Lamassu

A 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.

Mesopotamian symbols and gods. Also called assyrian winged bull, lamassu statue, shedu, winged bull.

Meaning

The Metropolitan Museum describes lamassu as massive winged composite creatures with the head of a man and the features of a bull or a lion, set to guard the gateways to throne rooms. Assyrian texts call them lamassu and šēdu (shedu), and the Assyrian king Esarhaddon explains what they were for: “I had stone šēdus and lamassus, whose appearance repels evil, placed to the right and the left of their gate(s) as protectors of the walk (and) guardians of the path of the king who made them.” Their horned caps mark them as divine; the French Ministry of Culture’s guide to Sargon II’s palace at Khorsabad counts three pairs of horns on the tall tiara, and adds that the bulls held up the brick vaults of the passages and carry a long cuneiform inscription of the king’s titles between their hooves. The lamassu belongs to the heritage of Iraq and of the Assyrian people today. The historian Sargon Donabed, who is Assyrian, remembers touching one at the British Museum as a boy and telling the guard: “But it’s mine.”

Origin and history

Ashurnasirpal II (reigned 883–859 BC) set them in the gates of his new capital, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu). The inscription carved across his palace reliefs says: “Beasts of the mountains and the seas, which I had fashioned out of white limestone and alabaster, I had set up in its gates.” His winged human-headed bulls and lions stood at important entrances facing outward, the Met explains, each gateway guarded by a matching pair of bulls or of lions; only in the throne room did two lions face inward. Sargon II (721–705 BC) gave his new city of Dur-Sharrukin, now Khorsabad, bulls more than four metres high and up to 30 tonnes in weight. Reliefs at Nineveh show how such blocks were quarried, cut, hauled on sledges by dozens of men and floated on rafts. Sennacherib’s “Palace Without Rival” at Nineveh was entered through gateways flanked by colossal human-headed winged bulls, the British Museum says, that protected the king from dangerous supernatural forces.

They were the first Assyrian works the modern world saw. Austen Henry Layard’s finds at Nimrud in the mid-nineteenth century included colossal winged bulls, and the British Museum began paying for his digging. The sculptures went down the Tigris on rafts to Basra, by steamship to Bombay and round Africa to London, where the pair from Ashurnasirpal’s throne room arrived in 1852 and caused a sensation; The Times reported a year later that Assyria had been brought into fashion. Excavators at Khorsabad, faced with the weight, sawed bulls into sections to move them. In Chicago, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures shows a 40-ton human-headed winged bull in its Yelda Khorsabad Court, a recreation of a courtyard of Sargon’s palace; most of the gallery’s objects were excavated by the institute’s own Iraq Expedition between 1929 and 1935.

Why does a lamassu have five legs?

So that it looks right from two sides. The sculptors gave these guardians five legs, the Metropolitan Museum explains, so that they seem to stand firm when seen from the front and to stride forward when seen from the side. The Met’s essay on Mesopotamian magic adds that from the side the legs give the illusion of a beast ready to move against any supernatural enemy.

“They have found Nimrod himself”

Layard told the story of the first head at Nimrud in Nineveh and its Remains (1849). Two Arabs rode up to him at full gallop, shouting: “Hasten, O Bey, hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod himself.” In the trench the workmen drew back a screen they had put up to show an enormous human head carved in alabaster. Layard saw at once that it belonged to a winged lion or bull like those already known from Khorsabad and Persepolis. One workman, at his first glimpse of it, had dropped his basket and run off towards Mosul.

Bull or lion, lamassu or shedu

Not every lamassu is a bull. Ashurnasirpal’s palace had winged human-headed lions as well as bulls, and the pair now in the Metropolitan Museum is one of each, taken from two different gateways. Esarhaddon’s inscription names šēdus and lamassus together, and the French guide to Khorsabad calls the same bulls “lamassu or shedu”.

Destroyed and remade

In March 2015 the group that called itself Islamic State attacked Nimrud with bulldozers, and by April a video showed the north-west part of Ashurnasirpal II’s palace destroyed along with its sculptures, among them lamassu still standing in place. UNESCO’s director-general, Irina Bokova, called the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage a war crime. At Nineveh, a lamassu that had stood at the Nergal Gate since about 700 BC was destroyed in February 2015. The artist Michael Rakowitz rebuilt it at full size from empty cans of Iraqi date syrup for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, with the cuneiform inscription from its back exposed. In 2019 Factum Foundation sent facsimiles of the two lamassu from Ashurnasirpal’s throne room, recorded in the British Museum, to the University of Mosul, where they were unveiled at the entrance to the university library.

Assyrians and the lamassu today

For Assyrians, the lamassu is their own history. George Bet Atanous, the designer of the Assyrian flag, counted the human-headed winged bull among his two favourite ancient motifs and used it on medals, coins, plaques and jewellery to keep the old images alive; to him its body meant strength and its wings speed. Donabed, speaking with the Met curator Sarah Graff in 2022, compared the reliefs, “dispossessed and then repossessed and reconstructed”, with the Assyrian people, displaced and forced to flee their land. The Penn Museum counts Assyria as part of Iraq’s cultural identity, the part that the destruction of 2014 to 2017 tried to erase.

Sources

Mesopotamian magic in the first millennium B.C. (The Met, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, essay “Mesopotamian Magic in the First Millennium B.C.”, 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
Winged bulls (Khorsabad, the City of Sargon, French Ministry of Culture), Archeologie.culture.fr, “Khorsabad, the City of Sargon”: The luxury of an Assyrian palace, Winged bulls, Ministère de la Culture (France), with the Musée du Louvre, page text
Human-headed winged lion (lamassu), 32.143.2 (The Met), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object 32.143.2, catalogue entry, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 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
Introducing the Assyrians (British Museum blog), British Museum blog, “Introducing the Assyrians”, The British Museum, page text
Lamassu from the North-West Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (Factum Foundation), Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation, project page, Factum Foundation, page text
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
UN condemns destruction of Nimrud heritage site in northern Iraq (UN News, 6 March 2015), UN News, 6 March 2015, United Nations, page text
UNESCO condemns destruction at Iraq’s Nimrud site (UN News, 13 April 2015), UN News, 13 April 2015, United Nations, page text
Replicas of Assyrian statues smashed by IS unveiled in Iraq’s Mosul (AFP via AINA, 2019), Agence France-Presse, reprinted by the Assyrian International News Agency, 24 October 2019, Assyrian International News Agency, page text
The invisible enemy should not exist (Lamassu of Nineveh) (Michael Rakowitz), Michael Rakowitz, artist’s statement for the Fourth Plinth commission, Trafalgar Square, Michael Rakowitz (artist’s site), 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 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
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

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

Added October 8, 2026.

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