Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/353

 Inhabited Palaces. of carrying on ordinary life, with its needs and pleasures. Abodes of this nature, to the number of four, perhaps five, seem to have occupied the southern part of the platform, and in dimensions and arrangement to have slightly differed from one another. Although the house; about which the name of Darius everywhere appears, was by no means the largest, nor even, mayhap, the most pro- fusely ornameiited, we shall adopt it nevertheless as type of domestic dwelling (Fig. lo. No. 3), for the simple reason that it is the least injured of all the palaces (Fig. 13). Hence differences observable between our restoration and those that have already been published are of minor importance, and bear solely upon tiie nature of the decoration and that of the entablature.^ The Palace of Darius is seated upon a platform cir, three metres above that where Xerxes subsequently erected his prodigious colonnade. As around the latter, sculptures adorn the retaining wall and extend along the four ramps, of which two are on the west and the other two on the south face. Here stands the real facade — a porch of eight pillars arranged in two ranges, leading to a hypostyle hall of sixteen columns (Figs. 14, 82, 161). Front porch in antis, stone doorways and sculptures along their jambs, niches, and hypostyle hall, are familiar to us from the exemplar of a Hundred Columns. At first sight, then, one is inclined to consider it as no more than a reduced copy of the colossal edifice. Narrower inspection, however, discloses the fact that a number of rectangular chambers of varying size existed here. Out of these, two, one on each side of the porch, were porter and guard rooms, whilst the remaining seven opened upon the flanks and the farther end of the central colonnade, behind which two narrow passages may have led outside through openings pierced in the brick wall. These have disappeared ; what remains, besides niches recessed in the depth of the wall, are the frames of hewn stone of doorways, which were certainly not closed by hangings like the throne-room. On the inner side of all the cases, at the top, are channeHings that can only have served to receive door-hinges. Right across the topmost stone runs a circular groove, twenty-two centimetres wide and six centimetres deep, indicating where the door-pivots were set (Figs. 162-164). .The inner arrangement of this edifice resembles that which ^ Tim is the haiem of T^tier, so called, he says, by the natives {Dexrip^on^ torn, it pp. 18^ 181) ; but why it should be so he has not told us. Digitized by Google