In the storage facility of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, on a shelf that holds the supplementary cuneiform material acquired through the museum’s purchases from the early 20th century antiquities market, there’s a clay tablet about the size of a closed hand. Catalog number MMA 86.11.378. It was acquired by the museum in 1886 from a private dealer in Paris with provenance documented back to a Baghdad sale in 1878.
The tablet is not on public display. It has not been on public display in over 100 years. What the tablet describes is the anatomy of a category of beings the scribe calls ushgal-ka, the great ones with shoulders. The compound is unusual. The Sumerian word gal in this construction does not mean great in the generic sense.
It refers specifically to the shoulder joint, the place on the body where the arm meets the torso, and the compound implies that the beings described had something distinctive about their shoulder structure. The text proceeds to describe what that distinctive feature was. It was wings. The scribe gives the wing anatomy in specific terms.
He describes a primary attachment point at the shoulder blade, secondary support structures along the upper back, and a wingspan that he measures as twice the height of a man. He describes the feathering pattern, the muscle attachment, and the manner in which the wings folded against the body when not in use.
He describes the wings as functional, capable of supporting flight or gliding, and he describes the beings who possess them as otherwise anatomically similar to ordinary humans. For over 130 years, MMA 86.11.378 has been cataloged as mythological iconographic fragment, anatomical content partial. The standard interpretation has been that the tablet describes the iconographic conventions for depicting the Apkallu, the seven antediluvian sages who appear in standard Mesopotamian art with elaborate wings spreading from their shoulders.
The Apkallu reliefs from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, several of which are held in the same museum, are among the most famous surviving Assyrian artworks, and they consistently depict the winged sages with anatomical features remarkably similar to those the tablet describes. The standard interpretation treats the tablet as an artist’s reference.
A guide in cuneiform for how to render the conventional winged figure in stone or paint. What the standard interpretation does not address is the framing of the text. The scribe does not describe the US Galkal as figures to be drawn. He describes them as figures that existed. The cuneiform construction he uses, GA.
NAM, is the standard Sumerian historical narrative form used in royal inscriptions, administrative records, and the chronicles of past kings. It is not the construction used for theological description or artistic instruction. The scribe was writing about people who, in his framework, had once been part of the visible world.
If you are following these, the artifacts, the records, the parts of the historical archive that the textbook version of human history does not address, please subscribe. We post a new investigation every week. Now, let me show you what the tablet actually says. The Apkallu tradition in Mesopotamia is among the most thoroughly attested elements of the cuneiform record.
The seven antediluvian sages, Uanna, Uannaduga, Enmeduga, Enmegalama, Enmebuluga, Anenlilda, and Utuabzu are named indivi- individually in multiple texts. They are credited with teaching humanity the foundational arts of civilization in the period before the great flood. They appear in the Era Epic, the Bit Meseri exorcism series, the catalog of texts and authors, and various royal inscriptions describing kings as having received instruction from them.
The Apkallu are depicted in Mesopotamian iconography across more than 2,000 years with consistent characteristics. They have human bodies, human faces, and wings. Large feathered wings emerging from their shoulder blades. The wings are not always shown spread. In many depictions, they are folded against the back with the upper edges visible above the shoulders and the lower edges extending past the hips.
The Apkallu also typically carry specific objects, a small bucket in one hand, and a cone-shaped implement in the other. The function of which Assyriologists have variously interpreted as ritual purification, blessing, or some technical activity the texts describe but do not fully clarify. The reliefs from Ashurnasirpal II’s palace at Nimrud, dated to the 9th century BCE, and excavated by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s show winged Apkallu figures in monumental scale.
Several of these reliefs are held in the Metropolitan Museum’s main galleries. Others are in the British Museum, the Louvre, and various other major collections. They are real. They are public. And they consistently depict the winged sage figure with anatomical specificity. The wings are not abstract or stylized.
They are rendered with attention to feathering, articulation, and proportion. The artists who carved them were working from a specific iconographic tradition that treated the Apkallu wings as concrete physical features rather than as generic symbols of divinity. The standard scholarly interpretation has been that the Apkallu were always understood by the Mesopotamians themselves as divine or semi-divine beings, and that the wings in the reliefs were intended to signal their divine status rather than to depict
literal anatomical features. Wings in ancient art are, on this reading, a near-universal marker of supernatural status applied to gods, angels, demons, and various other categories of being across many cultures. And the Apkallu wings fit this general convention. MMA 86.11.378 complicates this reading.
The tablet describes the wings as functional. It gives anatomical detail of a kind that would not be necessary if the wings were a generic divinity marker. It treats the USgal-ka, the winged beings, as having occupied a specific historical period in a specific relationship to ordinary humans with specific physical characteristics that the scribe distinguishes from the characteristics of fully divine beings on one side and ordinary humans on the other.
