Frieze of Lions, Lion and a Half Walking Left
Unknown · Reign of Darius I, 522-486 BC
Here the procession turns the other way: a whole lion and the hindquarters of another advance to the left, mirroring the panel displayed opposite. The animals stand on a band of rosettes and beneath a frieze of stepped battlements, with their manes shown as rows of pointed locks and their open jaws revealing the tongue. Because the bricks were moulded before glazing, the contour of each lion rises a few millimetres above the wall, and the glaze pooled a little thicker in the hollows, which gives the colours their depth.
The panel comes from the eastern court of the palace of Darius the First at Susa, built around five hundred years before Christ. Lion friezes of this kind continued a tradition that reached back to the processional way of Babylon, which Darius knew well after his conquest of the city. The bricks were brought to Paris by the Dieulafoy mission in the eighteen eighties. Looking at the two lion panels together, try to imagine them running for many metres along a sunlit courtyard wall.
Did You Know? Lions walking left and lions walking right were meant to meet at the centre of the wall, so the two panels in this room once faced each other across a doorway.
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