There’s so little that actually remains of Babylon, and yet here we have part of the actual fabric of the city. These lions lined the Processional Way into the city. We have really positive associations with lions. We put them on babies’ bibs. The people who lived in Babylon were terrified of lions because they lived among them. In Mesopotamia, the king and the lion are equated with each other. The lion is the worthy opponent of the king: the preeminent symbol of power in the natural world that is being harnessed to protect you as you go into the city. The lion is made up out of individual bricks, made in individual molds, that each had a piece of the image on them. The Babylonians made every effort not to cut through the very important parts that stand out to you: the ear, the eye. They weren’t merely architectural decoration, but have very magical and deeply religious overtones. Clay is a chaotic material for them in its formless, unshaped state, but through this ritualized process --shaping, molding, and then incubation it becomes a beautiful, perfected thing. They describe birth goddesses creating life out of clay, placed inside the wombs of the mother goddesses; in a way it’s like DNA. It always had this possibility to come alive in a very real sense. That’s something that I think we need to work to see. If you look at the way the bricks bulge out, there’s something about the lion, it’s like it’s straining against the bricks. You can sense the life force of the lion still in the bricks.