Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/226

 2l6 History or Art in Antiquity. numbers, where " the corpses must be laid on their backs, their eyes turned towards the sun, exposed to the rain that will dissolve their impure remains." * Whereas the structures we find here are roofed in with heavy slabs of stone and destitute of windows; the only means of access being the door, evidently intended to remain closed the moment the body was ushered in and confided to the depth of those walls. A certain degree of obduracy is displayed in refusing to consider the towers about which we are busy as tombs, like all those in which Persians of high d^[ree found their last abode. Coste sup- posed that the edifices in question were used as temporary tombs, where the bodies of kings and princes of blood royal, immediately after death, were deposited to undergo the necessary processes of embalmment, after which they were taken to the mausoleums pre- pared for them.' The notion has been revived by Dieulafoy. He thus writes: "In this chapel the body of the king, away from human gaze, was left to undergo slow decomposition, whilst the bodies of his subjects were exposed for years in dakmas akin to the funerary towers of the Guebres of Teheran and Yezd.'^ He thinks his conjecture is made j^ood by " a cavity over the door, cut one with the lintel," which, he argues, " was a groove prepared to receive a stone or marble tablet, whereon was engraved the name of the prince provisionally inhunKnl in the tower. As the inscrip- tion had to be changed with each tenant, the hollow was shaped in such a manner as to fit any tablet without interfering with the building." We have looked and looked again at his Plates VI. and XI., to which he refers — faithfully reproduced in Figs. 301, 380 — but we confess to our inability to discover aught that resembles a depression, or hollow frame, which, according to his version, should exist here ; all we can trace is the relief of a moulding, the crown of the door-case. Moreover, there is not a single passage, either in the historians of the West or the Avesla, to favour the view that the bodies of kings or commoners were required to make a longer or shorter station in provisional tombs or (dakmas, ere they were confided to the earth.* Then, too, a peculiar detail in the ^ VemNdad, Fargard (chapter) v. 14. * Flandin and Coste, p. 141. • Dieulafoy, E Art antiquty i. p. 28. erected for the purpose of receiving the bodies when bad weather prevented their being transported at once to the dakma, but from the context it appears that the Digitized by Googlt:
 * Afcntion is indeed made in the Aresta {Fargard v. io-i_^) of a little house