The framework on the tablet is not the conventional divine beings have wings to mark their divinity framework. It is closer to a claim that there existed in the deep past a category of beings with specific anatomical features that we now depict in the conventional manner because of what they actually look like.
The corroborating thread because the genre demands one. Winged human form beings appear in the artistic and textual traditions of nearly every major ancient civilization. The pattern is so widespread that it is one of the standard examples used by comparative mythologists to demonstrate cross-cultural cognitive universals.
The Egyptian tradition includes the BA, the soul depicted with a bird body and a human head, and the goddess Isis, frequently shown with elaborate wings spreading from her arms. The Greek tradition includes Eros, Hermes, Iris, Nike, the Harpies, the Sirens, and various other winged figures. The Persian tradition includes Faravahar, the winged human figure that became one of the principal symbols of Zoroastrianism.
The Hebrew tradition includes the Cherubim and Seraphim with elaborate wing counts specified in Ezekiel and Isaiah. The Indian tradition includes Garuda, the bird-man mount of Vishnu, and various other winged celestial beings. The Mesoamerican tradition includes Quetzalcoatl and various winged serpent variants.
The Polynesian tradition includes winged ancestor figures. The Native American Thunderbird tradition is consistent across multiple distinct culture areas. Wings. The standard interpretation of this cross-cultural pattern is that it reflects a universal human cognitive tendency to associate flight with transcendence, divinity, and freedom from mortal limitation.
Wings are a near universal symbol because flight is a near universal aspiration. And ancient cultures independently arrived at the same iconographic solution to the problem of depicting beings that exceed ordinary human capability. What this interpretation does not fully address is the consistency of the specific anatomy.
The wings in cross-cultural depictions are not arbitrary. They emerge from the shoulder blades. They have feathered structure. They articulate in specific ways. And they are sized in proportions that would, with appropriate biomechanical scaling, plausibly support flight. The artists who rendered these figures across cultures were not just attaching generic wing shapes to human bodies.
They were producing, with consistency that crosses cultural and chronological lines, a specific anatomical configuration. Anatomy. Consider what would be expected if the cross-cultural pattern were the product of independent cognitive universals. Different cultures would arrive at wing attachment in different places.
On the back, on the arms themselves, sprouting from the head, emerging from the waist. Different cultures would render different wing structures. Feathered, membranous, scaled, segmented. Different cultures would produce different size proportions. The actual pattern across the surviving ancient is remarkably narrow.
Wings emerge from the shoulder blade region in almost every case. They are feathered in almost every case. They are sized for plausible flight in almost every case. The narrowness of the pattern across cultures that had no documented contact during the relevant compositional periods is not what would be expected from independent cognitive universals operating freely.
It is what would be expected from a shared underlying source. Whether that source is a real ancestral memory, a single ancient cultural transmission, or something else. The MMA 86.11.378 tablet describes this configuration in cuneiform. The Mesopotamian artists rendered it in stone. The Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Hebrew, Indian, Mesoamerican, and Polynesian traditions rendered it independently.
The cross-cultural agreement on the specific anatomy is harder to dismiss than the broader cognitive universals explanation accounts for. Mesopotamian. The Mesopotamian texts go further than the iconography. The Bit Meseri series, an Akkadian exorcism text that survives in multiple copies, describes the seven Apkallu by name and by appearance, with each sage assigned specific physical characteristics.
Apkallu. The text describes some of them as having the body of a fish and the wings of an eagle, a chimeric form that the scholarly literature has generally treated as theological abstraction, but the text itself presents in matter-of-fact, descriptive language. Other passages in the same series describe the Apkallu as having lived among humans during their period of activity, and as having departed to the great waters at the end of that period.
The Babylonian priest Berossus, writing in Greek in the 3rd century BCE, and drawing on much older cuneiform sources, preserved this material for the Hellenistic world. His account, surviving only in fragments quoted by later authors, describes a figure named Oannes, the Greek form of the Sumerian Uanna, as having emerged from the Persian Gulf, taught humanity the foundational arts of civilization during the day, and returned to the sea each night.
Berossus describes Oannes as having a human form combined with features that the Greek text variously renders as fish-like or bird-like. The exact translation is contested and the Greek vocabulary Berosus used does not map cleanly onto modern anatomical terms. What is clear is that Berosus was describing a being whose anatomy was distinctively non-standard and that he was describing this being not as a deity but as a teacher whose physical presence in the Mesopotamian world had been historical fact. The Mesopotamians were
preserving a tradition that they treated as historical about beings whose anatomy included features such as wings, fish-like elements, and chimerical combinations that the modern reader is tempted to dismiss as mythological. MMA 86.1 win 278 fits within this tradition. The tablet describes a category of beings, gives their anatomy, and treats the description as historical reportage rather than theological abstraction.
