On a brisk morning in 1885, a peculiar sight greeted the villagers of Susa in southwestern Persia (modern Iran). A French woman clad in a tailored men’s suit stood atop an ancient mound, directing a small army of local diggers with confident authority. This was Jane Dieulafoy – also known as Jean – an adventurer, sharpshooter, and self-taught archaeologist.
By her side was her husband, Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy, a civil engineer-turned-archaeologist. Together, the Dieulafoys formed one of the 19th century’s most remarkable duos: a devoutly Catholic bourgeois couple from Toulouse who traded comfort for the dust and danger of Persia in pursuit of ancient treasure.
Their bold expeditions through Iran’s deserts and ruins would yield stunning archaeological finds and stir enduring debates about cultural heritage, colonialism, and the meaning of preservation.
Jane and Marcel’s odyssey began in 1881, when they embarked on a year-long journey across Persia’s vast landscape. Motivated by Marcel’s fascination with the origins of Islamic architecture and Jane’s thirst for adventure, the two spent months trekking on horseback from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf. They ventured through snow-capped mountain passes and scorching plateaus, visiting ancient cities and monuments largely unseen by Western eyes.
Jane – who had fought beside Marcel in the Franco-Prussian War dressed as a male soldier – donned men’s attire again for practicality on the road. With her cropped hair and attire, she could ride freely without the era’s restrictions on women travelers. (Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar, the king of Persia, initially refused to believe this confident “Monsieur” Dieulafoy was actually a woman.) As they traversed Persia, Jane kept detailed diaries and took hundreds of photographs of everything from Islamic mosques to bustling bazaars and caravanserais.
Her accounts brimmed with enthusiasm – “Persia fascinated her,” one biographer noted, and she recorded observations on Persian history, art, architecture, crafts and customs with a keen (if occasionally judgmental) eye. Unusually for a Western traveler of the time, Jane even managed to gain access to private women’s spaces. Armed with a large-format camera that intrigued locals, she was invited into secluded andarūns (harem quarters) and documented the lives of Persian women of various ranks – an unprecedented glimpse behind the veil for European readers. These vivid descriptions of daily life, from humble muleteers to provincial governors and even the Shah himself, would later captivate audiences back home.
Yet, Jane’s travelogue was not without the prejudices of her era. In between lyrical praises of Persia’s splendid architecture and “glorious past,” her pages occasionally lapsed into the Orientalist tropes common to 19th-century Europeans. For instance, she wrote dismissively of local religious customs, referring in one passage to “the irritating fanaticism of the mullahs,” underscoring her tendency to generalize negatively about the cultural practices she found alien or inconvenient.
She could be by turns admiring and disparaging – marveling at the beauty of a turquoise-tiled mosque one moment, then lamenting what she called local “fanaticism” the next. In her published travel journal, serialized in Le Tour du Monde magazine, Dieulafoy at times vented frustrations at conservative clerics (mullahs) and folk “superstitions,” liberally using terms like infidels and fanaticism to describe those who impeded her quest.
Such language reflected the colonial mindset of the age, and contemporary scholars caution that her writings must be read critically for bias. Still, there is no denying the value of what Jane and Marcel accomplished on that first journey.
By February 1882, after 3,700 miles of arduous travel, they had compiled a rich visual and written record of Persia’s cultural heritage. Their itinerary took them to the architectural wonders of Isfahan, the ruins of Persepolis, the shrines of Shiraz, and beyond.
Everywhere they went, Jane’s camera captured scenes that would later be turned into elegant woodcut engravings illustrating her memoir La Perse, la Chaldée et la Susiane (“Persia, Chaldea, and Susiana,” 1887). Those images and stories introduced Western audiences to a Persia far more real and complex than the caricatures of earlier travelogues. In one stroke, Jane Dieulafoy became a celebrated travel writer – and Persia’s unofficial cultural ambassador to Europe.
Known for her archaeological work with her husband Marcel-Auguste, she documented ancient Persian sites, including Susa.
