Skip to content
Virtue & Power

Museum

Louvre

Holder of the Code of Hammurabi, the glazed brick friezes of Darius's palace at Susa, and the Azara herm of Alexander — much of it a product of nineteenth-century excavation concessions.

Paris, France · founded 1793

Scope

Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, with the most important Achaemenid holdings outside Iran.

History of the collection

Opened as a public museum in 1793. Its ancient holdings grew through purchase, through the Napoleonic seizures — largely returned after 1815 — and above all through nineteenth-century excavation concessions.

The French missions at Susa from 1884 operated under a concession permitting the export of finds, which is why the palace of Darius is substantially in Paris.

Collection notes

The Code of Hammurabi stele was excavated at Susa in 1901, not at Babylon where it was made: it had been carried off as booty by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the twelfth century BCE. An ancient act of plunder determined where a Babylonian law code would be found three thousand years later.

The Susa archer friezes are routinely captioned as depicting the Immortals. The panels carry no such label and the corps is not named in Persian sources; the identification is an inference.

Contested holdings

Recorded because a collection description that omits a live claim is not describing the collection. The platform states the dispute and does not adjudicate it.

  • The Susa material, including the palace friezes of Darius I

    Claimed by: Discussed in Iran

    Acquired under a nineteenth-century concession that permitted export. The terms were legal at the time and are the subject of continuing debate about the ethics of concession archaeology. No formal restitution claim of the kind attaching to the Parthenon sculptures is currently before the museum.

Objects in this catalogue