Depicting a muscular anthropomorphic leonine-human, it sold for $57.2 million at Sotheby's auction house on December 5, 2007.

The sculpture had been acquired by a private collector, Alastair Bradley Martin, in 1948 from the collection of Joseph Brummer, and had been on display at Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City from that time to its sale in 2007.

[1] In 1950 Edith Porada described it as a lioness "because of the feminine curves of her lower body and the absence of male organs" while conceding the possibility "that the figure represented a sexless creature".

[7] It is thought to have been created at approximately the same time as the first known use of the wheel, the development of cuneiform writing, and the emergence of the first cities.

[8][9] Such anthropomorphic figures, merging animal and human features, can be seen in the top and bottom registers of the trapezoidal front panel of the famous Great Lyre from the "King's Grave" (circa 2650–2550 BC), discovered by British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley early in the twentieth century at Ur in present-day Iraq.