Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/459

 434 History of Art in Antiquity. Tbc hero to whom these stones sang a hymn was not this or that king, Xerxes rather than Darius ; no matter his name, it was the king, the successor of Cyrus, the dread lord who, conjointly with Ahur^- Mazda, maintained the Persians in the ascendency which had been won for tlu;m by his ancestors. Darius may have furnished the primary Uneaments of the royal effigy ; but it does not appear that aught was changed or added thereto in after times, when it became the ideal image of the Acha^menid royally. If, owing to a natural bias, the art of Persia did not rise to portraiture, its inclination, on the other hand, could not but induce it to sum up and personify, in a certain number of types sharply defined, the most striking physical characteristics of the principal nations, the conquering and the conquered, whose represen- tatives he grouped about the throne. The masterpiece of the kind is the presentment by the Persepolitan sculptor of the type of the Aryan race to which he was proud to belong. This type he composed and modelled from the finest specimens of the family, such as they are still found in the south of Iran, among the hilly tribes that have not intermarried with the Turcomans, but have kept the purity of the race intact. None finer or nobler than this can be found in the habitable world, not even in Greece. Nowhere is the forehead, which is on a line with the nose, higher and straightcr, and the eyebrow more finely arched. Nowhere is the eye more open and longer, the mouth more exquisitely shaped, with lips neither too thin nor too full. A black curly Iv^ard conceals the well-rounded chin, and the tall, finely proportioned figure is set off by a wealth of soft hair. The proud Medes and Persians must have felt inwardly gratified as they recognized themselves In this type, which bears a certain resemblance, but is more elegant than that which the Assyrian sculptor ascribed to the chiefs of his nation. The profile of the latter is rendered s )mewhat hard and heavy by a hooked nose and swelling nostril, recalling a bird of prey. The character of the theme involved the representation of the Aryan type almost to the exclusion of any other in the bas-reliefs; and we find it repeated everywhere, both on a large and small scale, whether on the facades of the tombs or the walls of the palaces. As for the other nations, the sculptor had not the same reasons to feel particularly interested about them. He was content, for the most part, with giving them peculiarities of dress Digitiz^ by Google