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 * 196 History of Art in Antiquity. display of sepulchral luxury was in imitation of foreign examples. Like these, they wished to leave after them instances that should appeal to and astonish the imagination. As to private individuals, they had not the same reasons for refusing to acquiesce in practices which so well harmonized with the spirit of the religion they publicly avowed. According to Herodotus, many of them followed the example of the priest-caste of the Magi, and left their bodies to the mercy of hungry dogs and birds. If others continued to confide the dead to the earth, it was done quietly and without ostentation, the corpses being duly protected in a sheath of wax, so as to minimize as much as possible the wrong done to the nursing element. In these conditions a simple grave was enough for the purpose, dug by stealth, as it were, away from pleasant homesteads and verdant fields. Granting tendencies such as these, Persia had not — indeed, she could not have -a funereal architecture of her own ; no surprise, then, need be felt at the tomb not having furnished its usual contingent to the restitution of national art and the industry that derives its inspiration from it. The fact that the few sepulchres we are about to review were due to royalty will not detract from their very great interest As in the palaces, here also will be found a mingling of direct copy and intelligent adaptation to special needs and usages, so worked out by native fancy as to imbue all the creatioRS of Persian art with quite a peculiar and individual character of their own. The Built Tomb. Explorers — both those who believe they recpgfnize Pasargads in the ruins near Meshed-i-MOrghab, and those who hold a diflferent view — are at one in considering the town represented by the remains scattered over the ground there as older than Persepdis (Fig. 94). In the former the name of Cyrus is everywhere to be read on the stone, whilst in the latter the founder of the monarchy is already forgotten, and along the staircases and the approaches to the palace appear the names of his successors, Darius and Xerxes. Here, too, edifices are on a vaster scale, and more elaborately decorated. Persian art is seen at its best, that art which in the upland valley of the Polvar had not yet learnt how to embellish stone pillars with elegant flutes. Digitized by Google