§ IV Religious and Sepulchral Monuments
Ormuzd (Ahura-Mazda), the great deity of the Persians, was not to have, according to the regulations in the Avesta, either temples or statues. The conception of the supreme and only God, perfect in all things, was too vast to suggest any shelter for him except the vault of heaven in which he dwelt. Herodotus did not fail to observe this characteristic of Mazdeism and this absence of temples among the Persians: “The custom of the Persians,” he says, “is not to raise statues, temples and altars to the gods; on the contrary, they treat those who do so as madmen: in my opinion, this is because they do not believe, like the Greeks, that the gods have a human form.” However, Ormuzd is often represented on the monuments of the Achæmenid dynasty; he has the form of a man crowned with the tiara and enclosed in a winged disk (fig. 141). This is exactly, except in the modifications brought about by the progress of art, the figure of the deity in the Assyrian monuments.61 Thus this symbol, borrowed from Mesopotamia, is a transgression of the precepts of the Avesta, and an act of tolerance which only penetrated into the monumental sculpture of palaces and tombs, and into the glyptic art. The only symbol admitted by the Avesta is the all-purifying flame. Hence the cultus of the sacred fire and the fire-altars, called pyrea or atesh-gahs, erected in the open air on heights. The atesh-gahs are the only monuments which represent the religious architecture of the Persians. Their remains are numerous, but they do not present many features of archæological interest. Several of them are seen at a short distance from Nakhsh-i-Rustam which seem to be earlier than the time of Cyrus. On a platform reached on all sides by a few steps, an altar is erected in the form of a truncated pyramid, with four sides. At the corners small columns, attached to the structure, support semicircular arches, which sustain the stone slab on which the sacred fire was lighted.
After the conquest of Asia the Achæmenids generally gave to the fire-altars the form of Græco-Lycian chapels. In the sculptures of a royal tomb at Nakhsh-i-Rustam we see a king in adoration before Ormuzd, and a fire-altar, which has the form of a square block of masonry with projections in imitation of pilasters, supporting an entablature formed of three steps one above the other; the highest, larger than the other two, forms the platform on which the fire is lighted (fig. 141).62
The architectural influence of Assyria is manifest in the construction of certain fire-altars. Near Firuzabad are the ruins of Jur, particularly interesting on account of the remains of an atesh-gah ninety-one feet high, described by travellers, and apparently a copy of the staged towers (zikkurat) of Chaldæa and Assyria, a type of which, the most complete in existence, is here handed down to us. M. Dieulafoy remarks that the atesh-gah at Jur resembles the minaret of the mosque of Ibn Tûlûn, one of the oldest Mussulman edifices. Thus types of religious architecture invented by the Chaldæans exercised their influence even on the modern art of the East.63
The funeral rites imposed by the Avesta had another consequence—that of creating a kind of architecture unknown in any country besides Persia. Human corpses might neither be committed directly to the ground, nor burnt, nor thrown into the river, for this would have caused pollution to water, earth, and fire. Cities of the dead had been established in remote and deserted spots: these were tall round towers called dakhmas, built of masonry, and showing no architectural ornament even round the top. These towers supported a wooden trellis-work on which the corpses were laid; birds of prey came and tore these abandoned bodies to pieces: they often carried off separate limbs to a distance, where wild beasts devoured what was left of them. That which remained in the charnel-house was buried, but previously covered with wax to avoid all direct contact with the ground. Herodotus has preserved a reminiscence of these distressing practices. “The corpse of a Persian” he says, “is not buried until it has been torn to pieces by dogs or birds of prey.... The Persians cover the dead body with wax, after which they inter it.” There is still at the present day in Persia a certain number of ruins of the sepulchral towers of the Mazdeans, and one of the best known is not far from Teheran.
But the dakhmas only served for popular burials; for the Achæmenid kings, at any rate, broke the Mazdean law, which perhaps itself made in practice an exception in favour of the royal family. The tombs of the Achæmenid princes can be divided, from the architectural point of view, into two large classes, according as they are or are not anterior to the conquest of Egypt. The former are conceived according to the style and plan of Græco-Ionian tombs, the latter according to the Egyptian hypogæa.
