The Cramond Lioness
Second or third century
A lioness has pounced on a naked man and is killing him. She grips his shoulders with her paws, her teeth close around his head, and his bound arms show that he is a prisoner. Two snakes coil at the base, symbols of death and the underworld. This is Roman funerary sculpture at its most brutal and most vivid, carved from local sandstone and probably intended to stand on the tomb of a senior officer at the Roman fort of Cramond, on the shore of the Firth of Forth a few miles from here. The image of a big cat devouring a man was a Roman way of saying that death is sudden, powerful and cannot be argued with.
Look at how the carver has handled the animal. The lioness is muscular and compact, with a heavy head and a tail that curls along her back, and the man's face, upside down between her jaws, is rendered with real care. The stone is a soft local sandstone, so the surface has worn in places, but you can still see the claws, the ribs, and the fine lines of the mane. The sculpture would originally have been painted. Similar tomb lions are known from Roman Germany and Britain, but few are this complete, and none in Scotland compares with it.
The discovery is a story in itself. In January 1997 the ferryman Robert Graham was working at the mouth of the River Almond when he noticed a carved stone in the mud at low tide. It turned out to be one of the most important Roman finds ever made in Scotland. The lioness was conserved and acquired by the museum, and is now a centrepiece of the Early People gallery. It matters because Cramond was a key base for the Roman army during the campaigns of the Emperor Septimius Severus around the year two hundred and ten, and this monument gives a human face, however grim, to the people who died there far from home.
Did You Know? The sculpture was spotted by a ferryman at low tide in 1997, lying in the mud of the River Almond.
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