§ I Civil Architecture
When Cyrus had his new capital, Pasargadæ, built in the valley of the Polvar, he had completed the destruction of the kingdom of Crœsus, finished the conquest of Asia Minor, and made himself master of Babylon. The precise date of the monuments of Meshed-Murgab is fixed by the cuneiform inscriptions, which, while they are all composed in honour of Cyrus, are written in three versions, Persian, Medic, and Assyrian, and consequently we cannot place them earlier than the conquest of Chaldæa in B.C. 538. In his victorious expeditions through regions remote from the table-land of Fars, his native country, such as Mesopotamia, Lydia, and the coasts of Asia Minor, Cyrus had the opportunity of observing monuments which must have astonished him by their architecture, and palaces which seemed to him far finer than those inhabited hitherto by his ancestors, princes of proverbial austerity and simplicity. He conceived the idea of constructing for himself a royal residence as sumptuous as those of Crœsus and Nabonidus, and of importing into the heart of Persia the architecture of Babylon and the Hellenic architecture of Asia Minor. His military successes assisted him wonderfully in this undertaking. The prisoners of war whom he captured at Babylon and in the Greek cities of Ionia became the workmen who built his palaces; and he allured the architects, whom he could not carry away by force, by loading them with wealth and honours. The successors of Cyrus continued, like him, to appeal to the artists of Greece, whose voluntary exile from their native country has often been remarked by historians. Pliny, for instance, cites a worker in bronze, Telephanes of Phocæa, who passed among his contemporaries as a worthy rival of Polycletus, Myron, and Pythagoras, and whom the kings of Persia, Darius and Xerxes, attracted to their court, where he exercised his craft during the greater part of his career.53
The structures begun by Cyrus at Pasargadæ, which were never finished on account of his death, which abruptly ended the work, receive their inspiration both from Greek and Assyrian art; there is nothing to be referred to the architectural types of Egypt, not yet invaded by the Persian conquerors. The palaces stand upon platforms like those of Nineveh and Babylon; but these substructures follow the Greek method of building.
The monument called by the modern Persians Takht-i-Madar-i-Soleiman (“throne of the mother of Solomon”) is nothing more than the platform of Cyrus’ palace (fig. 120). It is a structure built of large stones, in which mortar is replaced by iron clamps. The facings are seldom trimmed, but only rough hewn, and surrounded by a double moulding like rusticated stonework with marginal draftings. The courses are alternate rows of headers and stretchers. The nucleus of the structure is a mass of blocks arranged in horizontal layers, always level with the facing courses. M. Dieulafoy54 observes that the Lydians practised this method of building from the eighth century before our era. The Assyrians did not proceed in the same manner. At Khorsabad, for instance, no clamps bind the stones of the facing to one another; the wall is straight and absolutely vertical, while in the Takht-i-Madar-i-Soleiman the upper courses recede from one another like steps, in order to give greater thickness to the base. Over the greater part of the facing, position marks have been detected, carved upon them by the stone-cutters, in order to know the place of each hewn stone. These marks are conventional signs, which do not belong, it is true, to any alphabet, but which—a matter worthy of remark—are the same as those discovered in Greek buildings.
The palaces of Persepolis were erected by Darius and Xerxes only fifty years after those at Pasargadæ; but in this short interval Egypt had been conquered by Cambyses; and after that event the monuments of the Pharaohs were destined, for the same reason as those of Assyria and Asia Minor, to exercise a direct influence upon Persian art. The latter, however, could never fuse these heterogeneous elements together and assimilate them to its own character, but could only group them in a hybrid style. The buildings of Persepolis are still standing to a considerable extent, and its ruins, rising in the midst of a vast amphitheatre of grey marble rocks, are an object of enthusiastic admiration to all travellers. The palaces rest upon a platform built on the model of that of Takht-i-Madar-i-Soleiman. The outer coating of this basement is formed of carefully trimmed ashlar, and the blocks, fitted together without mortar, are fixed by iron clamps. Better preserved than the ruins of Pasargadæ, those of Persepolis enable us to reconstruct more perfectly the principal forms of Achæmenid architecture. The platform of the Persepolitan palaces was ascended by a flight of a hundred and eleven steps, broad enough to be mounted by ten men abreast; a gently inclined roadway, formed on one side of the platform, enabled carriages to reach the summit: here we have precisely, except in point of material and manner of construction, the platform of the Assyrian palaces. The summit of the terrace was crowned, as at Khorsabad, with a row of battlements. The peculiarity of the artificial mound called Takht-i-Jemshid by the Persians is that it is only an immense basement supporting three other terraces of smaller area upon it. These terraces are of unequal height, and communicate with one another; they are reached by stone staircases. The grand staircase, leading to the second platform, is adorned with a colonnade and flanked by gigantic human-headed bulls, similar to those at Nineveh. Upon the highest of these three platforms were built four palaces, upon the walls of which the names of Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes Ochus have been found.
