Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/191

 History of Art in Antiquitv. aspect of the houses of his iUustrious predecessors, and, still on their example, to have made the neighbouring rocks the receptacles of all the good and great things he had done in honour of their memory/ The ruins of the Takht>i-Madere-i- Suleiman, near Shiraz, have appeared to many travellers as similar in character to the above ; they would represent a building raised long after the fall of the Achaemenidse, not only upon the models of the Persepolitan palaces, but with materials stolen from their ruins;* notably in the isolated doors, made of huge blocks of stone with sculptures chiselled in the depth of the frame. Both from the fauct that the pieces in these doorways were not set up in their proper order, so that gaps occur and break continuity of outline, that they are of black limestone, apparently not found in the neighbouring heights of Shiraz, but common in the hills that dominate the plain of Mervdasht, and that these blocks coincide with those that are missing at the Takht-i-Jamshid, has led to suspect they they were taken from thence,' It would be well to have the above statements verified ; should they turn out to be true, there would be one more proof of the anxiety shown by the sovereigns of the second Persian empire to revert to olden times. Sassanid sculptures are found a little way from the ruins. These are by no means the only instances that show how, long after the Macedonian conquest, forms once familiar to national architecture occasionally crop up. Of the part the latter had assigned to embattlements we have spoken elsewhere;* it will suffice for the present to recall a monument, the grottoes of the Tagh>i-Bostan, near Kcrmanshah, which ranks as one of the masterpieces of Sassanid art/ In it membering and sculpture, rich heavy scrolls, all bear the impress of the exuberant and full- blown art derived from the Graeco-Roman style of the last centuries of the old era, such as it appeared in the eastern divisions of the empire. Thus, over the great archway leading to the most spacious of the subterranean chambers are figured winged genii, whose type is taken from the victories of Greek statuary; but the flat roof above terminates in very salient . » Flanoin and Coste, fcrse ancimne^ Plates XLVIII.-LIV. impression. » Ibid., Plate LVI. ' Hist, of Art, tom. V. p. 539. ' Digitized by Google
 * Wi.^ Plate LV. and pp. 64-66. Morier would seem to have had the same
 * Flandin and Coste, Pine andenm^ Plates III.-XVI.