THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The lamassu is a guardian colossus with a human head, the body of a bull or lion, and eagle's wings, wearing the horned crown of divinity and the plaited beard of an Assyrian king. In cuneiform texts lamassu and šēdu name a pair of protective spirits invoked together in blessings — 'may a good šēdu go before me, a good lamassu behind me' — but the word now attaches above all to the winged bulls flanking Assyrian palace gates.
The famous examples stood in the royal capitals of the ninth to seventh centuries BCE: Ashurnasirpal II's Northwest Palace at Nimrud, Sargon II's Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), and Sennacherib's 'Palace without Rival' at Nineveh. Each was cut from a single block of limestone or gypsum alabaster, over four meters tall and around thirty tons; several Khorsabad colossi carry five legs, so that they stand firm seen from the front and stride seen from the side, always facing the visitor who walks around them. Royal inscriptions state their task plainly: to guard the gates and keep evil from the king's dwelling.
The excavations of Botta and Layard in the 1840s shipped pairs to the Louvre and the British Museum, and the University of Chicago holds a Khorsabad bull of about forty tons. In February 2015 militants of the Islamic State were filmed defacing the lamassu of Nineveh's Nergal Gate and later dynamited Nimrud, making these colossi emblems of heritage lost to war.
