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Oriental Institute, Chicago

With eyes in the back of his head (and on both sides, too), this four-faced deity may represent the god Marduk, whose multiple eyes and ears helped him reign supreme over the Babylonian pantheon. Wearing a horned cap, the god carries a scimitar and rests one foot on a ram. The bronze statuette, dating to the early second millennium B.C.E., was discovered by looters at Ishchali, in Iraq, and is now in the Oriental Institute, in Chicago.

Vestiges of the four-faced Babylonian deity may be found in Ezekiel’s vision of a divine winged creature with four different heads (Ezekiel 1).