Assyrian winged disc
A 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.
Meaning
In Assyrian palace art the winged disc floats at the top of the scene, above the king or the sacred tree. Austen Henry Layard, writing about the Nimrud reliefs in 1849, described it as a human figure with the wings and tail of a bird, enclosed in a circle and holding a ring in one hand, and called it the emblem of the supreme deity. The Metropolitan Museum ties the winged disk to Ashur, Assyria’s chief god, as William Hayes Ward did in 1910 when he wrote of “the winged disk of Assur” over the tree. But the Oracc guide to the gods notes that on Neo-Assyrian stelae and boundary stones the winged disc stands for Šamaš, the sun god. The emblem lives on as a national symbol: the flag of the Assyrian people, designed by George Bet Atanous, puts the god Ashur in war gear above a winged disc of Shamash.
Origin and history
Layard came across it in the palace of Ashurnasirpal II (reigned 883–859 BC) at Nimrud. On one slab, he wrote, two kings stood facing each other across the sacred tree, and above the tree was the emblem of the supreme deity. Edward Hincks, one of the decipherers of cuneiform, identified the god of Assyria on the reliefs at Kalhu (Nimrud), Cécile Michel records. The disc turns up in small details as well as large scenes: on one relief in the Metropolitan Museum, a winged figure carries a bucket engraved with two tiny winged figures performing their ritual before a sacred tree and the winged disk.
The most famous example is the relief behind Ashurnasirpal’s throne, where the king stands in worship on both sides of the tree under the winged disc. The art historian Irene Winter tied that image closely to the first title in the king’s Standard Inscription, SANGA of Assur, the god’s priest. Early Assyrian kings wrote that Ashur was king and the human ruler his vicar, Seth Richardson notes, and at a coronation a priest called out “Assur is king, Assur is king.”
Ashur or Shamash?
Both readings have support, and they come from different monuments. The Met, and Ward in 1910, tie the disc over the palace scenes to Ashur, Assyria’s chief god and the god who, the British Museum notes, gave the king his absolute power. Ruth Horry’s Oracc entry on the sun god says that Šamaš, whose usual emblem was a four-pointed star, was shown by a winged solar disc on Neo-Assyrian stelae and kudurrus; a stele of Ashurnasirpal II from Nimrud in the British Museum shows the king worshipping the great gods in symbolic form, Šamaš among them as the winged disc. The modern Assyrian flag keeps both gods, as its designer explained: the Shamash disc in the centre and the god Ashur above it.
Often confused with the Persian winged figure
The winged figure in a circle has a close Persian relative. Layard noticed in 1849 that the Assyrian emblem resembled “the image so frequently occurring on the early sculptures of Persia”, which some then took for the Zoroastrian “ferouher”, the spirit of the person beneath it. He thought the resemblance remarkable. Egypt had a winged sun of its own, the winged sun disk.
On the Assyrian flag
The flag adopted by the Assyrian Universal Alliance was designed by George Bet Atanous, a self-taught Assyriologist and seismic engineer born in Russia in 1919 to a family from Urmia. He told the editor Homer Abramian in an interview from about 1980 that he had chosen existing ancient motifs rather than inventing new ones. At the centre is the golden disc of Shamash, with the god Ashur in war gear above it, coloured as in engravings in the British Museum; between its wings run the rivers Tigris, Euphrates and Zab, extended in four directions to mirror the Assyrians of today, scattered to the four corners of the world, and their hope of finding the way back.
Read next
- Next in Mesopotamian symbols and godsAssyrian 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.
- In Symbols across culturesSun symbolsThe commonest sun symbol is a disc: plain, with rays, with wings, or carried on a chariot. The winged sun disc of Egypt and Assyria, the Babylonian sun god’s four-pointed star in a disc, the gold disc of the Trundholm Sun Chariot and the chariot wheels of the Sun Temple at Konark each belong to a named tradition.
See also
Star of Ishtar, Winged sun disk, Faravahar, Cuneiform, Inanna (Ishtar), Enki (Ea).
Sources
- Nineveh and its Remains, vol. 1 (Austen Henry Layard, 1849), Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and its Remains, vol. I (London: John Murray, 1849), ch. III pp. 65–66 and ch. V p. 133, Internet Archive (out-of-copyright scan), page text
- Relief panel with a winged figure and a courtier (The Met, 322613), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, relief panel from the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, page text
- Utu/Šamaš (god) (Ruth Horry, Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses), Ruth Horry, “Utu/Šamaš (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
- Introducing the Assyrians (British Museum blog), British Museum blog, “Introducing the Assyrians”, The British Museum, page text
- The Assyrian flag and its designer (AINA), Assyrian International News Agency, “The Assyrian Flag and Its Designer”, translated excerpt from George Bet Atanous’s book The Assyrian Flag (interview by Homer Abramian, c. 1980), Assyrian International News Agency, page text
- The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations (Mariana Giovino, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 230, 2007), Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 230 (Fribourg and Göttingen, 2007), pp. 84 and n. 215, 124 and n. 329 (quoting W. H. Ward, 1910, and S. Richardson, State Archives of Assyria Bulletin 13), Academic Press Fribourg / Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (open access, University of Zurich ZORA), pp. 84, 124–126
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research
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