The lion, however, was sometimes chiselled in stone, either partially, as in a block of stone found by M.Renan at Um-el-Awamid, or completely, as in a statuette brought by General Di Cesnola from Cyprus.

The representations hitherto discovered have not very much merit.

We may gather from them that the sculptors were unacquainted with the animal itself, had never seen the king of beasts sleeping in the shade or stretching himself and yawning as he awoke, or walking along with a haughty and majestic slowness, or springing with one bound upon his prey, but had simply studied without much attention or interest the types furnished them by Egyptian or Assyrian artists, who were familiar with the beast himself.

The representations are consequently in every case feeble and conventional; in some they verge on the ridiculous.

What, for instance, can be weaker than the figure above given from the great work of Perrot and Chipiez, with its good-humoured face, its tongue hanging out of its mouth, its tottering forelegs, and its general air of imbecility?
The lioness' head represented in the same work is better, but still leaves much to be desired, falling, as it does, very far behind the best Assyrian models.
Nor were the sculptors much more successful in their mode of expressing animals with whose forms they were perfectly well acquainted.