amuletsPazuzu head𒀭𒅆𒊒𒍪𒍪

said pa-ZU-zu, Akkadian pà.zu.zu

also: Pazuzu amulet · Pazuzu pendant

A head, cast or carved, with a hole or a loop through the top for a cord. The face is the point: gazelle horns, human ears, a dog's muzzle, bulging eyes, wrinkled cheeks. Terracotta is the common material; bronze, iron, gold, glass and bone examples survive too. Some heads were fixed to cylinder seals or worn as brooches; larger stone versions hung on a wall. The full figure, where it appears, has a scaled canine body, two pairs of wings, a scorpion's tail, bird talons, right hand up and left hand down.

cited

When

8th century BCE to the Seleucid period cited

Period	Neo-Assyrian to Seleucid
How the date is known	excavated — dug up in a dated context
Note	First visual depictions in the 8th century BCE at Nimrud, first texts in the 7th, most representations 7th–6th, the most recent finds dating to the Seleucid Empire.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Pendant
Made of	Fired clay · Copper and bronze · Iron · Gold · Glass · Bone and ivory
Goes	At the neck · On a wall · At the door · In the grave
Made by	made in quantity and to a near-uniform pattern; the cited scholarship calls the heads, amulets and statues mass-produced
It says	invocations of Pazuzu, cut on the backs of the representations or on accompanying tablets (cuneiform)
Note	Heads have been found in graves as well as houses. No published measurement was read, so none is given.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Death in childbirth citedsaid by ritual texts from Uruk, which prescribe a bronze Pazuzu necklace against miscarriage caused by Lamashtu
Harm to a child — harm to an infant or a small child; common across the atlas, though not the largest class in it — see /story/most-of-them-are-for-children/ citedsaid by the householders who set his image in dwellings to protect infants, and the pregnant women who wore his head
Illness — sickness in general, where no cause is named citedsaid by an Assyrian ritual text, which prescribes a Pazuzu head to banish sickness
Demons and night-hags citedsaid by Pazuzu himself, in a text narrated in his voice
I ascended a mighty mountain that shook, and the (evil) winds I encountered there were heading West; One by one I broke their wings.
Fever and plague citedsaid by Mesopotamian religion, which pairs him with plague and with winds that carry pestilence

The story

Pazuzu is a demon employed as a doorman. He is the south-western wind, he carries plague, and the texts that address him call him "Agony of Mankind" and tell him to stay out of the house — and the same culture hung his face over the bed. In the bilingual Compendia he introduces himself: "I am Pazuzu, son of Ḫanbu, king of the evil lilû-demons. I was enraged (in violent motion) against the strong mountains and ascended them."

What he is for is Lamashtu. She snatches babies; he forces her back to the underworld. Ritual texts from Uruk direct that a woman be given a bronze Pazuzu necklace so that Lamashtu cannot make her miscarry; a Late Babylonian incantation against Lamashtu tells the reader to make a Pazuzu necklace and hang it round the afflicted person's neck; an Assyrian ritual text prescribes a Pazuzu head to banish sickness. Franz Wiggermann dates the figure's sudden appearance to the Early Iron Age, with the first images in the eighth century BCE from the tombs at Nimrud, the first texts in the seventh, the bulk of the finds in the seventh and sixth, and the latest under the Seleucids.

One of the large wall amulets was found where it fell. At Dur-Katlimmu, a Neo-Assyrian town, it lay on the floor of the main reception room, facing the entryway it had been hung to watch.

Inference — the heads are uniform and there are a great many of them. Eckart Frahm's study finds the appearance barely changes across his history. An object that looks the same everywhere and turns up everywhere was made in quantity by people who were not improvising, which is what the cited scholarship means when it calls the representations mass-produced.

cited

Where you can see one

The British Museum — a bronze head of Pazuzu
The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Pazuzu material in the ancient Near Eastern collection

An accession number appears here only where it was read off a catalogue page that is linked. No link, no number.

Not to be confused with

Lamashtu plaque — if the figure is female, bare-breasted, holding serpents and standing on a donkey, it is Lamashtu; Pazuzu is a horned dog-muzzled head, usually just a head

What this is near

contrastLamashtu plaquethe demon he is bought for; the necklace in the Uruk texts exists because she is in the room traditionMesopotamian household protectionthe tradition that made a household guard out of a wind that brings plague parallelBes amuletthe Egyptian counterpart scholars keep comparing him to — both lion-parted, winged, long-phallused, and both standing over mothers and infants; five Pazuzu heads turned up near a Bes amulet in a 7th-century fort at Nimrud parallelGorgoneionthe same device in Greek: a face too frightening to walk past, mounted where the danger comes in motifThe hornthe gazelle horns that identify the face at a glance practiceHanging at the doorthe practice the Dur-Katlimmu find caught in the act — hung on the wall facing the entryway materialFired claythe material most of the surviving heads are made of, and the reason there are so many practiceGrave depositwhy some of these are still here: they were buried with the people who wore them descendantIncantation bowlthe later Mesopotamian object doing the same job with writing instead of a face

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

parallelBes amuletMesopotamia's grimacing household figure, hung for the same reason and looking just as unpleasant on purpose parallelGorgoneionMesopotamia's version of the argument: a frightening head, mounted facing the way in contrastLamashtu plaquethe counter-figure cut on the same plaques, shown chasing her down the river; a household could own both and they were not opposites in the tray partMesopotamian household protectionthe counter-power, cast by the thousand and worn at the neck carried-byThe lionthe Mesopotamian half of the documented contact: five of these were found beside a Bes amulet at Nimrud carried-byCopper and bronzecast in bronze for the cases that mattered most, and prescribed by name in the Uruk texts carried-byGlassmade chiefly in terracotta, but glass is one of the six materials the heads turn up in carried-byFired claychiefly terracotta, drilled to hang, and found in numbers because a mould made it cheap

Where this came from

Pazuzu — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Lamashtu — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Mesopotamian mythology — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Bes — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16

Elsewhere

Pazuzu — Wikipedia

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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