A Note on the “Lion-Demon”

Extract

The “Lion-demon” (Akk. ugallu, “Big Weather-beast”) is a human-bodied creature with a lion's head, donkey's ears and human feet or, more usually, the talons of a bird (Plate XIa). With variations on this form beginning in the Akkadian period, the figure is known from Old Babylonian down through Kassite, Late Assyrian, Late Babylonian and into Achaemenid times. Since the completion of a corpus of material depicting the figure in the art of Mesopotamia and the Near East (Green 1986), I have obtained photographs of two seals dating from the virtual chronological limits of the type's depiction in Mesopotamia, one Old Babylonian, the other Late Babylonian. A fuller supplement to the work, with additional and formerly restricted material, will appear eventually, but in the meantime, as these two particular seals were included in this catalogue, as nos. 41 and 144, but with somewhat incorrect descriptions (pp. 181, 229) based upon the line-drawings of their earlier publication (reproduced ibid., Pls. 8 and 38), it seems desirable, in the interests of an early corrective, to present here these photographs (Plate XIb and c) and some brief comments, as promised in the postscript to the catalogue-article (p. 254). I have to thank Dr. J. P. A. van der Vin of the Royal Coin Cabinet, The Hague, for the photographs and for permission to publish them, and, in the year of her eightieth birthday, I offer this short piece especially to Lady Mallowan, whose interests in Mesopotamian magic and iconography are well known.