Sirrush

On the great blue-glazed Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon, commissioned by Nebuchadnezzar II around 575 BCE and partially reconstructed today in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, three animals stride in parallel bas-relief bands. Two are unmistakably real, the lion sacred to Ishtar and the aurochs sacred to Adad. The third is the Sirrush, also called the Mushussu, meaning splendor serpent, and it is this creature that has provoked over a century of scholarly argument about whether the Babylonians were depicting mythology, symbolism, or something they believed they had actually seen.

The Sirrush as rendered on the gate is anatomically coherent in a way that most composite monsters are not. It has a slender scaly body, a long serpentine neck, a horned viperine head with a forked tongue, clearly articulated feline forelimbs with claws, and distinct avian hind legs with raptor-like talons. Its proportions are consistent across hundreds of individual depictions on the gate and on related Babylonian artwork spanning several centuries. Unlike the lion and aurochs, the Sirrush is never shown in naturalistic activity, and it was associated primarily with Marduk, the chief deity of Babylon.

Cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans, in his 1958 landmark On the Track of Unknown Animals, argued that the Sirrush's anatomical consistency and its position alongside real animals suggested the Babylonians were representing a creature they considered zoologically factual, perhaps an animal known to them through travelers' reports from the African interior. The apocryphal Book of Bel and the Dragon, preserved in Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament canons, tells of the prophet Daniel killing a great living dragon worshipped by the Babylonians in the temple precinct, a narrative that echoes the Sirrush imagery and has been read by some as a garbled account of a real captive animal.

Heuvelmans and later researchers, including Roy Mackal, linked the Sirrush tentatively to the Mokele-mbembe reports from the swamps of the Likouala region in the Republic of the Congo, where local people describe a long-necked, heavy-bodied animal sometimes compared by Western visitors to a sauropod dinosaur. Whether or not any such connection can be sustained, the Sirrush remains a genuine puzzle in the history of zoological representation. Its glazed tiles have stared out across Babylon, Berlin, and the long argument of cryptozoology for more than two and a half thousand years, anatomically precise, persistently strange, and still waiting for an identification anyone can agree on.