Quest for the Lost City of the Lilies
A panel of the glazed-brick Frieze of Archers from the palace of Darius I at Susa, painstakingly reassembled by Jane Dieulafoy and now on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Dieulafoys uncovered this Achaemenid artwork in 1886 amid the ruins of Susa’s Apadana (audience hall), sparking enormous public fascination with ancient Persian art.
The Dieulafoys’ greatest fame would come not from their travel writing, however, but from their next Persian adventure – a full-fledged archaeological excavation at Susa, the fabled ancient capital known in the Bible as Shushan (meaning “City of Lilies”). Susa had been the winter palace of the Achaemenid kings Darius and Xerxes, and its ruins – large mounds of earth outside the modern village of Shush – held the promise of spectacular discoveries.
Earlier European visitors had noted tantalizing fragments: a carved black stone here, a cuneiform inscription there. In the 1850s, a British explorer, William K. Loftus, had even identified the site as ancient Susa and conducted limited digs, sketching a plan of the palace and unearthing a few column bases of Darius’s palace.
But Loftus’s work was hampered by disease, hostile terrain, and local suspicions – he left convinced Susa was “without importance,” a judgment that would be proven very wrong. By the 1880s, the British had largely abandoned Susa in favor of Mesopotamian sites like Babylon and Nineveh.
This opened the door for France, keen to assert its scientific prestige after its 1870 defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. A convergence of national pride, museum ambition, and scholarly curiosity set the stage for the Dieulafoys to return to Persia as pioneering archaeologists.
French archaeologists who made key discoveries in Iran and Algeria between 1880 and 1888, advancing the study of Chaldean-Persian antiquities and influencing modern archaeology.
Back in Paris, Jane and Marcel’s reports of Persia had generated considerable excitement. Their 1883 lectures and illustrated articles demonstrated both the richness of Persian antiquities and the couple’s own “scientific reliability,” impressing officials at the Louvre Museum. With the backing of influential allies – notably Louis de Ronchaud, director of France’s national museums – the Dieulafoys petitioned the Qajar government for permission to excavate Susa.
In 1884, Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar granted the request, albeit with conditions. An archaeological convention between France and Persia was signed, authorizing a dig at Susa on the Shah’s behalf. Persia’s terms required that any gold or silver objects found must be handed over to the royal treasury, and that other antiquities would be divided between Persia and France.
A Persian official would be assigned to supervise the finds. Crucially, one clause forbade the foreigners from disturbing the sacred Tomb of Daniel, a revered pilgrimage site at Susa believed to house the biblical prophet – local villagers feared any tampering with the prophet’s grave would incur divine wrath. With these provisions in place, the Dieulafoys headed back to Iran, now under official auspices of the Louvre and the French government.
They arrived at Susa in winter 1884–85 with a full team: besides Jane and Marcel, there was Charles Babin, a young engineer to map the site, and Louis Houssay, a naturalist, along with over 300 hired local laborers. The dig began in February 1885, as the team pitched their tents on Susa’s high citadel mound amid the ruins of palaces forgotten for millennia.
For Jane, the scene fulfilled a romantic dream – she described wandering through the low hills of Susa, knowing that beneath her feet lay “extensive palaces buried underneath the sandy, rock-strewn hills, forgotten by time and nature”. Almost immediately, spectacular artifacts began to emerge from the ancient Persian capital. In the first season of excavations, trenches on the Apadana mound (site of Darius’s audience hall) exposed brightly glazed bricks decorated with lions and winged creatures, broken pieces of colossal columns, and intricately carved relief fragments.
Jane took charge of carefully documenting these finds. She managed teams of workers in exposing a long processional wall adorned with snarling lions fashioned in vivid yellow, blue, and white glazed bricks. As the lion figures came to light, Jane wrote of her almost maternal attachment to them, dubbing herself their “archaeological mother”. Soon after, in early 1886, the excavators struck what Jane considered their greatest prize: the Frieze of Archers, a regal parade of Persian archers immortalized in polychrome bricks (each archer clad in an ornate robe and carrying a bow).
