THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Elaine Sciolino
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| A frieze with archers, among the artifacts from the Darius palace in the Near Eastern Antiquities collection at the Louvre. |
PARIS — I visited the ancient Persian city of Susa only once, in 1982, on a trip to Iran’s western border during the Iran-Iraq war. The Iraqis had attacked a huge swath of Khuzestan Province, where Susa is, and the Iranians wanted to show the destruction to the outside world. These days, the Louvre considers the remnants of Susa among its most prized holdings. But unlike its blockbusters, including the Mona Lisa (the museum’s most-visited work of art, for which it has placed signs from the main pyramid entrance to the painting itself), and the Islamic collection (which has its own 30,000-square-foot modernist wing), the Darius palace rooms are little-visited and hard to find. [
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| At the Louvre, a limestone column whose top is decorated with two kneeling bulls. Thirty-six of these columns once supported the roof of the 128,000-square-foot audience hall in the Darius palace at Susa. |
