The gate of the year

Bull head, detail of the Great Lyre discovered in the Royal Tombs of Ur, modern Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq, dating back to about 2600 B.C., now in the British Museum, London. The bull shows a thick beard, distinctive tract of many human figures in Sumerian art. Indeed, the bull appears frequently as an image substituting some divinity: for example, the Moon god, Nanna (Akkadian Sin), the main god worshiped in Ur, was usually represented in the shape of a bull, an image that perhaps represented, through the sickle-shaped horns, the moon crescent (Jacobsen 2005).

[Image: http://joseph_berrigan.tripod.com/ancientbabylon/id13.html]




Human-Animal Transformation

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Bull head, detail of the Great Lyre discovered in the Royal Tombs of Ur, modern Tell el-Muqayyar, Iraq, dating back to about 2600 B.C., now in the British Museum, London. The bull shows a thick beard, distinctive tract of many human figures in Sumerian art. Indeed, the bull appears frequently as an image substituting some divinity: for example, the Moon god, Nanna (Akkadian Sin), the main god worshiped in Ur, was usually represented in the shape of a bull, an image that perhaps represented, through the sickle-shaped horns, the moon crescent (Jacobsen 2005). [Image: http://joseph_berrigan.tripod.com/ancientbabylon/id13.html]