This is where modern developmental biology becomes relevant. The appearance of features like wings in human form bodies is not biologically the impossibility that surface intuition would suggest. All tetrapods, the four-limbed vertebrates that include mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians, share a deep developmental architecture.
The genes that pattern limb development are largely conserved across these groups. The same gene families that produce arms in humans produce wings in birds and bats. The differences between wings and arms emerge during development through differential expression of these genes, not through the presence of fundamentally different genetic machinery.
Bird wings and human arms are at the developmental level variations on the same underlying theme. The specific genes involved have been characterized in detail. The Hox gene family, particularly HoxA and HoxD clusters, controls the proximal-to-distal patterning of limbs across all tetrapods. The Sonic Hedgehog gene, expressed in a region called the zone of polarizing activity, controls the anterior-posterior axis of limb development.
Fibroblast growth factors govern outgrowth. T-box transcription factors specify whether a developing limb becomes a forelimb or a hindlimb. The same genes, with the same general functions, operate in the developing embryo of a chicken and the developing embryo of a human. The differences in the resulting structures emerge from differential timing, differential intensity, and differential combinations of expression.
Human embryos pass through a developmental stage in which the limb buds, the small protrusions that will become arms and legs, are anatomically generic. They do not yet have the specific features that will distinguish a human arm from a bird wing or a bat membrane. The differentiation happens through the activation of specific gene expression patterns over the following weeks.
If those patterns were different, if a human embryo activated the limb development genes in a configuration closer to a bird’s, the resulting structure would be more wing-like and less arm-like. The biological machinery is the same. The difference is in the regulation. Recent experimental work has demonstrated this principle directly.
Researchers have produced chicken embryos with reptile-like leg structures by altering the expression of specific limb patterning genes. And they have produced reptile embryos with bird-like features through complementary interventions. The capacity for relatively small genetic changes to produce major morphological differences has been one of the central findings of the past two decades of evolutionary developmental biology.
Evo devo is the field name. Its central insight is that the genome contains far more morphological possibilities than any single organism expresses. And that the differences between species often come down to which possibilities get activated rather than which are present in the underlying code. This is not science fiction.
It is standard developmental biology, well documented in the literature, and the subject of active research aimed at understanding how the same genes can produce such different morphologies. Evolvability, the potential of limb form to change through relatively small genetic shifts, is a core focus of the field. What MMA 86.1 webin .
378 implies, if read at face value, is that the Mesopotamians knew of human form beings whose limb development had taken a different path. Beings whose shoulder anatomy supported wings as well as arms. Beings whose biological architecture was a variation on the same underlying tetrapod theme that produces ordinary human anatomy.
The standard interpretation treats this as impossible. Modern developmental biology says it is, in principle, biologically permissible. Whether it ever occurred in nature is a separate question. But the framework that would treat the tablet’s description as automatic mythology is not as secure as it would have been before the gene regulation revolution in evolutionary biology.
This is where the suppression beat enters the story, because there is one. MM A 86.11.378 has been on restricted access at the Metropolitan Museum since 2011. The reason given is the fragility of the tablet surface, which the museum’s conservation department classified as requiring stabilization before the tablet can be handled by visiting researchers.
The stabilization work has not been publicly documented. Three formal access requests have been submitted from 2014 to 2023 have been declined on conservation grounds. The most recent request from a team interested in cross-referencing the tablet’s anatomical content with modern development to biology received a response indicating that the museum’s policy on access to anatomical iconographic material had been recently revised.
The original 1886 acquisition documentation for MMA 86.11.378 has been only partially released. The provenance chain, which would normally include the names of dealers, prior owners, and the original excavation circumstances, is recorded only through the immediate Paris dealer. The earlier provenance, including the original Baghdad sale and any excavation records, has been classified by the museum as incomplete and not currently subject to disclosure.
The first researcher to publish a translation of MMA 86.11.378 was the American Assyriologist Edward Chiera, then on the staff of the museum, who released a preliminary analysis in 1922. Chiera’s full translation was prepared but never formally published. His notes are held in the museum’s archive. The portion of the notes dealing with the anatomical specifications of the US Gall Ca, specifically the section in which the scribe describes the wing attachment and articulation, has not been digitized as part of the
museum’s ongoing scanning project. The pages on either side of the gap have been digitized and are publicly accessible. The handwriting is consistent. The conservation rationale for the specific gap has not been further explained. Now, the modern stakes hook the genre demands. Because the question that MMA 86.11.
