Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/492

 468 History of Art in Antiquity. CHAPTER VH. INDUSTRIAL ARTS. For a country to be possessed of industrial arts truly deserving the name, not only is it necessary that the people engaged in manual labour should not be looked down upon, but also that a taste for beautiful things should be sufficiently diffused to influence the artisan himself; for in that case he is prone to infuse in everything he makes a just and keen feeling for the delicate shades of the form. It is the presence of this feeling which dignifies labour sometimes considered as servile. Things were thus ordered in the workshops of Eg^pt and Chaldsea, and, above all, in Greece, where the artisan easily merges into the artist, no sharply defined line dividing them. Then were created the types and ornamental devices which formed the stock-in-trade of high antiquity. Nothing of the kind was to be expected from Iran. The ancient Persians felt little esteem for mechanical arts and industrial enterprise.' The loud activity, the gossip without which no barter could be effected in the Greek agvra, excited their astonishment and disgust.' The a^'ora, however, presupposes an agglomerated population, but Persia in the fifth century b.c. does not seem to have had a single town of sufficient importance for its name to have travelled to Greece. The Hellenes knew of scarcely any other place throughout Iran except Ecbatana.* All ' Anaximenes knew that FftMissdn was founded by Cynu, but his calUng it llfpawv orpaToiTfSov [Parsa-ghcrd] shows that he supposed it to be a simple fortress (Stephanus of Byzantium, s.v. Tlaa-crapydSai). For the analogy of the word gA^rJ to castellum, compare the modern names of such places as Darabgherd, Lasjird, Burujird, and the terta tennination of the names of ancient dties of Armenia and Digiii<ica by Cjt.)0^lc
 * Herodotus, ii. 167 ; Strabo, XV. iii. 19 : out€ jnnXoixrw ovt* wvovyrau
 * Herodotus, i. 153.