In no Assyrian drawing is the massiveness and strength of the king of beasts more powerfully rendered than in this favorite group, which the Persian sculptors repeated without the slightest change from generation to generation.

The contour of the lion, his vast muscular development, and his fierce countenance are really admirable, and the bold presentation of the face in full, instead of in profile, is beyond the ordinary powers of Oriental artists.
Drawings of bulls and lions in rows, where each animal is the exact counterpart of all the others, are found upon the friezes of some of the tombs, and upon the representations of canopies over the royal throne.
These drawings are fairly spirited, but have not any extraordinary merit.

They reproduce forms well known in Assyria.

A figure of a sitting lion seems also to have been introduced occasionally on the facades of staircases, occurring in the central compartment of the parapet-wall at top.

These figures, in no case, remain complete; but enough is left to show distinctly what the attitude was, and this appears not to have resembled very closely any common Assyrian type.