Though when found it was only a jumbled heap of colored fragments, Jane painstakingly oversaw the gathering, labeling, and packing of each piece, determined to resurrect this Achaemenid masterpiece back in Paris. “I was bringing back to life the glorious past of the great kings with my own hands,” she wrote proudly, describing how she would spread the enamel shards before her like a puzzle each night, praying that by morning the patterns would resolve themselves in her mind.
By the end of the excavations, she even joked about her “special recipe” for fitting the pieces together – a mixture of perseverance and a dash of dream-like inspiration.
Jane’s Diaries III
If Jane was the heart of the expedition, meticulously recording and restoring each find, Marcel was the strategist. He divided the site into sections (Apadana, Acropolis, Royal City, etc.) and directed the heavy work of digging out massive stone capitals and sculptures. The scale of some discoveries posed enormous challenges. In early 1886 the team uncovered a pair of monumental bull-head capitals – the carved stone tops of columns featuring back-to-back bulls, each weighing around 12 tons, that once supported the palace roof.
These bull capitals, icons of ancient Persian art, were breathtaking but practically immovable. Faced with the prospect of leaving such treasures behind, the Dieulafoys made a fateful decision. Jane herself recounted the moment in her journal with striking candor:
“Yesterday, I was watching with regret the large stone bull that was recently discovered. It weighs about twelve thousand kilograms! Impossible to move such a massive object. Finally, I couldn’t control my anger. I took a hammer and started hitting the stone bull. As a result of my violent blows, the column split like a ripe fruit.”
With this shocking act of sacrifice by smash, the Dieulafoys reduced the colossal artifact into transportable chunks. The broken bull pieces were then crated up to be shipped out of Persia. It was a troubling insight into the mindset of 19th-century excavators: to them, the ends of retrieving a masterpiece for Europe justified even the means of intentionally fragmenting it. Indeed, Marcel and Jane were hell-bent on enriching the Louvre’s collections.
As their second season at Susa rushed toward an April 1886 deadline, Marcel urged the French navy to send a gunboat up the Karun River to retrieve their haul – some 40–45 tons of artifacts in all. They opened new trenches frantically “in search of beautiful objects at any cost”. This treasure-hunting zeal was not lost on observers, and it later attracted criticism from modern historians and Iranians alike.
But at the time, the Dieulafoys felt they were on a patriotic mission to rescue Persia’s antiquities from obscurity (and perhaps from local neglect) and give them a grand second life in a European museum.
Triumph in Paris, Backlash in Persia
A massive Achaemenid bull capital from the Apadana of Darius’s palace at Susa – one of a pair excavated by the Dieulafoy expedition in 1885–1886 – on display at the Louvre. To ship such 12-ton sculptures to France, the team broke them into pieces and reassembled them in Paris.
When the Dieulafoys finally returned to Paris in mid-1886, they were received as heroes. They brought back no fewer than 327 crates of antiquities – an “embarrassment of riches” representing 2,500 years of Persian history. The Louvre wasted no time in showcasing the haul. In October 1886, an entire new suite of galleries – the Salle Dieulafoy – opened at the Louvre’s freshly inaugurated Department of Oriental Antiquities.
Throngs of visitors marveled at the reconstructed Frieze of Lions and Frieze of Archers, the gleaming colors of their glazed bricks restored under Jane’s careful supervision. Towering above were the fragments of the Apadana columns and the imposing bull-head capitals, pieced back together to suggest the grandeur of Darius’s palace. Parisian society was entranced.
Here, finally, was proof that Persia’s ancient civilization rivaled those of Egypt and Mesopotamia in magnificence – and it was thanks to the Dieulafoys’ daring that these wonders came to light. Jane and Marcel suddenly found themselves celebrities in the fin-de-siècle capital.
