Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/515

 General Characteristics of Persian Art. 491 have been modified, it is so slightly as to be impcrce[)iil)l(at first ^l^^ht. This is so true th it, in order to detect the variations, it is necessary to juxtapose the two types of cornice, the Egyptian and the Persian, and look narrowly at them. Traces of these borrow- ings arc more r.ire in sculpture. Nevertheless, over the head of a figure which seems to represent Cyrus, the founder of the empire, is there not a tall and peculiar head-dress, every detail of which was taken trom some Egyptian b.is-relief ? The relations with Egypt, and the influence the latter exercised upon the art of Persia, do not stop here ; we find elsewhere examples of the adoption of Egyptian forms. If at a given time the vault hollowed in the rock supersedes the built tomb, of which the most curious example is that of Cyrus, when did the change take place ? Why, in the reign of Darius, after the new masters of Egypt had seen the speos, sepultures, or temples which a trained and patient chisel had carved for thousands of years in the depths of the cliffs of the Libyan and Arabian chains of mountains. But if they imitated it was in no servile spirit Thus the Persian architect did not give to his funerary chamber the vast proportions it had assumed in the necropoles of Thebes; whilst he put outside, in the light of day, the, figures which in Egypt adorned the interior of the vault ; or, to speak accurately, the sculptured decoration he applied to his sepulchral front is a faithful reproduction of that of the facade of the subterraneous temples of the Delta. Again, the arrangement of his frontiispiece must be pronounced truly remark- able. His was the idea of putting there the copy of the palace fa9ade, above which rises the fire-altar and the graven image of the tutelar deity of the monarch and the people. The composition, considered as a whole, redounds to the honour and the ingenuity of tiie artist who conceived it ; though it must be admitted that it is rather a clever adaptation than an original work. As already remarked, they had no thought of it until they visited and admired Egypt, whose hypogeia embodied the outiines and the main elements of the type we have studied in the royal tombs at Naksh-i-Rustem and Persepolis. If Persia got her first lessons from Assyria, as well as diose first principles of which the effects are felt to this day in the develop- ment of our culture; if, later, she borrowed much from Egypt, did she take nothing from Asiatic Greece, which was her vassal from the day of Cyrus and remained so for more than two Digitized by Google