Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/68

 The General Principles of Form. 53 whose magnificence dazzled the Greeks, and which in their ruinous state may still in part be divined. The fa9ade of the rock-hevm tombs, acknowledged on all hands as the entombments of the Achaemenid kings, may be taken as the most complete type of Persian adjustment Its originality, that which strikes one at first sight, is the function the column fulfils — ^a column we know to have been of stone from base to crown, by the specimens and fragments that still exist upon the platforms where once rose the palaces with which they were associated. The important part ascribed here to the column, neither recalls Chaldaea nor Assyria, where it held a very subordi- nate place, but at once brings Egypt to our mind. A superficial observation would tempt one to think that, in the main, the Persian architect copied it upon the models of Egyptian architecture ; a more critical eye, however, soon discovers that the supports are characterissed by touches utterly opposed to those of the Nile, whilst their make reveals the stamp of a very different taste. Take at haphazard any Egyptian column and place it side by side of a Persian support, and the contrast they offer will strike the most uneducated eye. Analysis and com- parison alike, instead of detracting from the impression thus received, will accentuate it and help to widen more and more the gap between them. The shaft of the Persian column is always tall and slender. In the "Palace of the Thirty-six Columns" at Persepolis (Fig. 10, No. 2 in plan. Plates VII. and VIII), the total height of the I one diameter of the shaft; whilst in the Pasaigadx specimen ' (Fig. If), whose capital has disappeared, the proportions are even more airy and light On the other hand, in what may be termed the classic type of Egypt, in the Ramesseum and the hypostylc hall at Kamac, the entire height of the column is but five or six diameters : and in the vast majority of cases — at Medinet AbQ, for instance — it measures but four diameters. The Egyptian support, even when it strives most after el^^anoe, always maintains a massive and somewhat stubby aspect, in striking contrast with the Persian order, which is far the airiest stone support the architects of antiquity ever raised. Divergence 'is no less marked in the membering of bases. In the valley of the Nile it is never more than a platband or a stout Digitized by Gopgle
 * order, with base and crown, is in the proportion of twelve to