But if France celebrated the Dieulafoys’ successes, Persian officials viewed the matter very differently. In Tehran and Tehran’s diplomatic circles, rumblings of discontent began almost as soon as reports arrived of the massive Susa shipments bound for France. The Dieulafoys, it turned out, had bent if not outright broken the terms of their agreement with the Shah’s government.
According to later historical research, Marcel had from the start been determined to secure as many antiquities as possible for France’s sole benefit. During the first digging season in 1885, he downplayed the importance of discoveries in front of the Persian government’s onsite inspector, Mirza ‘Abd-or-Rahim Khan, who was assigned to monitor the excavations. Jane noted scornfully in her diary that this inspector – a former diplomat with little art training – was “not competent to grasp the value” of anything that wasn’t gold or silver.
Glazed limestone capital from a column in the audience hall (Apadana) of Darius I’s palace at Susa, c. 522–486 BC. Discovered by Marcel Dieulafoy, now on display at the Louvre, Sully Wing, Room 307.
Taking advantage of his ignorance, the French team quietly crated up dozens of prized objects (including the glazed brick panels) and, contrary to the convention, smuggled 55 boxes out of Susa at the end of the 1885 season. They attempted to send these crates by river to the port at Basra and onwards to Europe. However, at the border town of Amara, Ottoman customs officials seized the shipment, suspecting (correctly) that it contained antiquities exported without permission.
The incident caused an uproar. The governor of Khuzestan, Mozaffar al-Molk, and the Shah’s son Prince Zell-e Soltan both reported to Tehran that the French had tried to spirit away treasures “secretly out of the country”. Infuriated, Nasir al-Din Shah ordered the French legation in Tehran to halt the Dieulafoys’ work in June 1885.
Only deft behind-the-scenes intervention by Dr. Joseph Tholozan – the Shah’s French-born physician, who had been an ally to the Dieulafoys – convinced the Shah to relent and allow one more season to complete the excavations. The Persians, however, sternly reminded Marcel that he must scrupulously obey the agreed conditions going forward.
If Marcel received this warning, he chose to ignore it. The second campaign (1885–86) saw even more brazen maneuvering. Knowing another Persian inspector would arrive to catalogue finds, the Dieulafoys simply bribed him. In a candid letter to the Louvre, Marcel reported that a certain “Mirza” had come to examine their discoveries – but, as Marcel wrote, “we bought him for a very high price relative to his worth, and he has agreed to find us mules and to personally ensure the safety of the convoys” of artifacts heading out. In other words, the official Persian representative was paid off to assist in removing the loot.
By spring 1886, with the clock running out on their permit, Marcel struck a shady gentlemen’s agreement with Khuzestan’s governor as well. As Jane later told it, Marcel promised to lobby for Prince Zell-e Soltan to receive the Légion d’Honneur in France, in exchange for the governor’s tacit permission to take everything without the hassle of splitting the finds. Whether or not this promise was truly kept is unclear (Persian archives have no record of the details, and French archives shed little light).
What is clear is that when the Dieulafoys departed Susa in May 1886, they took all the discoveries with them – flagrantly violating the spirit, if not the letter, of their original deal with the Shah. French sailors helped load the 327 crates onto the gunboat Sané, and off the trove went to Paris. Left behind in Susa was little beyond broken brick rubble and empty trenches.
Glazed siliceous brick panel depicting five archers in procession, c. 522–486 BC. Discovered in the Apadana of Susa by Marcel Dieulafoy and now exhibited at the Louvre, Sully Wing, Room 307. An iconic masterpiece of Achaemenid ceremonial art.
The fallout was significant. Iranian authorities felt deceived and robbed of their heritage. As one later French diplomat dryly observed, “Dieulafoy was certainly wrong to try to double France’s share of the discovered objects” – his overreach caused “a lot of problems” for France’s relations with Persia thereafter. Indeed, the Shah’s government was so displeased that it suspended all French archaeological work at Susa for over a decade.
