NEAR EASTERN ANTIQUITIES GUIDE
Discovering the Ancient Civilisations That Shaped the Near East
Near Eastern Antiquities Louvre Guide: Civilisations of the Ancient World
Before entering the Louvre’s Near Eastern galleries, it helps to understand what kind of collection this really is.
Because this department is not simply another sequence of ancient objects. It is the oldest department in the museum, and one of the places where the Louvre feels closest to the beginnings of organised civilisation itself. Mesopotamia, Iran, the Levant, and the Arabian Peninsula are all present here, across a span that stretches from roughly 7000 BCE to the 7th century CE.
That scale matters. So does the concentration of historical significance. The Code of Hammurabi alone would justify the visit. Yet the department offers much more than a single masterpiece. It offers the material world of the first cities, the first empires, and some of the earliest systems of writing, power, and law.
Mesopotamia: The World’s First Civilisations
The Mesopotamian galleries give the department its intellectual centre of gravity. This is where the Louvre places Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria into view not as isolated names, but as successive civilisations shaped by the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys.
The Louvre’s modern understanding of this world began in the 1840s, when the French consul Paul Émile Botta excavated Khorsabad, the Assyrian capital of Sargon II. Those excavations produced Europe’s first sustained encounter with Assyrian monumental architecture and sculpture. The objects sent to Paris did not simply enlarge the collection. They changed it.
The Khorsabad lamassu
In Rooms 4 and 5 of the Richelieu wing’s ground floor, the lamassu remain among the most physically affecting works in the entire museum. These monumental winged bulls with human heads once flanked the gates of Assyrian palaces and temples. The Louvre’s examples, carved in alabaster during the reign of Sargon II, around 713 to 706 BCE, stand about 4.2 metres high and weigh roughly 30 tonnes each.
What makes them unforgettable is not only their size. It is their intelligence as sculpture. Stand between a pair, and the faces remain almost at eye level. Look from the front, and the creature appears still. Look from the side, and it moves. That shift is deliberate. Assyrian monumental art was designed to control space as much as to decorate it.
| Before the legal imagination of the ancient world becomes visible, Mesopotamia first establishes its scale. |
The Code of Hammurabi
Few objects in the Louvre carry more historical weight than the Code of Hammurabi. In Room 3 of the Sully wing’s ground floor, the black diorite stele stands 2.25 metres high and bears 282 laws carved in Akkadian cuneiform during the reign of Hammurabi, king of Babylon, around 1750 BCE.
At the top of the stele, Hammurabi appears before the seated sun god Shamash, who extends toward him the rod and ring that signify royal authority and justice. The image matters because it frames the text below. Law is not presented here as mere administration. It is presented as something sanctioned, ordered, and made visible through kingship.
Why it still matters
The laws address property, commerce, family life, agriculture, labour, and criminal penalties. The principle often summarised as an eye for an eye appears here in one of its earliest complete legal formulations. Yet the real force of the stele lies in something larger. It shows written law not as scattered custom, but as a system.
Excavated at Susa in Iran by Jacques de Morgan in 1901 and 1902, the stele remains one of the clearest surviving documents of how ancient states attempted to define justice in durable form. It is not simply old. It is foundational.
| If one object can make antiquity feel suddenly modern, it is usually this one. |
The Iran and Susa Galleries
After Mesopotamia and Babylon, the galleries devoted to ancient Iran shift the mood of the visit. Here, power is expressed less through mass than through surface, repetition, and colour. The result is different, but no less imperial.
The most striking works are the glazed brick panels from the palace of Darius I at Susa, around 510 BCE. Visible in Rooms 10 and 11 of the Sully wing, the frieze of archers once formed part of the decorative programme of the royal reception hall. Each figure, around 160 centimetres high, is rendered in turquoise, yellow, and brown glazed brick against a pale ground.
Why the archers matter
These panels retain a visual freshness that photographs rarely capture. The colours remain unexpectedly vivid, and the repeated figures create an effect that is both ceremonial and disciplined. What they show is not an individual portrait, but an imperial order made decorative.
In these rooms, the collection becomes more than archaeological. It becomes atmospheric. The Louvre does not simply preserve the remains of Susa. It gives a sense, however partial, of how Persian power once wanted to be seen.
| By the time colour returns in Susa, the department has already expanded from the first cities to the first great empires. |
Tips for the Near Eastern Antiquities Galleries
A successful visit here depends as much on order and pacing as on the objects themselves. The department rewards attention, but it rewards structure first.
Go to the Code of Hammurabi first
Room 3 of the Sully wing’s ground floor is the clearest place to begin. Arriving around 9:15 AM on a weekday gives you the best chance of seeing the stele before the main tour groups gather. Read the panel. The age of the object matters, but the actual content of the laws matters just as much.
Give the lamassu more time than most people do
The Khorsabad lamassu in Rooms 4 and 5 of the Richelieu wing deserve ten to fifteen minutes rather than a quick walk past. Stand between a pair. Look at the faces at eye level. Then count the legs. Each figure has five, so that it appears at rest from the front and in motion from the side.
Do not rush the Susa rooms
The frieze of archers in Rooms 10 and 11 of the Sully wing is almost always easier to see without crowding. Allow ten minutes here. The preservation of the glazed brick technique, and the quality of the surviving colour after twenty five centuries, needs a little time.
| The best visits here do not move quickly. They move in the order that allows the ancient world to become legible. |
Author’s note: This text was written with the intention of sharing and transmitting knowledge, not as an academic work. Its author is not a historian. Some details or interpretations may not reflect current historiographical consensus. For a rigorous approach, please refer to the sources listed at the end of this document
Références : Musée du Louvre, Département des Antiquités orientales ; Musée du Louvre, Le palais ; Musée du Louvre, Dans le palais de Sargon II – Cour Khorsabad ; Musée du Louvre, Trésors de Méditerranée orientale – Galerie d’Angoulême ; Louvre Éditions / Librairie du Louvre, publications sur les Antiquités orientales.
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