Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/286

 The Platform at Persepolis. 277 of far greater magnitude ; in it the architect aims at placing his exemplar upon so elevated a pedestal as shall attract the eye , of the beholder from afar, whilst to the sculptor has been allotted at least part of the space where he will distribute and establish his bas-reliefs. To sum up the above remarks : Persian art does not date from the conquest of Egypt, when relations with Greece became closer and more frequent; in the day of Cyrus and Cambyses it already had settled habits and tendencies, along with characteristics proper thereto, and quite distinct from the culture of other Eastern peoples. Hence it is that to soar to its full height it had no need to change either its general principle or the path it had carved out for itself. All it was required to do was to take advantage of the resources and enormous capital the ambition of Darius and his successors placed at its disposal. The Platform at Persepolis. . At the present day the district where, from the reign of Darius, Persian royalty Hxed its residence contains naught but villages ; all the same, it is one of the most fertile, well-watered parts of Pars. The plain of Mervdasht is seventy and eighty kilometres on the north-west ; its mean vridth is eight and twelve kilometres towards the south-east (Fig. 7). A river, that may be the Araxes of the ancients, flows through it, and loses itself in the Lake Miris, It is called Polvar in the hilly district where it takes its rise, Muro^hab near the village of that name, SiwuMid Rud a little lower down the gorge which serves as a line of demarcation between the territory of Pasargadaii and Persepolis, and Bend- Amir in the plain of Mervdasht. If we have uniformly spoken of it as the Polvar, and thus given it a conventional value which it only pos- sesses in the first part of its course, it was for the sake of brevity and to avoid confusion. At the foot of the chain which bounds the plain to the north are interspersed, with no sparing hand, the remains of all the monuments which, from the day when they were brought to the notice of European savants, have been visited by travellers whose number has increased from century to century, and who have been more sedulous, too, in notin[j down with scrupulous exact- ness every detail of fabrication. 1 he space within which the Diyiii^ed by Google