During the Japanese Archaeological Expedition's third field work at Tel Zeror, Israel, in 1966, a fragment of a steatite lion bowl was excavated from one of the Iron Age strata at the site. The bowl belonged to an unknown ritual practiced over a fairly wide area of the Fertile Crescent (mainly in Assyria and Syria-Palestine) during the ninth to seventh centuries B. C. It seems likely that the ritual was related to the cult of Ishtar, the Assyrian goddess of warfare and afterlife. In later periods, this ritural, accompanied by extremely peculiar cult objects, was altered but continued to reappear intermittently in various regions of the Near East and Europe. The last stage of diffusion was that of the so-called "Miniaturbruunen." Description of this later development of the ritual and its spiritual content is a fairly difficult undertaking.

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