
- The Yelda Khorsabad Court (ISAC Museum, University of Chicago), Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, gallery page, with the Esarhaddon prism quotation, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago, page text
- Vorderasiatisches Museum: the collection (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum, “Collection”, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, page text
- Anunna (Anunnaku, Anunnaki) (Nicole Brisch, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Nicole Brisch, “Anunna (Anunnaku, Anunnaki) (a group of gods)”, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Oracc and the UK Higher Education Academy, 2024, Oracc (Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus), University of Pennsylvania, page text
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research