Before you read this week’s post, I have a question for you.
So far, I’ve been posting one lengthy installment per week, but Substack yells at me every week that these posts are “too long for email,” and I wonder how many of you who get this in your email are clicking through to read all the way to the end. I am toying with splitting these posts into two installments, one on Sunday and one on Wednesday. Which would you prefer?
OK — back to regularly scheduled programming…
Ever wonder why the lion is called the “king of the jungle” when lions do not, in fact, live in the jungle?
Lions can be found in a number of locations in West, Central, and Southern Africa. In almost all of those places, they thrive best in open areas, like savannahs and grasslands. They generally avoid the tropical rainforests that we call jungles. So where did the name come from?
It seems that our word jungle comes from the Hindi word jangala, which means “an arid area, sparsely grown with trees.” By the time the British colonized India, the word was used broadly to indicate areas away from civilization — what might be called the “bush” or the “wilderness.” So Indian people started the practice of calling the lion the “king of the jungle,” meaning something like “king of the wilderness” or “king of the bush.”
But, you might ask, why were people in India attaching any nicknames at all to an African animal? Well, lions haven’t always been confined to Africa. In fact, their historical range can be seen in red on the map below:
You’ll notice that there’s still a tiny pocket of lion habitat in Gir National Park in western India, where a few hundred lions survive. These Indian lions are all that’s left of a large population that once thrived north and east of the Sahara, ranging from Greece through the Middle East and all over the Indian subcontinent.
Lions roamed these lands for a long time. They were found in Turkey, for example, well into the 19th century. The last wild lion in Iran died in the 1940s. Here’s a picture of some Iranian men with a wild-caught lion sometime in the late 1800s:
So the lion was not an exotic animal for people in many ancient civilizations. It was a real creature that stalked the areas on the outskirts of human civilization, representing the very real danger that nature presented to people. The human world must have seemed much smaller back then, and far more vulnerable to the dangers that lurked out there in the wilderness.
Lions became important symbols in many ancient civilizations, signifying both ferocity and dignity. And the men who could kill a lion, well, there must be something special about them.
Lion hunts are commemorated on some of the earliest Greek artifacts. Bronze Age Mycenaeans commemorated lion hunts on some of the precious items that they buried with their elites. Nineteenth-century archaeologists found a ceremonial dagger with a lion hunt in which four people fight three lions:
Here’s a close-up — you can see that the hunters are attacking one lion with long spears and trying to protect themselves with shields. One of the hunters has already fallen under the lion’s feet:
Another battle between man and lion — this time a one-on-one contest — appears on a golden ring found in one of the Mycenaean graves:
It wasn’t just the Greeks that imagined their leaders in combat with lions. On a piece of ancient Egyptian pottery dating to around 1100 BCE, we see an unnamed pharaoh doing battle with a lion. He’s aided by a trusty dog and, like the Greeks, portrayed as being in very risky close combat against his prey:
And in the Neo-Assyrian Empire, they, too imagined the lion hunt, although this one was done with the assistance of a horse and chariot (the horse looks like it’s about to trample the lion):
Sometimes, the lions were depicted in an exaggerated way — in this Elamite cylinder seal, the lion is more like a monster in an action movie, attacking on its hind legs despite having an arrow in its head!
The greatest of all of these ancient lion hunts, however, dates to the 600s BCE. Though these carvings are now in the British Museum, they once graced the walls of the palace of Ashurbanipal, one of the greatest Assyrian kings. He ruled from Nineveh, in northern Iraq, and was known for undertaking brutal campaigns of conquest while sponsoring the arts and preserving the knowledge of his people in a library.
And how did he prove his greatness as a ruler and warrior? He killed lions.
In Mesopotamia, only kings were allowed to hunt lions. By killing the big cats, Ashurbanipal protected his people from the wild, dangerous world while demonstrating his warrior spirit. The lion-hunt reliefs covered the walls of the king’s palace, a testament to his bravery and mastery over nature.
We see the mighty king hunting on horseback:
And on foot:
Many of the lions are depicted in the process of dying:
The carnage is almost overwhelming:
And sometimes quite affecting, at least to modern eyes:
But these spectacles weren’t fair fights. The lions that Ashurbanipal killed weren’t wild beasts, rampaging through the wilderness. They’d been captured, perhaps even tamed, and then released so that the king could kill them in a public show. Here, we see an official releasing a lion from its cage into the arena:
The inscriptions that accompany these images show no pity for the animals, only imperious pride:
I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, king of the land of Ashur, in my royal sport, I seized a lion of the plain(?) by its tail, and at the command of Ninurta and Nergal, the gods whom I trust, I smashed its skull with my own mace.
I, Ashurbanipal, king of the universe, king of the land of Ashur, whom Ashur and Ninlil endowed with supreme strength, the lions which I killed, I aimed the terrible bow of Ishtar, lady of battle, at them. I offered an offering over them. I poured a libation of wine over them.
Though no leader made quite as big a deal out of the lion hunt as Ashurbanipal, other, later rulers were depicted doing battle with the king of the jungle. One of the most famous was Alexander the Great.
Here we see Alexander and his companion Craterus doing battle with a lion in a mosaic from Pella, Macedon. Alexander apparently encouraged his men to hunt lions lest they get soft while not on campaign, and took part in a couple of hunts himself:
Alexander may have been trying to emulate Heracles, who, in Greek myth, defeated the Nemean Lion, as depicted in this mosaic:
Alexander sometimes had himself portrayed with a lion skin on his head, wearing it just as Heracles had in the myths:
The Macedonian king’s lion hunts remained the subject of art for many centuries after they took place. In this etching from 1608, we see Alexander face a lion one-on-one:
And in 1679, Charles de la Fosse painted this lurid struggle between Alexander and a lion in Louis XIV’s apartments:
Louis XIV, nineteen centuries removed from Alexander, saw himself as a stylistic heir to the Macedonian general — he frequently used lions as symbols of his power and greatness. In turn, Alexander, a Macedonian ruling a large and mostly foreign kingdom, was drawing on the legacy of Ashurbanipal and the legendary Mycenaean kings, who had hunted lions during the preceding millennium.
Hunting lions was the sport of kings for many centuries. But, over time, the number of wild lions dwindled — probably more because of habitat loss than royal hunting. Lion hunting faded as a royal activity.
This was partially because lions became much more rare, but it was also because people no longer needed to hunt lions to prove their mastery over the king of the jungle. Humans were evidently the new kings of the jungle and everything else besides.
Hi George, another enjoyable romp through history. I’d no idea lions spread that far. Bears are one of my special interests and they have a similar reputation further north among other things. Re your email length Im with gmail and it showed the entire message. I clicked to see the rest but it was just a footer maybe that didn’t show. All your article did however, just give you an idea of how much shows up of your writing in email. I have same issue too with my writing. I like reading your work all in one go by the way :-)