Ancient object
Glazed brick archer from the palace of Darius I at Susa
Moulded and glazed brick relief panel
Louvre, Paris
Object provenance
Record checked- Object
- Moulded and glazed brick relief panel
- Material
- Glazed brick
- Made
- Evidence level: Probablec. 510 BCE
- Found
- Evidence level: DocumentedThe palace of Darius I, Susa
- Excavated
- From 1884, principally the campaigns of Marcel and Jane Dieulafoy and later Jacques de Morgan · French archaeological missions to Persia
- Now at
- Louvre, Paris
- Inventory
- AOD 488
- Identification
- Evidence level: ProbableA guardsman of the Achaemenid royal guard
Frequently captioned as depicting an 'Immortal'. The panels carry no inscription, and the corps Herodotus calls the Immortals is not named under a corresponding term in the Persian record. That the figures are royal guards is a reasonable inference; the specific identification is not.
Condition — Assembled from individual moulded bricks; panels have been reconstructed from excavated fragments.
Read across
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.