Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/141

 History of Art in Antiquity. more solid than movable drapery existed here, which could b(let down or partly drawn so as to exclude the sun or admit a little air and lii^ht. It is easy to imagine several ways by which this could be accom[^lishefl. The lateral gateways have nothin^^^ to distin^;uish them from those of the facades, except that they are smaller ; but they are likewise adorned with sculpture (I'ig. 57). On the contrary, the frames of both tin? windows and niches that were distributed, at regular intervals, between the entrances to tht apartments are quite plain. All these openings are uniform in size and identical in profile; their height is double their witlth, and a unicpie fillet surrounds them. Some are pierced right through the massive a^diculum, and are real windows ; but by far the greater number are only cut to a slight depth, and are niches, or /aks/iis, as the Persians call them, closed with a slab opening into the apartment, liven now the most luxuriously fitted-up house in the Kast has no other cup- boards than these recesses, into which the bedding disappears during the day to be taken out at night. There are no pieces of furniture answering to our chests of drawers, wardrobes, writing-tables, and, in Uxtt the appliances of a European house ; hence it is that recesses are pierced in the depth of the walls of every house, so as to enable the inmates to put away a few things which otherwise must drag about the seats and the floor. At most one may descry in some corner an oblong cofler heavily padlocked, which contains the precious objects of the family. How well I remember, during my peregrinations in Asia Minor, the satisfaction I felt to find at my elbow the friendly niche, where 1 could deposit arms, watch, mariner's compass, notes and papers. sealing holes are very roughly made, and not in koofiing with the surrounding arclii- tecture of the facade. It seems pretty certain that work was done here after tlie fall of the Achaemenidx. Some local grandee may have wished to inhabit a building which, perhaps, had suffered less in the conflagration than the great gala rooms, when he set up a stiff frame to the external doorway so as to shut himself io, a n">t superfluous precaution in troublous times. This, we are bound to say, was not Coste's impression, "In the upper part," he writet;, "of the inner faces of the recesses of both windows and bays are rebates destined to receive the hinges of a door which must have had two valves, k circular groove, twenty«two centimetres wide and six deep, runs right across the top of the main doorways and indicates the place where the pivots of the valves fitted " (text, fol., pp. 105, 106). It is not unlikely that both observers are right, their fault residmg in gencratitics of too sweeping a nature. The reception>TOoms were certainly not closed; as to the apartments occupied by the king and his wives, it is diflScuIt to admit that they were left open. Digitized by Google