The pictured silver plate of ancient Iran depicts a royal horseman engaged in a lion hunt.

Discovered accidentally in 1954 near a brick kiln on the outskirts of Sari, now the capital of Mazandaran province in northern Iran, it stands as one of the most unique artifacts from the Sassanian era. 
The central scene portrays a king on horseback hunting lions with a bow and arrow. The king draws his bow toward a leaping lion while another slain lion lies fallen on the ground. Such motifs were common in royal hunt scenes of Sasanian art, and this plate represents one of the oldest surviving examples of such metalwork.

A notable innovation in this composition is the inclusion of small hills adorned with leafy plants, arranged in two rows and rendered with relative naturalism. The weapons featured—sword and bow—are depicted together in a single scene for the first time. The horse’s crescent-shaped bridle resembles those seen in early Sasanian rock reliefs. The vertically positioned lion (presumably the primary target) is wounded (with an arrow embedded in its foreleg), while the horizontally rendered lion at the bottom follows a long-established convention for depicting dead animals: its head rests upon its paw.

The crown worn by the king most closely resembles those of Hormizd I and Shapur II. Comparisons with the rock reliefs at Taq-e Bostan even reveal similarities to the crown of Ardashir II. However, the closest parallel for the Sari hunter’s headband is the crown worn by Shapur (son of Papak, reigning 207–210 CE) in his engraved image at Persepolis. Such royal hunt scenes were widespread across the Middle East and functioned as diplomatic gifts for political propaganda.

Depicting kings as heroic hunters—especially mastering predators like lions—was a royal tradition rooted in earlier artistic practices. The Sasanian Empire deliberately invoked its Achaemenid predecessors to legitimize its rule. The name "Ardashir" in its Sasanian Pahlavi form (and its reconstructed form Artakhshir) consciously echoes the name of the Achaemenid Artaxerxes (Artakhshassa), serving as tangible evidence of this ideological continuity.

AM