Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/512

 4S8 History of Art in Antiquity. of the poj)ulations of Iran, or by the examples and traditions of Medic royalty. As might have been foreseen, the adjoining countries of Chaldiea and Assyria were those that gave most to Persia. They taught her to raise artificial mounds whereon to place her buildings, and monumental staircases on their fronts, at once an easy means of ascent and superbly decorative. If in the construction of these gigantic plinths or ramps Persia substituted stone for the brick of Chaldiua, the principle was identical. The builders of both countries were actuated by the desire to elevate the house of the sovereign above the plain and the habitations of meaner men ; a nameless rabble, bound to the soil or doomed to carry on the business of life in obscurity, whose lot was serfdom and obedience. The eye could measure at one glance the distance which separated the king from the plebs. Reminiscent of Assyria also is the adoption of brick walls, which were not imposed upon the architect, as in Mesopotamia, by the dearth of stone ; so that if he introduced the frail material in his finest buildings, it is probable that it was in imitation of the royal houses at Babylon and Nineveh. From thence, too, he borrowed decorative methods. In order to vary the external face of his great mud walls he built them of different qualities of brick ; and in the most carefully wrought parts of the palace he applied enamel, costly woods, either in their natural colour or tinted ; ivory, and metal, and he crowned his walls with crenelations. The situation which, as a rule, he assigned to sculpture in his buildings is very similar to that which it always occupies in Assyrian edifices. Whilst the Egyptian artist distributed bas-reliefs all over his pylons and his temples, and the Greek reserved them for the entabla- ture, the Persepolitan sculptor, as he of Calach and Nineveh, placed the most important and finished of his figures level with the ground, at the sides of doorways, on the face of substructures, and along the walls of his ramps. The resemblance is not only observable in the choice of sites, but also in that of the themes. Thus colossi guard the gateways, and we find here the symbolic groups we noticed on the banks of the Tigris, such as the winged globe, the figure of the deity hovering in the air surrounded by a ring, which recalls the solar disc ; the hero overcoming monsters, whom he strangles in his embrace or pierces with his sword ; the king .seated on his throne, surrounded by attendants who carry the Digitized by Google