Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/33

 i8 History of Art in Antiquity. genius of Firdaust replaced it by the fabulous Jamshid, yet, after a fashion of their own, they were mindful of their past history and religious union. This traditional continuity, which nothing has been able to stamp out, may likewise be traced in the modem art of Persia. The arrangement of the palace of the Shahin-Shah, king of kings, will enable us to grasp that of the palaces of Darius and Xerxes. Thus Feth-Ali-Shah, in the last century, had the victories of his reign recorded on rocky walls, exactly as Darius and Shapur had done before him. The prescriptive laws of Islam forbid the representation of the human figure, and the behests have been obeyed everywhere save in heretic Persia. Then, too, certain decorative forms have main- tained themselves against all comers with marvellous fidelity ; such as the style of the stage, along with the supports, which serves as throne to the Shah in the state room at Teheran, and which differs in no way from those brought to our notice in the funereal bas-reliefs at Persepolis, dating from the reign of the Achaemenidx.' Finally, we cannot refuse to lecognize a reminiscence of the ancient religion and the national kings of Persia, in the order of the Lion and the Sun, the coat-of-arms of a Turkish dynasty and a Turkish empire. Did not the victory of the kingf over the lion form one of the sacramental themes of antique Oriental sculpture ^ And if the sun is not Ahur^- Mazda himself, he is at least the greatest and most beneficent of the gods associated with him. He and no other the Iranic tribes had brought from their distant and primitive home. And his name and cult, Dcus So/ invidus MiiAra, as thousands of Latin inscriptions of the third and fourth centuries engraved in his honour have it, made as many converts of serious minds as Christianity itself, whom the polytheism of Greece had ceased to satisfy. If we have aimed at giving as exact an idea as possible of the configuration of the Iran plateau, and tracing with no less precision the broad outlines of its history from ancient times to our own days, it is because nowhere else has man been more strictly dependent on nature, nor is it possible to cite a nation whose state of existence and development were as rigorously forecast by the surroundings in which she happened to be placed. We wished to point out at the same time that these very peculiar condi- tions were no small factor in endowing the genius of the Persian ^ Flandin and Coste, Voyt^ en Pirsc^ Ftrst medertu, Plate XXXII. uiLjiii^ed by Google