A Tower Crowned by a Lion-Rider: Reading a Bronze Age Cult Vessel Through the Lens of the Armenian Highlands

A small, weathered piece of fired clay — barely 31 centimeters tall — sits today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At first glance it looks like a toy: a two-story tower with a door, a window, and a man standing on the roof flanked by two snarling animals. Look closer, and it becomes something far stranger and more compelling — a miniature temple, built to carry liquid offerings down through its own body in a ritual whose exact meaning was already obscure by the time cuneiform scribes were writing about gods. This article lays out, with sources, what is actually documented about the object, and then turns to the comparative question that gives it a second life: does its imagery echo, even distantly, the warrior-god iconography that would later define the religious world of the Armenian Highlands — Ḫaldi of Urartu, and his shadowy Christian-era successor, Surb Karapet?

What the Object Actually Is

The piece is catalogued by the Metropolitan Museum as a “Cult vessel in the form of a tower with cylinder seal impressions near the top.” Its essential facts, as published by the Met, are:

• Period: Middle Bronze Age
• Date: circa 19th century BCE (the Old Babylonian period)
• Geography: Syria
• Medium: Ceramic
• Dimensions: H. 31.4 cm, W. 8.3 cm, D. 11.4 cm
• Credit line: Rogers Fund, 1968
• Object number: 68.155
• Curatorial department: Ancient West Asian Art
• Provenance: acquired by the Museum in 1968, purchased from George Zacos of Switzerland

You can view the object record and image directly on the museum’s website here: 👉 Cult vessel in the form of a tower — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met’s own description (also archived in its now-folded-in “Timeline of Art History” entry) is worth quoting in summary rather than verbatim, but the key details are these: the model is a two-story building, with a doorway cut into the lower facade and a window on the upper floor. Circular bosses representing the ends of wooden roof-beams run along the top of each story — the “shield-like” round studs visible in photographs of the piece. At the very top, a male figure grasps the hindquarters of two lions, and a large open vessel sits between the two animals. The whole object is pierced from the vessel at the top straight down through both stories to the base, so that liquids — almost certainly libations used in temple ritual — could be poured in at the top and would travel down through the structure. Source: 👉 “Modeling the World: Ancient Architectural Models Now on View,” The Met, by curator Joanne Pillsbury

Around the rim near the top, the clay also preserves the impressions of a cylinder seal, rolled into the soft surface before firing. The Met identifies this as a Syro-Anatolian seal showing a seated figure facing a striding man in a kilt with his arms raised in a gesture of respect; a small monkey fills the space between them as a decorative motif; and behind the seated figure stands a “smiting” deity wearing a horned crown and kilt, holding what appear to be a lightning bolt and a sword — the standard attributes of a Near Eastern weather/storm god. The Met notes that the object is comparable to other second-millennium BCE tower-shaped vessels found across Mesopotamia and the Levant, and that it likely once sat atop a separate offering stand in a temple or shrine.

A useful secondary description, drawn from the same Met source text, is preserved here: 👉 Cult Vessel in the Form of a Tower — photographed in the Met galleries (Ipernity)

And the Met’s full public-domain image and object record can also be browsed via the Internet Archive’s mirror of the museum’s collection: 👉 Internet Archive copy of the Met object record

It is worth being precise about what this means: the museum’s own scholarship places the object in Bronze Age Syria, roughly contemporary with the early Old Babylonian dynasties — many centuries before the Kingdom of Urartu existed, and in a different cultural and linguistic sphere from the Hurrian- and Urartian-speaking populations of the Armenian Highlands. The Met does not identify the figure as Ḫaldi, Vahagn, or any specifically Armenian or Urartian deity, and it identifies the animals as lions rather than horses. Any connection to later Armenian religious iconography is therefore a comparative hypothesis, not a museum attribution — and it is worth laying out clearly as exactly that.

Why the Comparison Is Tempting: Ḫaldi, “The Man Who Stands on a Lion”

The reason the object invites comparison with the Armenian Highlands at all is that its central motif — a male figure standing above one or two lions, on top of a tower-shaped structure — is almost a textbook description of how the chief god of the Kingdom of Urartu was depicted centuries later, in the territory that is now eastern Turkey, Armenia, and northwestern Iran.

