Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/383

 Some more Palaces other than at Pkrsepolis. 361 residence of the Lords of Asia? In those two hundred and fifty «» years of prosperity her rampart, being found too narrow, was broken through in many places, and the whole suffered to crumble . away. A very slight knowledge of Eastern centres, and of their tendency to spread English fashion into vast suburbs, for the sake of garden and greenery, helps one to understand how if came to pass that two travellers, at a distance of fifty years from each other, should have judged so differently of the expanse occupied by the. urban population agglomerated around the artificial hill which formed its nucleus. The mound in cpiestion has preserved to the present hour its name of Shush, which the old tribal chief applied thereto when he first determined to make it the seat of his fortified castle, whence he might command and rule the rich land below. The broad hillock lies but a few miles from Dizful, and covers a superficies of close upon a hundred hectares. Its mean height is twenty-two metres, and, in places, it rises to thirty-six metres above the surrounding plain (Fig. 6). From what was known of its long and brilliant career, it was fully expected that the mound carried, hidden in its flanks, the remains of many important buildings that would be found staged in chronological order one above the other, like the strata which form the crust of our planet. As after the Macedonian conquest Susa fell from her high estate of metropolis never to rise again, it was conjectured that remains of edifices of the Achaemenid period would be found at the top, and consequently the first to be uncovered by attacking the apex of the tumulus. These previsions were amply realized. The excavations of Loftus, directed against one of the projections of the mound, almost with the first blows of the pick-axe discovered bases whereon the names of Darius and Artaxerxes were plainly written (Fig. 1 2). The opening of other trenches revealed a building in which he at once recognized a striking resemblance to the hypostyle hall of Xerxes at Persepolis, "the general form, the dimensions and peculiar ornamentation employed," being identical with the column bases in the Great Hall (Fig 177).* Some thirty years or more after- Loftus — one of the most sagacious and intelligent travellers that ever breathed — from his excavations «ns to the eflfect that the Gieat Hall of Xenes at Persepolis ami that of Artaxenes at Susa had never been walled in, but were simply dosed Digitized by Gopgle
 * LoFTUS, Travels and Rfsearc/tes, ch. xxv.-xxxi. The impression gained by