Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/403

 Methods and Materials. neighbours. A it, in a country so often attacked and so often ravaged, may well have had its stagnant periods, its retrograde periods; so that to date the monuments in question on their merits or demerits as artistic productions tdone might lead to false conclusions. All would be changed could Susian inscriptions, like that of Fig. 183, be read and translated, which, to judge from its length, would, no doubt, be instructive in more ways than one. Until then all we can affirm is diat the sculptures we have passed in review have no affinity with the art which flourished in the reign of the Achaemenidae. The divergence does not so much reside in the texts engraved near the figures — ^for these often fail in both instances — as in the style, the taste, and character of the work itself. These monuments owe nothing to Egypt or Greece. The details observable in them are all of a nature that admit of being explained by the examples and the practices of the oldest civilizations of Asia. On the other hand, if the works executed for Cyrus and his successors still revert, in more than one essential, to the tradi- tions connected with the arts of Chaldsea and Assyria, we feel that other influences are already at work as well. Methods and Materials. The monuments of what we will denominate Persian sculpture have this one thing in common, that they are all royal, and repre- sent either the king himself or scenes intended to remind the spectator of him, and impress upon his mind an idea of his power and majesty. The more important are met in the province now called Fars» watered by the Polvar ; but outside of these limits, in Media and Susiana, others have also been discovered. Hence it is that in drawing up the list of those upon which our attention will dwell awhile, not only must considerations other than those of locality be taken into account, but the language of the inscriptions engraved side by side with the sculptures, and, above all, the subject handled by the artist, along with peculiarities of fitbrication must be reckoned in as well The Persepolitan sculptures— owing to their bulk and the facilities they offer to the observer— are the starting-point and the chief object of the present study. The historian, however, finds in other places themes of which no examples exist in what has been preserved of the palaces on the Takht. Elsewhere, too, as at Susa, the working material changes ; Digitized by Google