{A photograph} genuinely reveals a 2,700-year-old Assyrian deity statue that was found in Iraq in 1992, deliberately buried, and uncovered once more in 2023.
{A photograph} shared to social media in March 2025 confirmed a big, partially buried headless statue alongside excavators. With hooved toes and a winged physique, the “huge 2,700-year-old” statue was mentioned to depict an “Assyrian Deity that was excavated in Iraq” in 2023.
The picture was shared throughout social media platforms like Facebook, X, Threads, and Instagram. One put up printed to Reddit had obtained greater than 19,000 upvotes on the time of this writing.
(reddit screenshot)
Iraq’s General Authority for Antiquities and Heritage posted the photo to Fb on
We subsequently fee the declare concerning the statue as true.
(Fb/Normal Authority for Antiquities and Heritage)
The winged bull determine is lamassu, a likeness featured in Mesepotamian artwork between the seventh and ninth centuries, in response to Britannica. Replicas (and near-replicas) of lamassu seem in museums and establishments all over the world, together with the College of Chicago Library, which describes the human-headed, winged bull as being:
… a mythological hybrid, a protecting deity identified to “flip again an evil particular person,” that’s composed of the top of a human, the physique of a bull, and the wings of a chook. These figures are depicted within the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of many textual sources for the iconography of those figures.
The [university’s] lamassu has 5 legs, which was typical for these created throughout Sargon II’s reign. This “double-aspect” causes the determine to seem like standing or strolling when seen both from the entrance or the facet, respectively. This winged-bull is sort of 5 meters (16 toes) tall and weighs roughly 40 tons. The massive sculpture fragments that have been excavated at Khorsabad have been packed in crates and transported to Chicago, the place they have been introduced into the OI Museum via the wall of the gallery because it was being in-built 1930. It was then restored and assembled on the identical spot. Its massiveness required the ground to be strengthened and the constructing to be constructed round it, which ensures that the OI’s lamassu won’t ever be moved to a different spot within the museum or loaned to a different establishment.
Intact replicas of lamassu are additionally on show on the Louvre in Paris, which describes the options as having been positioned on the gateway of the traditional metropolis of Khorsabad’s courtyard.
The museum describes this historic metropolis as:
The Khorsabad courtyard shows the stays of a huge metropolis in-built beneath ten years within the late eighth century BC. In these days, the realm that’s now Iraq was a part of the highly effective Assyrian Empire. King Sargon II had a brand new capital constructed at Khorsabad close to Mosul, however after the demise of its founder the town misplaced its standing as a capital.
French archaeologists excavated web site relics within the nineteenth century, a lot of that are on show on the museum as we speak.
In line with the Louvre, within the eighth century, King Sargon II reigned over the Assyrian Empire and based a brand new capital in 713 BC. Sargon selected a “sprawling web site on the foot of Mount Musri within the north of present-day Iraq and referred to as it Dûr-Sharrukin, the ‘fortress of Sargon,'” comprised of an estimated 200 rooms and courtyards.
In 1990, the College of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures featured a “human-headed winged bull” from the town and famous that these statues “adorned the entrances to the throne room of the Assyrian king.”