Not until 1895 could a new agreement be negotiated, and even then Persian officials refused to allow Marcel or Jane Dieulafoy to ever return to excavate in their country. The task of resuming excavations at Susa fell to another Frenchman, Jacques de Morgan, in 1897 – under much tighter controls. (Ironically, that 1897–1900 mission ended with France extracting even more Persian antiquities under a revised concession that granted France a monopoly over all digs in Iran. But that was seen as a formal diplomatic arrangement; the Dieulafoys’ subterfuge, by contrast, left a bitter taste.)
Chalcedony seal depicting two musicians facing each other with lute and lyre, alongside a fly, monkey, antelope, cross, rhomboid symbols, and cuneiform inscription. Discovered at Susa by Marcel Dieulafoy, now housed in the Louvre, Richelieu Wing, Room 227.
Back in France, the Dieulafoys moved on to other endeavors – travels in Spain and Morocco, writing novels and plays, and hosting their Paris salon. They remained respected figures in European scholarly circles. But in Iran, their name became intertwined with a sorrowful narrative of loss. The Susa episode occurred during the Qajar era, a time when Persia was weak under foreign pressure and often granted Europeans capitulations and concessions that proved costly to its own patrimony.
The Dieulafoys’ dig was one of the first large-scale foreign excavations in Iran, and it set a pattern: for decades afterward (up until the 1930s), foreign teams – mostly French, under that exclusive agreement – carried out digs and exported significant portions of the finds to European museums. Many Persians of later generations would look back on this era as one of exploitation in the guise of archaeology.
Salas Dieulafoy, inauguration at the Louvre – Frieze of the Archers of Susa. Arch. JL Pajares. The Diaries of Jane II – The Dispute with the Louvre
Dieulafoy Album of Ávila link
Legion of Honor
“With the discoveries from the Susa expedition, the Persian Antiquities Museum was inaugurated at the Louvre. For these and other contributions, the French government awarded Jane Dieulafoy the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1886 and granted her special permission to dress as a man, something forbidden by law for women.”
Jane’s Diaries II
“On December 31, 1885, a key piece for the mission was found. Successive blocks of snow-white tiles were discovered: on one of the edges, a beautiful yellow glaze with blue, green, and red stars appeared in high relief; then bricks with the design of a long strip, followed by black feet with golden yellow boots, and black legs and hands. As we gathered these fragments, we reconstructed life-size figures of archers depicted in profile, marching with spears in hand.”
Claiming Persian Art from the Louvre
In 2011, the Iranian government renewed its request to France for the return of ancient art taken from the country in the 19th century, when Iran was still part of the Persian Empire.
“We do not accept that European countries view us as inferior,” declared the Iranian Vice President; officials from Iran later claimed they were promised that part of the hundreds of looted pieces would be returned to Tehran, a claim the Louvre denied.
In addition to the Code of Hammurabi, the Louvre holds large ceramic murals from the Persian palace of Darius (522-485 BC), the Archer Frieze, and the Lion Frieze, all taken from the palace walls by the Dieulafoy couple, who exchanged them for small amounts of rewards in the 1880s.
In 2018, the Louvre organized an exhibit in Tehran showcasing a small portion of the Persian art collections stored in its warehouses, but none of the major works displayed in the Dieulafoy halls were included.
Remembering the Dieulafoys: An Iranian Perspective
How do Iranians today regard the Dieulafoys and their legacy? The answer is nuanced. On one hand, the Dieulafoys are acknowledged in Iran’s academic circles as trailblazers who documented Iranian historical sites at a time when local archaeology had not yet developed. Jane’s early photographs of Islamic monuments – from Varamin’s medieval shrine to the grand ruins of Persepolis – are now valuable records for Iranian art historians.
For instance, her 1881 photographs of the Emamzadeh Yahya shrine in Varamin have proven a boon to modern conservationists studying how that monument’s appearance has changed over time. Iranian scholars also recognize that the Dieulafoys’ publications helped put Persia’s rich heritage on the world map, potentially sparking the first efforts at heritage preservation (even if from afar).
