Page 242 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE ART OF ANCIENT PERSIA
seems to adorn a weapon closely related to the Luristan bronzes, the T. E. Lawrence
dagger-hilt in the British Museum (Plate 177B). The silver was cast on to the iron blade
and hilt-ease by the cire perdue process, so that the rosettes which simulate rivets are really
mere ornaments. The curious type of pommel, with a wedge-shaped space between the
splayed lunate wings, which was filled with wood or bone, recurs in other daggers from
Luristan and in the Caucasus region, but is also depicted among the weapons captured by
Sennacherib in southern Mesopotamia about 700 b.c.40 It is not found in Achaemcnian
times, and seems, therefore, confined to the seventh century where the zoomorpliic
juncture would likewise place the hilt. The Hons on the latter resemble the animals on
round-headed pins and bronze girdles from Luristan. On these, too, the necks of the
animals are striped lengthwise, and there is hatching along their outlines.
The use of Imdugud by the metal-workers of Luristan shows that their connexion
with Mesopotamia was of long standing. Imdugud can hardly be found in Assyrian art,
and odicr motifs basic for Luristan designs (such as the hero between two rearing ani-
malsj were equally outmoded in Mesopotamia by the seventh century B.c. The survival
in Luristan is understandable if the relation between the native metal industry and Meso­
potamia was an old one, and for this there is evidence, as we have seen (p. 208, and n. 28
(p. 263)). The novelty of the bronzes would then represent the response of an established
craft to the demands of die newly-arrived Aryan horsemen. What little we know of the
archaeological context corroborates this view. The Luristan bronzes have been dis­
covered, it seems, in conjunction widi long-spouted bronze ewers and certain painted
pots which are also found in Necropolis B at Sialk, near Kashan, well to the east of
Luristan.41 The Sialk tombs were equipped with simple horse-bits, daggers not unlike
some found in Luristan, ornaments of solid bronze and of punched and engraved bronze-
foil obviously related to some of the Luristan finds, but without the elaborate decoration
which we have been studying. There are no decorated cheek-pieces to the horse-bits, no
huge pins, no axes or pole-tops with zoomorpliic junctures. In short the Luristan bronze
industry appears as a special local development within a cultural province occupying a
much larger area. With the establishment of the Achaemenian empire the best crafts­
men were concentrated where the court resided and the folk-art of Luristan was super­
seded.

Achaemenian Art

Introduction

The Medes, allied with Scythians and Babylonians, destroyed Assyria, but did not ex-
tend their power outside Iran. Eighty years later the Persians took over the empire which
Babylonia had meanwhile administered. A tribe of nomadic or semi-nomadic horsemen
took charge of the civilized world and did not destroy civilization but enhanced it.
This was mainly the work of one man; Cyrus of the family of the Achaemenids led
the Persians, but had begun his chieftainship as a vassal of the Medes (559 b.c.). Ten years
later lie defeated the Median ruler, Astyages. In 546 he defeated Croesus of Lydia, in 539

Q
213