The Burney Relief (The Queen of the Night)

A large fired clay relief plaque from the Old Babylonian period, roughly 1800 to 1750 BCE, known both by its former owner's name, the Burney Relief, and by the modern museum title The Queen of the Night. It shows a nude, winged goddess with birds' talons for feet, a horned crown, and rod and ring symbols in each hand, standing on the backs of two lions and flanked by two owls, originally painted in red, black and white pigment against a background thought to have been black. Held at the British Museum, registration 2003,0718.1, acquired in 2003 as a principal purchase for the museum's 250th anniversary. The goddess's identity has never been settled: the museum's own stated preference reads the hanging wings and dark background as underworld imagery pointing to Ereshkigal, queen of the Mesopotamian netherworld, while an equally credentialed line of scholarship reads the lions and mountain symbolism as pointing instead to Ishtar, and an older, largely abandoned proposal read the figure as the demon Lilitu. The relief is presented here as engaging Ereshkigal honestly, as one of two live candidate readings rather than a settled depiction.