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Bull Capital from the Apadana of Darius I at Susa
Unknown · c. 510 BC (reign of Darius I, 522-486 BC)
Craning upward at this is the closest most people will come to standing inside an Achaemenid throne room. The apadana at Susa was a hypostyle audience hall with thirty six columns, each roughly twenty metres tall, and each crowned by a double animal protome of this kind. The two bull foreparts faced outward in opposite directions, and the trough of their joined backs carried the great cedar roof beams. The hall was where the king received tribute from the twenty and more peoples of his empire, and the architecture was itself an argument about the reach of Persian power.
Everything about the piece is a deliberate synthesis. The fluted shaft below is Greek and Egyptian in feeling, the vertical volutes recall Ionic capitals, the palm leaf collar is Egyptian, and the paired bulls are Mesopotamian and Elamite. Darius boasted in a foundation inscription that Ionian and Sardian stonecutters worked the stone, Babylonians made the brick, Medes and Egyptians adorned the walls, and cedar came from Lebanon. Look at the tightly curled forelocks, the ringed horns, the muscular fold of the shoulder, and the way the sculptor kept the surfaces broad enough to read from twenty metres below.
The Dieulafoy mission of 1884 to 1886 recovered the fragments and transported them to Paris, where the capital was reconstructed. Alexander's army burned the palaces at Persepolis, and Susa was progressively abandoned; the collapse of the roof is what preserved these pieces at all. What you see is a single capital removed from a forest of them, so multiply it by thirty six to imagine the original hall.
Did You Know? Darius left a foundation charter naming the nationalities of his workforce, from Ionian stonecutters to Babylonian bricklayers, making this one of the earliest documented multinational construction projects.
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