Page 244 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE ART OF ANCIENT PERSIA
The stone-cutters who wrought the stone, those were Ionians and Sardians. The goldsmiths
who wrought the gold, those were Modes and Egyptians. The men who wrought the ishmalu,
those were Sardians and Egyptians. The men who wrought the baked brick, those were Baby­
lonians. The men who adorned the wall, those were Mcdcs and Egyptians.
Says Darius the king: At Susa, here, a splendid task was ordered; very splendidly did it turn
out.
May Ahuramazda protect me; and Hystaspes who is my father; and my country.43

It is an astonishing fact that this motley crowd produced a monument which is both
original and coherent; a style of architecture and a style of sculpture possessing unity and
individuality to an extent never achieved, for instance, in Phoenicia. The pervading
spirit, the very design of the buildings and reliefs, never changed from the reign of
Darius I until the defeat of Darius III by Alexander. And that spirit - that design, too -
was Persian.
It is instructive to trace the foreign strains in Achaemcnian art precisely because they
set off the novelty of the works in which they arc integrated. One observes, for instance,
that the Achaemenian palaces follow Mesopotamian usage in many respects. They are
built on artificial terraces; the walls are of mud-brick, sometimes embellished by carved
slabs of stone and panels of polychrome glazed bricks. The gates are protected by huge
figures of human-headed bulls. The great god Ahuramazda, never hitherto depicted,
was rendered as Assur had appeared in the Assyrian palaces, a bearded figure in a winged
disk. At the same time, however, the doorways of the palaces were crowned by an
Egyptian cavetto moulding; and this rested - as it never did in Egypt - on the Greek
astragal, an egg-and-reel moulding. The bases and shafts of the earliest columns are
Ionian, too, but the capitals are not found outside Persia, and the height and number of
the columns arc without parallel in Aegean lands. As to the reliefs, they have little in
common with their Egyptian and Assyrian counterparts in subject-matter, and nothing
at all in style; they show the influence of Ionian workmanship.
But the tracing of the diverse strains in the architecture and sculpture of the Achae-
mcnians is supererogatory, if we seek to recognize the distinctive character of these arts,
a character established in the reign of Darius I and maintained, unchanged, for two
centuries.

Architecture
It has been suggested that the Persians entering Iran learned * Cyclopean architecture * -
the building with large blocks of untrimmed stone - from the Urartians.44 In any case,
two terraces built in this manner in the modern province of Khuzistan, which tire Per­
sians considered as their homeland, have been interpreted as strong points of the first
Achaemenian chieftains and of Cyrus the Great at the beginning of his reign.45 One of
these, the terrace at Meshed-i-Sulaiman (Figure 108), about twenty-five miles south-east
of the modern town of Shuster, shows several features recurring at Persepolis in a more
elaborate version. It is backed against a mountain; it utilizes a natural spur of rock
w ‘eh was levelled and enlarged towards the east by means of an artificial terrace; a
number of stairways give access to it, and one of these is of impressive proportions; its

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