Today, whilst I was at the Brooklyn Museum with my students, a tourist with a British accent interrupted our discussion of Neo-Assyrian reliefs to ask why some of the Apkallu-figures had wristwatches and handbags. I explained what these were, but it prompted me to look more closely at the buckets (not handbags), where I discovered this image on one of them:
It depicts two bird-headed Apkallu-figures doing their business to the stylized tree (or whatever it is), an image that we see full-scale in other places, including Brooklyn:
In essence, the image on the bucket is the directions for proper use, not unlike modern buckets:
Plus ça change…