Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/81

 66 History of Art in Antiquity. at least still able to speak for themselves, were squares or rectangles with flat ceilings. Of these, such as are of great dimensions can never have been other than sumptuous reception halls, flanked by porticoes on one or three of their sides^ and which by themselves may favourably compare with the most gigantic edific^ the great nations of antiquity have handed down to us. Elsewhere con- structions are found seemingly of a private character ; chambers affected to the various uses of the household, distributed around a central hall with columns or pillars as supports to their roof, pre- cisely as the modem harems or "anderouns" of Persia (Fig. 13). The hypostyle hall is, therefore, the chief creation of the Persian architect ; whether he enlarges its area and sufficiently raises the ceiling to render it independent of the adjoining structures, so tha^ giant-like, it may rely on no resources but its own for its marvellous effect, of whether he marks its place in the middle of the pile, making it emphatically the " common room " to all that will subsequently rise around it, it is from first to last his pet type, whilst his happy and brilliant handling have had this result, that in the history of his art he can stand by the side of his rivals of Egypt and Assyria, of Greece and Rome. To sum up : if the plans drawn by the anonymous builders oi the palaces of Darius and Xerxes betray everywhere a keen and delicate feeling for architectural rhythm, we do not find the rigorous, ' mathematically true symmetry pursued with so much devotion by modern builders. As a whole, the terraced platform at Persepolis undoubtedly recalls a space embraced within a rectangular parallelo- grram (Fig. 10), but its faces do not exactly correspond, inasmuch as they consist of projecting and re-entering angles — whimsical none of them being at right angles to the building they approach. Thus the Propylaea standing on the lower level of the esplanade a're on the axis of the upper level, but the central line of the great hypostyle hall of Xerxes, the nearest and most conspicu(nis structure,^ is 1 m. 15 c to the rear of the pilaster in this same Propylaea. Buildings on the esplanades are scattered haphazard, as it were, at different levels, with utter neglect of the massing and balancing of the parts. But whilst stru:tures are crowded in at the southern angle, the northern section of the lower terrace is quite empty, and looks as if it always had been so. The Persians of to-day have Digitized by Google
 * redans, in fact. The arrangement of the stairs, too, is peculiar,