Ḫaldi (also spelled Khaldi or Haldi) was the supreme deity of the Urartian state religion from the reign of King Ishpuini in the 9th century BCE onward, worshipped alongside the weather-god Theispas/Teisheba and the sun-god Shivini. Multiple independent sources converge on the same core iconographic description:

• Encyclopaedia Britannica describes him as “represented as a man, with or without wings, standing on a lion.” 👉 Haldi — Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Wikipedia’s article likewise states he was “portrayed as a man with or without wings, standing on a lion,” and notes that his temples were known as “the house of weapons” because they were hung with swords, spears, bows, and shields. 👉 Ḫaldi — Wikipedia
• The World History Encyclopedia adds that Ḫaldi’s temples had “distinctive square towers with reinforced corners,” and that Urartian shields were typically decorated with large central bosses bearing images of mythical creatures, bulls, and lions — the very kind of round, raised ornament visible on the Syrian tower-vessel’s upper registers. 👉 Urartu Civilization — World History Encyclopedia
• A more skeptical, source-critical account from Ancient Origins notes that modern scholars generally believe Ḫaldi was not originally a native Urartian god but was adopted from the captured city of Muṣaṣir (Ardini) and elevated to supreme status under Ishpuini — a useful reminder that even the “Urartian” pantheon was itself a layered, borrowed, and politically constructed tradition, much as the Syrian tower-vessel sits within a wider, shared Near Eastern visual vocabulary of gods standing on animals. 👉 Who Were the Enigmatic Urartian Gods? — Ancient Origins

So the resemblance is real at the level of motif: a tower-shaped sacred structure, topped by a standing male figure dominating one or more great cats, surrounded by round bosses that look like shields. What is not established by any of these sources is a direct historical line from this specific 19th-century-BCE Syrian object to the much later Urartian cult of Ḫaldi. The two are separated by roughly a thousand years and by a different geographic and political world. The connection, if it exists at all, would have to run through the much broader Near Eastern tradition of “the god who masters the lion” — a motif found from Mesopotamia and Anatolia to the Levant — rather than through any direct transmission from this particular vessel.

From Ḫaldi to Karapet: A Real, Documented Continuity Debate

The second half of the comparison — the idea that this warrior-god imagery survived into Christian-era Armenia under the title Karapet (“Forerunner,” the Armenian epithet for St. John the Baptist) — rests on genuine, peer-reviewed scholarship, even though it concerns a different god than Ḫaldi: the Indo-European storm-and-dragon-slaying god Vahagn, not the Urartian Ḫaldi specifically. This is worth stating clearly, because it is the part of the comparison that is best supported by actual historians of Armenian religion.

The most important monastery associated with this debate was Surb Karapet of Mush (Msho Surb Karapet), in the historic province of Taron, one of the most venerated pilgrimage sites in pre-genocide Armenia, second in importance only to Etchmiadzin.

• According to Armenian tradition recorded by Wikipedia (drawing on earlier Armenian sources), the monastery’s site had previously held a pre-Christian temple — described in some sources as dedicated to the gods Gisanē and Demetr, and in others as dedicated to Vahagn and Astghik — which Gregory the Illuminator is said to have destroyed in order to build a shrine for relics of John the Baptist. The article specifically notes that the Armenologist James R. Russell has argued that qualities of the pagan god Vahagn were transferred onto John the Baptist in Armenian folk religion. 👉 Surb Karapet Monastery — Wikipedia
• A 2022 peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies goes considerably further, examining the medieval Armenian text History of Taron in detail. It explains that the fifth-century chronicler Agatʿangełos described Gregory the Illuminator’s mission to Taron as confronting a shrine where “the temple of Vahagn” stood, and that Gregory buried the relics of the Karapet (John the Baptist) on that very spot. The article notes that Gisanē — the local name attested for the war-god in the History of Taron — is explicitly identified as Vahagn, and that James R. Russell has concluded, based on descriptions of flaming hair and blinding radiance attributed to the Karapet in later legend, that “this cannot be other than Vahagn.” 👉 “Death at the Door of the Karapet” — Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies

This is a real and actively discussed scholarly question: did the cult of a pre-Christian Armenian war-and-storm god (Vahagn, locally called Gisanē in Taron) survive, partially disguised, in the popular veneration of Surb Karapet — including motifs of thunder, fire, and a militant guardian figure who intervenes in battle? The answer most specialists give is a cautious yes, at the level of folk religion and local memory, even though the Christian institution itself was of course Christian in doctrine and intent.

