A NEO-ASSYRIAN GOLD HEAD OF PAZUZU CIRCA 8TH-7TH CENTURY B.C.

拍品描述

A NEO-ASSYRIAN GOLD AMULETIC HEAD OF PAZUZU, MESOPOTAMIA, CIRCA 8TH-7TH CENTURY B.C. Worked in sheet gold over a former, the head of demonic aspect rising from a short cylindrical socket, the face frontal and symmetrical. The brow is deeply furrowed with parallel horizontal ridges above arched, ribbed eyebrows that meet at the bridge of a broad hooked nose. The eyes are rounded and set beneath heavy lids, the cheeks scored with radiating wrinkles that fan outward toward the temples. The mouth is drawn back in a rictus, the parallel bars of clenched teeth exposed between thickened lips, and the lower face terminates in a striated beard rendered as vertical striations. Small pierced lugs project at either side of the head for suspension, and the crown carries the vestige of a further loop. The socket beneath is threaded onto a lapis lazuli bead of ovoid form, retained by a small gold cap. The head is that of Pazuzu, the wind demon of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian pantheon, recognisable by the canonical formula of leonine or canine snout, bared teeth, deep facial creases and prominent brow ridges. Although classed among the demons, Pazuzu occupied an apotropaic role in Mesopotamian belief: as king of the evil wind spirits of the south-west, he was invoked to repel his own kind, and above all to drive away the child-stealing demoness Lamashtu. Small amuletic heads of this type, pierced for suspension, were worn on the person or attached to fibulae and pins, and larger examples were fixed above doorways and windows or hung at the beds of pregnant women and infants. The formal reduction of the deity to the head alone concentrates the protective force in the demon's gaze and snarl, the features intended to be met and repelled by any hostile power approaching the wearer. The choice of gold for such an amulet is significant. The great majority of surviving Pazuzu heads are executed in bronze, with a smaller number in stone, faience or frit; gold examples are markedly scarcer and imply a commission of considerable status, whether for a member of the Assyrian or Babylonian court, a temple offering, or a high-ranking official's household. The lapis lazuli bead beneath, imported at great cost from the mines of Badakhshan in what is now north-eastern Afghanistan, carried its own protective and prestige associations in Mesopotamian belief, where the stone was linked to the heavens and to divine favour. The pairing of gold and lapis on a single amuletic pendant belongs to a tradition of high-status personal adornment reaching back to the royal tombs of the third millennium B.C., here placed at the service of a first-millennium demonological iconography. Pazuzu enters the visual record in the early first millennium B.C. and remains current through the Achaemenid period, his image travelling with Mesopotamian magical practice across the Near East. Heads of this scale and format, detached from any accompanying body, are the most numerous form in which he survives, testifying to the routine, personal, and domestic use of his protective power rather than to cult worship in any temple sense. This amulet exemplifies the concentrated apotropaic imagery of Neo-Assyrian personal religion, where the demon's own terrifying features are turned outward as a defence against greater terrors. The rarity of the gold medium, combined with the surviving lapis bead, places the piece among the more elevated commissions of its type and situates it at the meeting point of court-level material culture and the everyday magical practice of the first-millennium Mesopotamian world. Dimensions: Height 2.6 cm

图片