Page 252 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

THE ART OF ANCIENT PERSIA
The capital of the Achaemcnian column is without alien prototypes, although foreign
motifs arc utilized for it. Its upper part has been rightly compared with a forked sapling
used to this day in native houses in Persia to support the rafters.63 In Achacmenian archi­
tecture the fork becomes an impost-block shaped into the foreparts of two animals
(Plates 180, b and c; Figure 112). These may be bulls, bull-men, or dragons.64 They
y cither rest directly on the shaft of the column, or two members may be interposed,
111a
nan icly a corolla-shaped capital (Plate 180c) and a connecting piece composed of eight
vertical double scrolls (Figure 112).
The capital is itself of complex design; it rises from a ring of drooping sepals, and its
shape to some degree recalls the Egyptian palm-leaf capital; but even in Egypt the
papyrus and lotus capitals had, in the second half of the first millennium, assumed this
kind of segmentation.65 Moreover, each segment is decorated at the centre with a
papyrus flower. This proliferation of vegetal ornament unconnected with the basic form
of the capital is also common in Ptolemaic temples in Egypt.
The connecting piece with the eight vertical double scrolls brings us back to Ionia
again, or rather, to the eastern Mediterranean. The Achaemcnian capitals can be under­
stood as unusually rich offshoots of a development which took place in the Levant in the
sixth century b.c. and led there to the Ionian capital. The distinctive double volute of
this capital can be traced back through a number of divergent Levantine forms to the
tumed-down sepals of the Egyptian ‘southflower’, the so-called Lily of Upper Egypt.66
Examples of volutes are known on the capitals of pilasters on various Palestinian sites,
for instance, at Megiddo; and in Cyprus (Figure 95); they appear, three times repeated,
in a ‘sacred tree’ at Sakjegcuzi (Figure 89) and in double or triple form on the glazed
. brick fa$adc of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace at Babylon as recently reconstructed.67 It is
clear, therefore, that a pair of volutes was used throughout Western Asia as the finial of
column-shaped objects, pilasters, and so on. The drooping sepals of the capital are known
in north Syrian architecture in the ninth to eighth centuries b.c. We recognize this from
renderings of capitals in relief;68 from the capital supporting the eagle of Tell Halaf
(Plate 157B); and from the columns appearing in the ivories below the window of the
‘beckoning Astarte’ (Plate 170B).
Now, the double volute and the drooping sepals occur together in capitals found at
Nape and Neandria in Lesbos (Figure 113). The double volutes appear on the front of an
oblong impost block above the two rings of leaves. These rings turn, in Greek architec­
ture, into cymatium and astragalus (egg and reel moulding); an early example is found
in a column from the Ionian colony of Naukratis in Egypt, dated about 500 b.c. (Figure
114). More complete is the column erected to support a sphinx (Figure 115) by the
Naxians at Delphi, in the first half of the sixth century b.c. Here the double volute has
almost, but not quite, assumed the shape it has in the classical Ionian column; for it is
still used as a separate impost block supporting the figure of the sphinx. There is other
evidence, too, that the double volute was used as an independent element; the most im­
portant evidence is supplied by the bronze stand for a mixing vessel from Cyprus (Plate
I74s), for here they are used vertically, as in the Achaemenian columns, and
on a
column too.69 It is a sacred tree, with a double volute on either side
- in reality, ther c-
223

i.