Imprint from a cylinder seal of the Akkadian period (2200 B.C.) showing a group of gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon. It is to be observed that all the characters here represented wear a headdress surmounted by several pairs of horns: this was the peculiar emblem of divine beings since the most ancient times. Such a characteristic, in union with the numerous epithets designating the divinities through animal attributes, reveals a close relationship between the divine world and the animal world, albeit the most usual representation of the gods is an anthropomorphic one. In the illustrated scene could be distinguished, besides the winged goddess Inanna/Ishtar: Enki (Akkadian Ea), the god of underground fresh waters (which are represented by the streams of water gushing from his shoulders); the two-faces god Sha, Enki’s vizier; the Sun god Utu (Akkadian Shamash), represented with a knife in his hand in the act of breaking through the mountains, emerging from the Underworld to appear on the horizon at sunrise (Jacobsen 2005). All these figures have in common a relationship with the vital and generative power represented by water and sun. The object is in the British Museum.

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