Lot 333A

Fine Silver Intaglio Plaque - Royal Lion Hunt After Darius I Seal

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Lot 333
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Fine Silver Intaglio Plaque - Royal Lion Hunt After Darius I Seal
Fine Silver Intaglio Plaque - Royal Lion Hunt After Darius I Seal
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Fine Silver Intaglio Plaque - Royal Lion Hunt After Darius I Seal

Estimate: $200 - $300

Current Bid: $100

(1 Bid)
by Artemis Fine Arts
June 25, 2026 9:00 AM MDT (In Progress)
Live Auction
686 S. Taylor Avenue
Suite 108
Louisville, CO, US 80027

Modern, design after the Achaemenid cylinder seal of Darius I, ca. 1920–2026 CE. A royal lion hunt sunk in reverse into a tablet of four-nines silver, this intaglio plaque carries the most celebrated image in Achaemenid glyptic and carries it backward, cut to be pressed rather than read. The king rides to the right at the rear of a two-horse chariot, bow drawn, while a lion rears to meet him and a second beast lies fallen beneath the hooves. Two date palms close the scene at either edge, the winged disc of Ahura Mazda presides overhead, and a panel of cuneiform fills the left margin. Engraved intaglio and in mirror, the design reads as the negative of the familiar frieze. Pressed into wax, Darius rights himself, galloping correctly to the right, the hunt restored as raised relief, the object behaving like a stamp die quoting a cylinder. Size: 1.625" W x 1" H (4.1 cm W x 2.5 cm H); silver quality: 99.99%; weight: 12.9 grams.

The source is the chalcedony cylinder seal of Darius I now in the British Museum (BM 89132), found at Thebes in Egypt and cut in the reign of the king who held the Persian empire from the Indus to the Aegean. Its trilingual inscription, Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, announces "I am Darius, the Great King," though the seal was likely a chancery instrument worked by a royal official rather than the monarch's own hand. The lion hunt was an old language of kingship long before Darius borrowed it, the same boast carved two centuries earlier into the alabaster walls of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh: a king who masters the lion masters chaos, and says so in stone.

What this plaque copies is not the cylinder but its unrolled picture, the single rotation reproduced in every textbook as a flat frieze. The tell is the framing. A cylinder seal turns in an endless band with no beginning, yet here the loop is broken precisely where the published image breaks it, the palms and the inscription pressed into service as left and right seams.

The metal fixes the date. Silver refined to .9999 is the work of modern electrolytic processes, soft and useless for any seal meant to survive a second impression, a purity unknown to antiquity and at home only in the bullion and art-plaque trade of the last century. The image is twenty-five centuries old; the silver is not.

Provenance: private Charlotte, North Carolina, USA collection; ex-Joel Malter collection, prior to 2004

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Item # 203202

  • Condition: Excellent. Intact and excellent with crisp detail.

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Bid Increments
From: To: Increments:
$0 $299 $25
$300 $999 $50
$1,000 $1,999 $100
$2,000 $4,999 $250
$5,000 $9,999 $500
$10,000 $19,999 $1,000
$20,000 $49,999 $2,500
$50,000 $99,999 $5,000
$100,000 $199,999 $10,000
$200,000 + $20,000