lamassu

[prettygoodword]

lamassu (LEH-ma-soo) - n., an Assyrian, Akkadian, and Sumerian protective deity depicted as having the head of a human, the body of an ox or lion, and the wings of a bird.



Thanks, WikiMedia!


Also called shedu. Evolved from the protective Sumerian goddess Lamma or Lama, who was depicted as a woman with wings stretched wide. The iconography of the description seems to have been codified by the epic of Gilgamesh, while the name is from Akkadian, from the earlier Sumerian.

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Wow, so many questions! (Layers of accretion that we can't now unpeel or peek beneath.)

[prettygoodword]

I gather a fair amount of unpeeling has been done by scholars, none of which could fit in a brief dictionary entry. I don't have a sense of how much, though, nor how many layers are left.

Just about everything tossed through the Sumerian > Akkadian > Assyrian culture machine (with or without involvement of Chaldeans, Elamites, Persians, or other gear-cogged neighbors) has onion layers. All of them fascinating.

[thistleingrey]

Yes--I have a slight acquaintance with some of the layers. Somehow, visual representation has more impact than textual description.

[prettygoodword]

True, that.