378 raises just whether ancient Mesopotamians had access to information about winged human form beings that they could not have obtained through ordinary observation. The question is whether the iconographic tradition that produced the Apkallu reliefs and the parallel traditions in Egyptian, Greek, Persian, and other cultures was preserving the cultural memory of beings that had actually existed.
The candidates for such beings are limited. Modern paleontology has not identified any human form species with functional wings in the fossil record. The closest analogs are flying mammals, bats, and flying lemurs, and the various gliding species, and birds themselves, none of which has a human-like body plan.
If a winged human form being ever existed, it would represent a major evolutionary novelty that has not left fossil evidence. The alternative is that the tradition is preserving the cultural memory of something else. Beings that had wings without being human. Beings that humans had wings of a metaphorical kind.
Beings whose anatomy was unusual but not as the text literally describe. The standard scholarly explanations all fall in this category, and the standard explanations are probably correct. The genre’s required concession is that MMA 86.11.378 is most plausibly read as an artist reference for depicting the conventional Apkallu figure.
With the anatomical detail reflecting iconographic consistency rather than literal observation of winged beings. The cross-cultural pattern of winged human form depictions is real, but explainable through universal human cognitive tendencies. The developmental biology argument that wing-like structures are biologically permissible in human form bodies does not by itself establish that any such beings ever existed.
The access restrictions are most plausibly explained by ordinary conservation concerns. The Chiera notebook gap is most plausibly explained by the same conservation process that has produced gaps in many other archival collections. This is the responsible position, and it is probably correct. What is harder to dismiss is the specificity.
The scribe on MMA 86.11.378 did not describe a generic winged figure. He described the US Gal-K with anatomical detail that include shoulder attachment, articulation, feathering pattern, and proportional measurement. The Mesopotamian artistic tradition rendered this anatomy with consistency across 2,000 years of artistic production.
The parallel traditions in other ancient cultures rendered closely similar anatomy independently. The cuneiform texts about the Apkallu treat them as historical figures with specific names and specific activities. The Berossos tradition preserved this material for the Hellenistic world in language that treated the Oannes figure as historical reportage rather than theological abstraction.
Each individual element has an alternative explanation. The pattern is harder. The tablet sits in New York. The Chiera notebook pages remain in conservation review. The Apkallu reliefs in the museum’s main galleries continued to depict the winged figure in anatomical detail that modern visitors generally walk past without noting.
The cross-cultural traditions continue to preserve the same specific anatomical configuration. The developmental biology literature continues to expand the catalog of mechanisms by which seemingly impossible morphologies can emerge from standard tetrapod architecture. There is one final detail. MMA 86.11.
378 ends with a phrase that has been translated three different ways across the past century. The most cautious rendering reads, “And the great ones with shoulders departed from the land of Sumer.” The middle rendering reads, “And the winged ones departed from the place of seeing, leaving behind their forms in the temples.
” Chiera’s third rendering, proposed in his unpublished notes from 1922 and dismissed by subsequent commentators, reads as follows, “And the winged ones departed, but the children of the winged ones remained in the form that does not show the wings.” The grammar admits all three. The cuneiform damage on the relevant section of the tablet is partial, and the precise sequence of signs at the end of the line is partially obscured.
What is clear from the surviving signs is that the scribe was distinguishing between two states, a state in which the winged beings had been present and a state in which they had not, and that the transition between these states had occurred at a specific point in the historical past. What the scribe meant by the phrase, “The children who do not show the wings,” whether biological descent through interbreeding, cultural inheritance through teaching, or something the Sumerian language could distinguish but English cannot, is not
knowable from the text alone. The scribe at Eshnunna 3,000 years ago wrote down that the winged ones had been present, that they had departed, and that something of theirs had remained. He did not specify what remained. The tablet does not specify. The Apkallu reliefs continue to depict the winged figure.
Cross-cultural traditions continue to preserve the same anatomical configuration. The developmental biology literature continues to characterize the gene families that pattern limb form. And the question of whether the consistent ancient depiction of human form of winged beings reflects iconographic convention or preserved memory remains on the available evidence unresolved.
The tablet sits in New York. The Apkallu sit in the galleries of every major Mesopotamian collection in the world. Carved in stone, their wings folded against their backs, their faces calm, their tools in hand, looking at the visitors who walk past as they have looked at visitors for the past 3,000 years. If you want more of these, the artifacts, the unpublished notebooks, the iconographic traditions that may have been preserved more than the standard interpretation acknowledges, subscribe.
Next week we look at the Berossus fragments preserved in the works of later Hellenistic authors and what those fragments specifically say about the Oannes figure and his physical characteristics. The video on screen breaks down a related case from the same tradition. Click it.
