Page 253 - The Art & Architecture of the Ancient Orient_Neat

part two:
the peripheral regions

1

Figure 113. Capital from Ncandria
Figure 114. Capital from Naukratis
fore, probably, on four sides - above a capital rendered by two single volutes. The vari­
ous transitional forms which we have briefly reviewed here show that the Ionian and the
Achaemenian columns are both the products of a development which was centred in the
eastern Mediterranean in the sixth century b.c. Yet how great is the contrast. The Ionian
column, for all the richness of its fluted base and shaft and its efflorescent capital, remains
a clear and logical architectural member; the Achaemenian column is bizarre in the ex­
treme. But its massed effect has splendour, as a reconstruction of the Hall of the Hundred
Columns shows (Plate 186); and this effect is not the result of a more or less haphazard
combination of borrowed features, but of an original and carefully conceived design.
Plate 180c and figure 111 illustrate the point; observe, in the middle of each segment of
the corolla-shaped capital, a papyrus flower on a fluted stem, as unknown to Egypt as
the use of the astragalus as an edging is unknown in Greece. The derivations have been
integrated in a whole wliich possesses its own peculiar harmony - a harmony which
cannot be appreciated if one is merely preoccupied with the historical origins of its
elements.70 It was a Persian creation, like the remarkable building of wliich it was a
part, the palace of which Darius said in an inscription: ‘ I built it secure and beautiful
and adequate, just as I was intending to.*71
Outside the palaces Achaemenian architecture seems to have been insignificant. There
were no temples; the Zoroastrian cult called for fire altars under the open sky surrounded
by an enclosure wall. At Pasargadac a stepped platform rose at one end of the enclosure,
and it has been supposed that it supported a small building.72 The main argument in
favour of this view is supplied by Cyrus’ tomb at Pasargadae, wliich consists of a simple
^able-roofed sarcophagus chamber placed on a platform comprising, like that of the
sacred enclosure, six steps. But the requirements of a burial differ obviously from those
r oniconic cult; and in the reliefs of the royal tombs at Naqsh-i-Rustam near Pcrse-
j. /plate 187) the dead king appears in the act of adoration, before a fire a tar an
under sun and moon, while standing on a bare stepped platform.

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