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 112 History of Art in Antiquity. tion has been drawn, present all the characteristics of being exact copies of bronze objects. That which above all seems to preclude the comparison instituted by Dieulafoy^ is that the six lions' heads of Fig. 43 form a kind of collar around the column ; their characteristics are more those of a circular capital, and have in reality nothing about them which in the least approaches the Persepolitan capital ; where- as the oblong shape of the latter will come out without effort of the lower group of the stan- dard (Fin^. 41), and above all of the pair of lions decorating the sword-sheath. So far as can be judged from the little; wc know of their history, the Persians, up to their advent to the empire of the East, can hardly have been more cultured and careful of soft living or valued beautiful forms about them than the Lurs and Bakhliyaris of the present day ; so that at the outset they must have taken on all hands the elements of a culture which their altered circumstances and exalted position rendered im- perative. In this respect they still continued under the vas- salage of the Medes. It was the architecture of the latter which furnished the arrangement of the halls of Persian sovereigns, as well as the composition of lofts, and the slender proportion of the column which must ever remain the distinctive feature of the Persian order. But from the day when they began to raise stone buildings in the south of Iran, change of material in> volved the necessity of forms other than those that had origi- Kju. 43. — llgypiiaii column in the tomb- pninlings. TkissB D'AVKNMBS, iBtt. St f Art igyptien^ i. Digitized by Gc
 * DiEULAFOv, I! Art antique^ torn. ii. pp. 83-84.