Frieze of Archers from the Palace of Darius I at Susa

The technique is Mesopotamian in ancestry and Persian in scale. Each figure is assembled from moulded bricks of siliceous paste, shaped individually, coated with coloured glazes and fired, then set in place like a jigsaw so that the relief stands proud of the wall. Yellow, green, turquoise, white and brown do the work that paint would do elsewhere, and the material was chosen because it survives sun and rain. Look at the patterned robes, the twisted cord bracelets, the quiver slung at the shoulder, the short spear held upright with its butt resting on the foot, and the archer's bow carried on the back. The faces are deliberately uniform: individuality is not the point.

Marcel and Jane Dieulafoy excavated the palace between 1884 and 1886 under an agreement with the Qajar government, and shipped the bricks to Paris in crates where they were painstakingly reassembled; the panel you see carries a trilingual inscription of Darius. A parallel frieze of lions and another of winged griffins came from the same campaigns. The reassembly was itself guesswork in places, and some panels combine bricks from more than one original file.

Did You Know? Every figure was built up from individually moulded and glazed bricks, so the wall had to be fitted together like a giant ceramic puzzle both in ancient Susa and again in the Louvre.