Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/130

118 this same base, the main characteristic of which is a large torus, both in Assyria and the rock-cut architecture of Asia Minor, Phrygia, and Paphlagonia.

Long before the conquering hosts of Iran appeared on these tablelands, the peoples of the peninsula were in constant touch with the inhabitants of the Euphrates and Tigris basins, and the traces of these relations are very apparent in their art. We are justified, then, in considering the Samian and the Pasargadian bases as varieties of a unique type which may be called the "Asianic base," a type which, like the volute capital, passed to the Greeks through the channel of the nations of Anterior Asia. If the horizontal flutes of the torus are common to both, their profiles are very distinct. It is not only the torus which is channelled in the Samos base, but the scotia below it is seamed with very similar striæ. Nor is this all. At Pasargadæ the torus rests upon a square plinth; the Ionic base, on the other hand, is invariably made up of mouldings on a circular plan, except in a few monuments of the decadence. The difference is all-important. The Greek base, even in its most elementary form, exhibits a more complex and skilful arrangement than the Gabre specimen. Now, a complex disposition is not the forerunner of a simple one. The two types are distantly related, and can look back to a common progenitor, but the kinship is too far removed to admit of copy or direct imitation.

As we have before remarked, the true Persian base is the campaniform (Figs. 12, 24). Some have sought to identify it in Egypt; but none of the Theban edifices, so much admired