In the buildings at Persepolis and Susa, the doorways and window-frames take the form of a rectangular parallelogram, and in their architectural decoration, besides the traditional influence of Chaldæa and Assyria, the new exotic element, that we have indicated above, may be recognised; it is the intrusion of Pharaonic art. The doors, framed in three Græco-Ionian architraves, projecting one beyond the other, are surmounted, as well as the windows, by an Egyptian ornament above a line of alternate ovals and disks. In the thickness of the doorway sculptures in relief, copied from those of the Chaldæo-Assyrian palaces, show us the king in close combat with a lion or fantastic animal, or else the king sitting on his throne rendering justice at his palace gate, or again the prince solemnly advancing, surrounded by his officers and dressed in his ceremonial robes.
M. Dieulafoy55 recognised that the greater number of the windows were condemned to lessen the air and light in the interior of the rooms; these windows filled up by a thinner wall, formed, on the exterior, niches which broke the uniformity of the façade. Doors, windows, staircases and the pilasters arranged at the corners, are of white limestone or of grey porphyry with blue veins; but the walls in which these architectural features occur are of baked brick coated with enamelled tiles.
The architecture of the Achæmenid palaces includes the pier and the column as the supports of the structure. Among the ruins of Pasargadæ at present only three piers and one column, the height of which still exceeds 36 feet, are standing. But at Persepolis and at Susa, the Persepolitan capital, with all its elegance and originality, has been studied in all its varieties. It is found in every part, but notably in the great state saloon or apadâna of the palaces. It is thirteen times as high as its diameter at the base: its slender form reveals the imitation in stone of an original structure supported by light trunks of trees. The apadâna of the palace of Xerxes at Persepolis, situated on the middle platform, covered an area of nearly an acre and a quarter, and its roof was sustained by a hundred columns. Before the anterior façade rose a portico guarded by two gigantic bulls with human heads, partly built into the structure like those in the Assyrian edifices. The apadâna of the palace of Artaxerxes at Susa (fig. 124) was of no less gigantic proportions, and had a double portico on three of its sides; it covers an area of an acre and a half. The columns are not less than 18 feet 4 inches in diameter; slightly conical in shape, they are composed of long cylindrical drums, placed end to end, the base and capital being separated from the shaft. Two varieties may be distinguished.56 The simplest type is to be seen in the interior halls of the palace of Xerxes at Persepolis. The base is formed of two tori placed one above the other on a square pedestal; the shaft is decorated all round with forty-eight flutings; the capital includes a series of ornaments borrowed from the architecture of Egypt; it is developed in a succession of bells and inverted volutes, above which two bulls’ heads are arranged, even with the intercolumniations; this is the bicephalic capital, characteristic of the Achæmenid architecture, which has never been employed except in Persia. Other columns differ, but only in the base, from that which we have just described; the double torus supporting the shaft is sometimes placed, not on a square pedestal, but on a cylindrical drum, decorated with twenty-four vertical lines and growing gradually broader in the lower part, so as to present the form of a much elongated ogee or of a bell. At Susa, instead of lines, the ornament of the base is sometimes formed of elegant inverted foliage (fig. 126). The comparative study of the Achæmenid column, together with the monuments of Egypt and Greece, has led M. Dieulafoy to conclude that the outlines of the Persepolitan column are Egyptian, but that its structure is composed of Græco-Ionian elements. These volutes, strings of ovals, and tori at the base, had already become classical in the Hellenic world long before Cyrus, since they are found everywhere, at Mycenæ, Segesta and Selinus, in Attica and in Ionia: here again we are forced to recognise that the architect, even when he copies motives derived from Egypt or Assyria, is imbued with the principles of Hellenic art.