What this scholarship does not do is connect Vahagn/Karapet specifically to Ḫaldi (a different deity, from a different and earlier state cult), nor to the 19th-century-BCE Syrian tower-vessel discussed above. Treating the Met’s Syrian object as “a reconstruction of the Khaldi/Karapet temple” therefore combines three separate, only loosely related threads: (1) a genuine Bronze Age Syrian libation vessel; (2) the genuinely lion-mounted iconography of the much later Urartian state-god Ḫaldi; and (3) the genuinely documented folk-memory continuity between Vahagn and the Christian-era Karapet cult at Mush. Each thread is real and sourced; the chain linking all three into one continuous tradition is a hypothesis, not an established fact.

The Architecture: Towers, Doors, Windows, and the Symbolism of Repeated Bosses

Setting the question of identity aside, the architectural details of the vessel are genuinely striking and worth dwelling on for their own sake, since they are the strongest evidence of what kind of building Bronze Age Syrians imagined a temple to look like.

The two-story massing, the single doorway on the ground floor, and the single window on the floor above are exactly the features a viewer would expect from a small fortified shrine or tower-temple of the kind known from excavated sites across Syria and the Levant in this period. The rows of circular bosses running along the top of each story are not, according to the Met, purely decorative — they represent the visible ends of wooden roof-beams, a real structural detail of ancient mudbrick-and-timber architecture, translated into the round, shield-like studs that are so visually arresting in photographs of the piece.

It is precisely this row of round bosses — read by some viewers as a frieze of ceremonial shields rather than beam-ends — that invites the final layer of comparison, since the number seven carries deep ritual significance in later Armenian tradition (echoed, for instance, in widespread folk motifs of seven hills, seven brothers, seven blessings, and so on). Whether any specific number of bosses on this particular Syrian vessel was intended to carry numerological meaning is not something the Met’s own catalogue entry addresses, and no scholarly source consulted for this article makes that claim. It belongs, honestly, to the realm of suggestive visual resonance rather than documented fact — an invitation to keep looking, not a conclusion.

Conclusion: A Genuine Artifact, and an Honest Hypothesis

The object itself is real, beautifully strange, and exactly as described by the Metropolitan Museum: a pierced ceramic libation tower from Bronze Age Syria, almost four thousand years old, designed so that wine or another liquid offering could be poured from the vessel at its summit and flow down through two stories of miniature architecture to the ground — a small machine for talking to the gods. The figure mastering two lions at its peak, the seal impressions of a smiting storm-god pressed into its rim, and the beam-end bosses running along its cornices all belong to the documented material culture of the Old Babylonian-period Near East.

The leap from that object to the warrior-cult of Ḫaldi in Urartu, and onward to the folk-memory of Vahagn surviving inside the medieval cult of Surb Karapet at Mush, traces a genuinely fascinating arc in the religious history of the Near East and the Armenian Highlands — one supported, at its later end, by serious scholarship (Russell’s work on Vahagn and the Karapet, and the broader continuity debate around Taron). But it is an arc built from comparison and analogy across very different times, places, and peoples, not a single unbroken chain of transmission anchored to this one Syrian vessel. Presented that way — as a hypothesis inviting further comparison rather than as the museum’s own identification — it remains a rich and legitimate way to look at a remarkable, very small, very old piece of fired clay.

---

Sources cited

1. Cult vessel in the form of a tower — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (object 68.155)
2. Modeling the World: Ancient Architectural Models Now on View — The Met (Joanne Pillsbury)
3. Cult Vessel in the Form of a Tower — Ipernity photo-documentation
4. Internet Archive mirror of the Met object record
5. Haldi — Encyclopaedia Britannica
6. Ḫaldi — Wikipedia
7. Urartu Civilization — World History Encyclopedia
8. Who Were the Enigmatic Urartian Gods? — Ancient Origins
9. Surb Karapet Monastery — Wikipedia
10. “Death at the Door of the Karapet” — Journal of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies (2022)

Image source: Сукиас Торосян