Chapter V Persian Art
The most ancient52 monuments of Persia date from no earlier period than the reign of Cyrus (B.C. 549-529). If any Persian art existed in the previous epoch, when the country was no more than a satrapy of the Median empire, its traces have not yet been found. Median art is scarcely known at all, except by a cylindrical seal at the British Museum, bearing a Medic inscription, upon which a rider is seen fighting with a lion: the rider’s high tiara is characteristic, but the lion is copied from a Ninevite cylinder (fig. 119). No doubt this monument would not be enough by itself to prove that Median art was tributary to Assyrian art; but the description given us by Herodotus of the fortress of Ecbatana confirms the hypothesis. On the other hand, it is natural to suppose that the Persians, who were the vassals and consequently the political and religious heirs of the Medes, should have borrowed from the latter certain artistic traditions, if Median art had any originality of its own. Now, while a threefold foreign influence—that of the Chaldæo-Assyrians, the Egyptians, and the Ionic Greeks, is conspicuous in Persian works of art, there is nothing that can be referred to Media.
The monuments of the Achæmenid dynasty are gathered together upon three principal sites, the ruins of which have been explored in a fairly complete manner: Susa, where the Achæmenids, including Darius and his successors, erected their palaces at the spot on which the old capital of Elam, destroyed by Assurbanipal, formerly stood; Persepolis, the imposing remains of which form two groups, called at the present day Takht-i-Jemshid and Nakhsh-i-Rustam; lastly, the pile of ruins at Meshed-Murgab and Madar-i-Soleiman, two Persian villages in the valley of the Polvar, on the road from Ispahan to Shiraz, where, without doubt, the ancient city of Pasargadæ must have been.