THIRD WATCH 11 A. M. TERCE
ATLAS GOLDEN LION – 1922 – Panthera leo leo
Herodotus – 410 BC
The Persian Wars
, Greece
That whole region [of Thrace] is full of lions… upon Xerxes’ march the camels that carried the provisions of the Persian army were set upon by lions, which left their lairs and came down by night, but spared the men and the beasts of burden, while they made the camels their prey. I marvel what may have been the cause which compelled the lions to leave the other animals untouched and attack the camels, when they had never seen that beast before, or had any experience of it.
The Barbary or Atlas Golden-Mane Lion, as its Latin name Panthera leo leo suggests, was the remnant population of the archetypal lion species that once roamed throughout the entire Mediterranean basin. As this curious observation by the Greek historian Herodotus in his The Persian Wars (410 BC) confirms, lions were still numerous in Europe in Classical Greek times, and they were certainly still extant in Macedonia in the days of Alexander the Great. The Mediterranean Lion was probably extinct in its northern range of Europe by the time of Julius Caesar’s Rome, but remained relatively numerous for most of the next two millennia throughout North Africa – from Egypt to Morocco – until the advent of modern firearms.
Also known as Nubian Lions, these are the same ferocious animals portrayed in Eugène Ferdinand-Victor Delacroix’s famous Lion Hunting in Morocco (1854), painted two decades after his visit to North Africa. Richard Lydecker, in his The Game of Africa (1908), describes the Atlas or Barbary Lion as “very large, dusky ochery, with the mane very thick, long, and extending to the middle of the back, and a thick and heavy mane on the under parts. The males may weigh 500 lbs and measure 10 feet from nose to tip of tail.”
Pliny the Elder – 65 AD
Natural History,
Rome
Quintus Scaevola, the son of P. Scaevola, when he was curule aedile, was the first to exhibit at Rome a combat of a number of lions; and L. Sylla, who was afterwards Dictator, during his praetorship, gave the spectacle of a fight of one hundred lions with manes. After him, Pompeius Magnus exhibited six hundred lions in the Circus, three hundred and fifteen of which had manes; Caesar, the Dictator, exhibited four hundred.
As H. A. Bryden wrote in his Great and Small Game of Africa (1899): “There is little doubt that the Romans drew their chief supply of Lions for the arena and gladiatorial combats from Mauretania and Numidia. Pliny speaks of hundreds at a time being shown by Pompey and Caesar in the Roman arena. This bespeaks a great abundance of Lions in North Africa. Lions still linger here and there in the southeast and southwest of Algeria.”
John Bostock, the 1855 translator of Gaius Plinius Secundus’ Natural History, noted: “Seneca gives an account of this exhibition; he says that the lions were turned loose into the Circus, and that spearmen were sent by King Bocchus, who killed them with darts.” Scaevola’s title of curule aedile was that of a chief magistrate (consul or praetor) of Rome’s public works, buildings and games.
Also in North Africa, the Atlas Brown Bear (Ursus arctos crowtheri) suffered an almost identical history and fate to that of the Atlas Golden Lion. Herodotus and the Roman writers Virgil, Juvenal and Martial refer to this animal as the “Libyan Bear,” while Pliny tells us that in 61 BC Domitius Ahenobarbus brought “one hundred Numidian Bears” to Rome’s arenas. As late as 1830, there were live captive Atlas Brown Bears in Morocco and Marseille. In 1841, it was investigated by the Zoological Society and pronounced a rare and unique species or subspecies “very different from any other bear.” It became extinct about 1870.
Eliakim Littell – 1882
English Mechanic and World of Science and Art
Few of those who daily pass Sir Edwin Landseer’s lions in Trafalgar Square know that not far beneath their feet… in the Pleistocene gravels there are bones of the cave-lion (Felis leo spelaea).
Golden Atlas Lions from the Regent’s Park Zoological Gardens were the models for Sir Edwin Landseer’s famous Trafalgar Square bronze sculptures, but curiously enough, in the 1830’s excavations of the foundations of Trafalgar Square numerous fossil bones of extinct prehistoric animals were unearthed. Among them were those of the original “British Lion” (Felis leo spelaea) and prehistoric ancestor of the Atlas Lion (Felis leo leo). In The Living Age (1887), Littell further reported that medieval Londoners had earlier discovered “the fossil bones of cave lions… [which] have lain so securely stored for untold ages beneath Charing Cross and Trafalgar Square… [but] were long known as dragon bones.”
Atlas or Barbary Lions have had a long historical association with British monarchy. Captive Atlas Lions were kept in the Tower of London as early as the 12th century during the reign of Henry II and Richard the Lionheart. Two Barbary Lion skulls unearthed during excavations of the Tower were radio-carbon dated during the time of Edward I (c. 1300) and Henry V (c. 1420), respectively.
At the time of the Trafalgar Square excavations in the 1830’s, the Duke of Wellington had the Atlas Lions kept in cramped cages in the Tower removed to more humane enclosures in London’s Regent’s Park, where Sir Edwin Landseer came to view them in 1858. One famous Victorian pure-bred Barbary Lion named Sultan lived in the London Zoo until 1896.
Alfred Edward Pease – 1899
African Game
, Algeria
The North African Lion has today become so rare that it may be said to be nearing extinction. It lingers only in the country that might be described as the Mediterranean littoral zone, though an occasional lion is shot in the interior. Before the French came, the Turks had encouraged the Arabs to destroy them by freeing the two great lion-hunting tribes, the Ouled Meloul and Ouled Cessi, from all taxes and paying liberally for their skins. The French gave 50 francs for a skin. There are now a few lions still in the Province de Constantine, in the thick Atlas forests between Soukarras and La Calle.
Alfred Edward Pease’s prediction only took a couple of decades to realize. This remnant population was ruthlessly extinguished within the next two decades. The last wild Barbary Golden Lion was shot in the remote forests of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in 1922.
Remarkably, the Barbary Golden Lion was not the first Lion to become extinct on the African continent in modern times. It was another distinctive subspecies at the other end of the animal’s range in South Africa. This was the Cape Black-Mane Lion (Panthera leo melanochaitus) which was almost as large as the Barbary Lion. It also exhibited a black mane as large and luxuriant as the gold mane of its cousin. Captive animals of this race were exhibited live in Amsterdam, where they may be found in the drawings of Rembrandt. The last Black-Mane Lion in the Cape was shot in 1858, while a small number survived to the north in Natal for a few more years. The last recorded sighting of this Lion was a large male hunted down in Natal and shot by General Bisset in 1865.
By 1900, the only surviving non-sub-Saharan race, the once numerous Asiatic or Persian Lion (Panthera leo persica) – so famously portrayed in art since Biblical times – survived only because the Nawab of Junagadh gave the beast a sanctuary in India’s Gir Forest. By 1908, it was claimed there was only a single pride of 13 Lions remaining in this preserve. Fortunately, a great deal of effort has recently been made to save this subspecies and there are now several hundred Asiatic Lions in existence.
THE LION’S GATE
Atlas Golden Lion – 1920
At the gate was the god of Lions
Cut in a single massive stone
And raised above the desert sand
In the time of empires
This Lion’s eye was a brilliant swastika
A sunwheel on the desert wind
His voice was a stone
Rolling over the roof of the world
Even the great parapet of his head
Is broken now
The foundation of the temple
Is cracked and wasted
Upon the wall
The carved images are all but gone:
Vanished men pursue vanished beasts
In that ancient dream of a green
And fruitful land