Besides columns, the Persepolitan and Susian palaces had pilasters placed at the extremities of the porticoes, as continuations of the façades. In the façades of the palace of Darius at Persepolis two square pilasters of porphyry are seen, so perfectly preserved that in the upper part they still have holes, cut to receive the ends of the entablature. They would suffice to prove, if any proof were wanting, that in these structures, the columns, which are placed at long intervals and are tall and slender, did not support stone but wooden architraves. These were enormous beams which formed a line even with the tops of the columns, and, running from capital to capital, and placed in grooves contrived with this object, contributed to give homogeneity and solidity to the structure. Upon these great beams the rafters of the roof were arranged, and then a flat ceiling supporting neither a terrace nor a second story.
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that the palaces, the elements of which we have just described, constitute an official kind of architecture implanted in Persia by the “kings of kings” who were pleased with the monuments that they had observed in Egypt, Assyria, and Asia Minor. Springing from the caprice of sovereigns, this foreign architecture never took root in the country, and was not required by the nature of the ground and the necessities of existence on the mountainous table-land of Persia; it disappeared with the Achæmenid dynasty. But by the side of this conventional architecture there was that created by the natives of the country, because it had been imposed upon them as a condition of life. As well as the people of Chaldæa and Assyria, the Persians must have known how to build vaulted houses, alone capable of protecting them from the rays of a too ardent sun; they also built, at least in the cantons of Susiana, houses with terraces, supported by palm beams and trellis-work arranged over the rooms which were narrow like passages. Strabo tells us this while speaking of Susiana: “To protect the rooms from the excessive heat, the roofs are covered with two cubits’ depth of earth; the weight of this earth obliges the people to build all the houses long and narrow, because, although the beams must not be very long, nevertheless the rooms must be spacious; otherwise the people would be stifled.” Even at the present day, since the climatic conditions of the country have not changed, the method of building houses is the same as that practised by the ancient inhabitants of Iran. Travellers find houses, according to the wealth of the owner, surmounted by vaults, domes, and terraces, wonderfully suited to local requirements. It is, then, quite certain that the Iranians in the time of the Achæmenids knew the vault and the cupola as well as their neighbours on the banks of the Tigris.
But have the vaults and domes of Persia, more fortunate than those which rose above the Mesopotamian edifices, come down to us, at least in a few instances? M. Dieulafoy believes so. The ruins held to be of the Sassanian epoch at Sarvistan, Firuzabad, and Ferashbad, would date, in his opinion, from the Achæmenid period. A certain reserve, however, is required, from the chronological point of view, in speaking of these monuments in which the traveller can still see brick cupolas supported by pendentives,57 these cupolas being 97 ft. high and 49 ft. in diameter, semicircular vaults, pointed vaults nearly similar to those of our Gothic churches of the thirteenth century—in short, all the elements of Sassanian and Byzantine architecture. On the other hand, the decoration of these buildings seems to have been remarkably poor; at Sarvistan the interior columns are heavy and badly hewn, the cornice placed at the foot of the vaulting is composed of nothing but a serrated ornament; the interior walls must have been coated with red paint; the exterior walls were smooth, and even the façade showed no decoration except groups of half-columns buried in the masonry. Not the smallest trace has been remarked among these ruins of bricks, whether enamelled or bearing figures in relief, or of those slabs imitating the wall sculptures of Assyria which were such characteristic elements of Achæmenid art. The same reflections are applicable to the monument of Firuzabad, the architectural decoration of which has preserved, perhaps only by tradition, elements of Persepolitan origin.