The very fact that glorious Persian artifacts occupy pride of place in the Louvre is, in a sense, a testament to the grandeur of Iranian civilization that might otherwise have remained obscure in Western narratives dominated by Egypt and Mesopotamia. In this regard, some cultural commentators in Iran concede a measure of appreciation for the Dieulafoys’ work in showcasing Iran’s “glorious past” – albeit at a complicated cost.
Glazed brick panel depicting four archers flanking a trilingual inscription of Darius I, c. 522–486 BC. Discovered in the Apadana of Susa by Marcel Dieulafoy, this masterpiece of Achaemenid art is now on view at the Louvre, Sully Wing, Room 307.
That cost, however, is impossible to ignore. Many Iranians remember Jane and Marcel Dieulafoy less as heroic explorers and more as agents of plunder. In the Iranian popular imagination and media, the story of the Susa excavations is often told as a “tragic odyssey of stolen artifacts”. Iranian newspapers describe how, in an age of grossly imbalanced power dynamics, priceless relics of Iran’s heritage were carried off to foreign museums under the flimsy cover of archaeology.
The Tehran Times, for instance, bluntly characterizes the Dieulafoy mission’s goal as “simply looting and stealing valuable Iranian antiquities” rather than any serious scientific inquiry. The article recounts with palpable resentment the very anecdotes Jane herself recorded: the smashing of the 12-ton bull, the breaking of agreements, the packing of crates “in violation” of Iran’s rights.
Such actions are cited as early examples of the West’s disregard for local ownership of cultural treasures. The removal of the Susa artifacts is frequently described in Iran as part of a broader “historical injustice” in which imperial powers exploited Iran’s turmoil to drain the country of its ancient treasures.
Fragment of a floral and geometric patterned glazed brick, dating from the Achaemenid period (c. 539–330 BC). Excavated in Susa by Marcel Dieulafoy and Roland de Mecquenem. Now displayed at the Louvre, Sully Wing, Room 307.
Crucially, Iranian voices stress that these artifacts are far more than art objects – they are pieces of national identity. Each glazed brick and carved column taken from Susa, they argue, is a fragment of Iran’s soul and collective memory that now sits in exile. Seeing the Frieze of Archers or the winged bulls in a foreign museum can evoke pride, but also a profound sense of loss. In recent years, this sentiment has fueled calls for repatriation. Iranian cultural heritage advocates assert that the time has come to reunite at least some of these “stolen remnants” with their homeland.
The fact that one of the Louvre’s star attractions – the very archers that Jane Dieulafoy called her fils (sons) – was essentially removed without Persia’s fair consent in the 1880s still raises ethical questions today. As one commentary noted, these objects “serve as a poignant reminder of a tumultuous history marked by removal and theft that continues to resonate” in Iran. There is a growing movement among Iranian scholars and the public to view the Dieulafoy-era extractions not as proud discoveries, but as cultural losses that deserve acknowledgment and remedy.
At the same time, there are efforts at balance and dialogue. In 2018, in a gesture of cultural diplomacy, the Louvre itself organized a landmark exhibition in Tehran – the first time a Western museum lent a large collection of artworks to Iran. Among the items displayed at the National Museum in Tehran were some of the very Persian antiquities taken to France generations ago.
Visitors in Tehran could, for a few months, stand before the ancient sculptures and vessels that their great-grandparents had only heard about after they vanished overseas. The exhibit was warmly received and stirred discussions: some Iranians were thrilled to finally see the objects in person, while others voiced that such loans, though welcome, were bittersweet reminders that the originals still reside abroad.
Iranian and French experts held workshops on conservation and archaeology during the exhibition, reflecting how the field has changed since the Dieulafoys’ time. Today, Iranian archaeologists are globally recognized professionals, and Iran strictly controls excavations on its soil. Joint projects between Iran’s Cultural Heritage Organization and foreign institutions operate under new paradigms of mutual respect and artifact sharing – a far cry from the unilateral removals of the 19th century.
