“Sometimes the form-giving imagination reads details and meaning into a form beyond what is given in simple observation: the numinous power in the thunderstorm, Imdugud, developed from the dark thundercloud into an enormous black eagle floating on outstretched wings; but since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion’s maw, this bird was in time given a lion’s head.”

—Thorkild Jacobsen, from The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion, 1976.