Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/434

 Themes and their Situations. 413 hypothesis is confirmed by what we know of the habits of the Persian sculptor. He felt no compunction in repeating the very same figures and putting them in long trains before the eye of the spectator, so that we may boldly conclude that the sculptured decoration of the palaces at Persepolis is no more than the develop- ment — here ampler and more discursive, there abridged and crowded— of the twin themes we have divined under multiplicity of images, and singled forth from the varieties which might obscure the primitive simplicity. These same themes furnished the elements of the decoration of the rock-cut tombs coeval with the palaces ; with this difference, that there the component parts arc grouped in a different manner, but are as easily grasped. Thus, the guards or spearmen are ranged at either side of the field, on the small face of the return square, which connects it with the native rock. As in the Hall of a Hundred Columns, the gift-bearers are turned into supports of the throne, and' represent the principal nations of the empire. The king, almost alone in the middle of a great space, rules the whole crowd, and is the centre of attraction of every eye. His pose and attributes, however, are not those which are exhibited in the sculptures of the palaces. He stands in the act of worship before the altar, whilst his attitude as he leans against the bow is that of a warrior, a conqueror (Figs. 9, 24, 104, 106, 108, iti, 112). The great bas-relief constituting the frontispiece of the royal tombs is, then, the synthesis of an entire conception, a whole plastic creation. In the lower and lateral sections, the scene enacted is the homage subjects must surrender to their Lord, who stands on the platform about to accomplish the gravest and most solemn act which can devolve on the sovereign. The group of the lion and the bull, under a symbolic form, is repeated without the slightest change of situation or of posture in the several buildings, and appears to be no more than the combat where the king is represented in the act of slaying, almost without effort, monsters that threaten the well-being of his people * (Plates who triumphs over water cwtained in the clouds or in the earth. This interpretation, which was propounded by Lajard, seems to have found general acceptance. Yet it is supported by no ancient texts, and is not justified, especially for Persia, by any monuments relating to her religious tenets. There are, it is true, in the Bun- dehesht texts which might be cited as favouring the identification of the bull with ibe humid element. Ahuit-Masda created the bull, the source of Ufe, whose spcim Digitized by Gopgle
 * Some hold that Che victory of the Hon over the bull represeots that of the sun,