Inscribed baked brick in Elamite cuneiform, recording the restoration of the Temple of Kiririsha in Liyan by King Shilhak-Inshushinak, son of Shutruk-Nahhunte. Discovered in Susa by Marcel Dieulafoy, this artifact is part of the Louvre’s Department of Near Eastern Antiquities. Currently not on display.
In Iranian historical memory, therefore, the Dieulafoys occupy an ambivalent place. They are at once pioneers who shone a light on Iran’s antiquity and protagonists of a colonial-era drama that saw Iran’s heritage fragmented. Contemporary Iranian scholars tend to critique the Dieulafoys’ methods and motives even while mining their archives for information.
Nader Nasiri-Moghaddam, a historian of Qajar-era cultural contacts, has detailed how the Dieulafoys’ flouting of their 1884 excavation agreement caused a decade-long rift in Iran’s trust – effectively delaying the development of Iranian archaeology by forcing a pause and renegotiation. He credits them for their thorough recording of Susa’s layout, yet doesn’t mince words about Marcel’s duplicity in spiriting away far more artifacts than agreed.
Iranian archaeologist Massoud Azarnoush similarly acknowledged the Dieulafoys’ contributions to knowledge, but lamented the destruction of context: breaking artifacts and removing them meant that future generations of Iranians could only study these items in foreign museums, separated from their historical landscape (remarks he shared in a 2005 Persian-language interview on Iran’s cultural heritage). Such critiques reflect a broader reckoning with the colonial legacy in archaeology – a push to decolonize the narrative and give Iranian perspectives their due weight.
A Legacy Revisited
In the end, the story of Jean (Jane) and Marcel Dieulafoy in Iran is a complex tapestry of adventure, discovery, cultural exchange, and conflict. It has all the elements of a great tale: a fearless couple roaming across Persia in Victorian times; crumbling palaces and hidden tombs; golden treasures and glazed tiles resurrected from beneath the sands.
One can easily picture Jane in her wide-brimmed hat and tailored jacket, standing in the rosy dawn light at Susa as ancient walls emerge around her – an extraordinary woman defying convention in pursuit of history. Through her eyes, Western readers learned to appreciate Persian art and architecture on its own terms, not merely as an offshoot of classical Greece or biblical lore.
Her meticulous diaries and photographs froze in time many scenes of 19th-century Iranian life, from teahouse storytellers in Tehran to tribal camel caravans plodding along desert horizons. For that, Jane Dieulafoy is still respected as a keen observer of Iran, with one scholar calling her work “a seismic shift in [Iranian] studies” for the wealth of visual documentation it provided.
Molded terracotta figure from Susa depicting a nude woman standing with hands clasped, wearing a braided diadem, necklace, and bracelets. Excavated by Marcel Dieulafoy. Now in the Louvre’s Department of Near Eastern Antiquities (not on display).
Yet, woven into that tapestry is the undeniable thread of imperial ambition and cultural loss. The Dieulafoys came to Persia not as neutral academics, but as emissaries of a colonial power hungry for prestige and artifacts. They operated in an age when the prevailing view in Europe was that ancient objects belonged in imperial museums, regardless of their source. By today’s standards, their removal of 45 tons of Persian antiquities – without full Iranian consent and with methods that included deception and destruction – raises ethical issues that cannot be glossed over.
As modern Iranian voices remind us, those artifacts were not inert pieces of stone and clay; they were part of a living culture’s patrimony, taken at a time when Iran could scarcely defend its interests on the global stage. The Dieulafoys’ legacy, therefore, must be viewed from both sides: the immense knowledge gained and the cultural patrimony lost.
Happily, there is a growing convergence in how this legacy is understood. National Geographic’s own recent profile of Jane Dieulafoy celebrated her as an extraordinary rule-breaker – “the intrepid explorer who wears men’s suits” – while also noting the Persian approval for the Susa dig came only “in exchange for part of whatever was discovered”.
That part, as history showed, was perhaps not properly honored. Today, an international audience of cultural enthusiasts and historians can appreciate that the Dieulafoys’ story is neither one of one-dimensional heroism nor simple villainy.
