Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/378

 35^ History of Art in Antiquity. An explanation of the enigmatical aspect presented by these ruins may, perhaps, be found in a passage of the Arab chronicler Makdisi, who wrote somewhere about the latter half of the tenth century of our era (985). " The principal mosque at Istakhr," he says, " is situated near the bazaars, by which it is surrounded on three sides. It is built after the manner of the finest mosques of Syria. Its columns are round. At the summit of every pillar appears a cow. Report has it that it was formerly a fire-temple." * The wall of rubble, with its counterforts, is no more than an enceinte built after the triumph of Islam to enclose the courts of the mosque. The main body of the latter, comprising the mikrab and nimder, represented the covered part or central colonnade, formerly erected by an Achaemenid prince, with bull-capitals, which town-bred Makdisi mistook for cows. The inhabitants of Istakhr were fully conscious of the antiquity of their monument, of its travelling back to sovereigns who had been fire-worshippers. But they erred when they identified it with a temple. The great vaulted apartments which obtained in the time of the Sassanidae imparted to their palaces a very different aspect from that of the buildings erected by the architects of Darius and Xerxes, and explains the misconception of the later Istakhrians. But for the disaster which overtook their city in comparatively modem times, the traveller would, perhaps, hear at the present hour the name of Allah proclaimed under the roof of a building where, twenty- three or twenty-four centuries earlier, a pious monarch had doubtless engraved in some corner of its walls the image and title of his supreme god, Ahudi-Mazda. Remains of a structure anterior to Islamism likewise occur in the rich plain where, embosomed amidst gardens of unsurpassing fairness, rises Shiraz, the modem capital of Fars. They are found about six kilometres from the town, in a south-west direction, and are locally known as Takht-i-Madere-i-Suleiman or Mejid-i-Madere- i-Suleiman (the Throne or Mosque of the Mother of Solomon. They consist of three great isolated doorways, akin to the examples which muster so strong on the Persepolitan platform (Fig. 170). A number of loose stones mark the site of a fourth, and help us to reconstruct the plan of a square hall, 13 metres at the side (Fig. 171). Deuched fragments, both of cornice and steps, lie > Cited by Noddeke in his article entitled "Penepplis,** in Emtydt^euHa BriUM- nica, 9th edit, torn, xvul p. 558^ Digitized by Google