It is a cautionary tale of a formative period in archaeology, when courageous curiosity coexisted with colonial entitlement. It challenges us to maintain a balanced, informed perspective, acknowledging the Dieulafoys’ contributions to unveiling Iran’s past, even as we critique the power structures under which they operated.
In Iran, the memory of the Dieulafoys continues to evolve. The ruins of Susa remain a poignant site – Iranian archaeologists have worked there for decades now, and a museum in Susa displays local finds (including some artifacts that Jacques de Morgan’s team left, as well as replicas of the famed friezes).
Schoolchildren in Iran learn about the grandeur of Darius’s palace, and they also learn how those colorful archers ended up in the Louvre. Far from indulging in old resentments, many Iranians see this history as a spur to safeguard what remains of their heritage with all the more vigor.
And indeed, Iran has dramatically strengthened its heritage protection laws since the mid-20th century, ensuring that never again will whole collections depart its soil without permission. Meanwhile, dialogues with museums abroad have become more common, focusing on collaboration, loans, and perhaps someday the return of certain key objects.
In 1881, Mme. Dieulafoy and her husband embarked on their first Persian exploration, enduring countless hardships.
Their significant discoveries included the ruins of the palaces of Darius and Artaxerxes, from which precious bas-reliefs were brought back and eventually displayed in the Louvre. The couple also returned to France with the renowned “Persian Archers.”
As we conclude this journey through time, one image stands out: Jane Dieulafoy in the Louvre’s Persian gallery in 1888, gently placing a final glazed brick into the reconstructed Frieze of Archers as a crowd of Parisian onlookers gasps in admiration. In that moment, she surely felt a deep pride – she had, in her view, saved a treasure of Persian civilization and given it immortality in the West.
Little could she imagine that over a century later, voices from the very land that frieze came from would be calling for its soul to be returned, or at least recognized. The legacy of Jane and Marcel Dieulafoy in Iran thus lives on, not just in museum halls and history books, but in ongoing conversations about cultural justice and the shared stewardship of humanity’s past. As Iranian cultural historian Dr. Laleh Khorramian recently stated, “Preserving the past must never come at the cost of erasing its rightful guardians.”
Their story reminds us that history is never static: it is discovered, narrated, contested, and reclaimed anew by each generation. In that sense, the Dieulafoys – intrepid, flawed, and fascinating – have indeed “brought back to life the glorious past” of Iran, but it is up to us to ensure that past is honored in full, with sensitivity and respect for those to whom it truly belongs.
References:
- Aboutalebi, S. (2023, August 9). Unearthing 12-ton bull: Tragic odyssey of Iran’s stolen artifacts at Louvre’s 230th anniversary. Tehran Times.
- Calmard, J. (2013). Dieulafoy, Jane Henriette Magre. In Encyclopædia Iranica (Vol. VII, Fasc. 4).
- Déroche, A., & Sánchez, R. (2020, Dec 17). This French archaeologist broke the law—by wearing pants. National Geographic History Magazine.
- Nasiri-Moghaddam, N. (2017). The First British and French Archaeological Investigations in Susa during the 19th Century. In C. Lehni et al. (Eds.), Geographies of Contact. Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg.
- Overton, K. (2024). Jane Dieulafoy in Varamin: The Emamzadeh Yahya through a Nineteenth-Century Lens. Getty Research Journal, 19(1), 57–91.
- Dieulafoy, J. (1890). At Susa, the Ancient Capital of the Kings of Persia: Narrative of Travel through Western Persia and Excavations, 1884–1886 (F. L. White, Trans.). Philadelphia: Gebbie & Co. (Original work A Suse, Journal des fouilles published 1888).
- Iranica Online. (1995/2013). Dieulafoy, Jane and Marcel – Biography and historical context. (Authored by J. Calmard)
- Louvre Museum Collections. (n.d.). Frieze of Archers, Palace of Darius I, Susa – Object entry AOD 487. (Retrieved from collections.louvre.fr)