In the valley of Polvar-Rud, two and a half miles to the south of Takht-i-Madar-i-Soleiman, stands a small rectangular edifice, the probable burying-place of Mandane, the mother of Cyrus; the Persians call it Gabr-i-Madar-i-Soleiman, “tomb of the mother of Solomon” (fig. 139). The archaic Greek character of this monument is striking. Constructed of large blocks in regular courses, without mortar, the stones being cut and fitted with the greatest exactness, it is provided with a triangular pediment, the only one ever observed in a monument of ancient Persia; it is reached by six steps running all round the little building. The roof is formed of flat slabs, sloping on each side according to the inclination of the pediment. Round the roof is a cornice composed of a reversed ogee enclosed within two fillets, an architectural decoration found repeated round the door, the double frame of which is copied from that of the Greek buildings in the Ionian style. The inner chamber measures scarcely six square yards. Round Gabr-i-Madar-i-Soleiman was a courtyard surrounded by a portico; the chapel was not exactly in the centre of the courtyard, but stood at the bottom of it; so that an open space was left in front.
Not far from this is the tomb of Cambyses the First, the father of Cyrus. It is so dilapidated that only one façade is almost intact; this is enough, however, to enable us to compare it with another tomb at Nakhsh-i-Rustam in a good state of preservation. Both of them were square towers, constructed of fine and regular masonry, the mortar being replaced by iron clamps. The tower, solid at the base, contains in its upper part a chamber, the ceiling of which is formed of large slabs fitted together; a staircase built outside gave access to a small door. The exterior façade is furnished on its four sides with false windows; the idea has even been adopted of building the back of these niches of black basalt, in order to give them the appearance of true apertures. The summit of the edifice is composed of a cornice adorned with a row of denticulations.
When to all these details we add the rustication of the stones and the position-marks found on the blocks, it will be recognised that the architect and workmen came from Asia Minor and copied in servile fashion the sepulchral structures of that country. The architectural form of these towers reminds us of the Lycian tombs at Telmessus, Antiphellus, Aperlæ, and Myra, and above all of the celebrated Harpy tomb at Xanthus.
The descriptions given by Strabo (x. 3, 7), and Arrian (vi. 29), following Aristobulus, of the tomb of Cyrus, enable us to assert that it was like the square towers of Meshed-Murgab and Nakhsh-i-Rustam: “The tomb stood in the middle of the king’s gardens; it was surrounded by trees, running water and soft turf. It was a square tower, low enough to be hidden under the thick trees which surrounded it. The base was solid and composed of large cubical blocks. In the upper part was the sepulchral chamber, covered with a stone roof. It was entered by a narrow door. Aristobulus saw in it a golden couch, a table with cups for libations, a gilded tub for washing and bathing, and a quantity of garments and ornaments. There was a communication, by means of an inner staircase, with the chamber in which lived the priests who guarded the tomb.” It is not permissible, then, to doubt that, in the time of Cyrus, the kings of Persia had tombs built like those of Lycia, and that the towers which we have described preserve for us specimens of them.
But after the conquest of Egypt, Darius, who, as we saw, admired the monuments in the valley of the Nile, resolved to have a sepulchral cave hewn for himself, in the form of a speos, in the side of the rock, and analogous to the sepulchral hypogæa of the Pharaohs. His successors acted like him. The caverns of Darius and the princes of his dynasty, which are to be seen in the rocks of Nakhsh-i-Rustam and Takht-i-Jemshid, near Persepolis, differ in all points from the tombs of Cambyses I. and Cyrus: while the latter are square towers of masonry, those of the second Achæmenid dynasty are cut out side by side in the vertical wall of the mountain, and the façade, like that of the hypogæa at Beni-Hassan, is decorated with bas-reliefs. To reach these chambers it was necessary in the time of the Achæmenids, as in our own day, to be hoisted by ropes to a level with the aperture. The exterior sculptures are interesting. A colonnade with bicephalic capitals supports an architrave, the frieze of which is adorned with a procession of lions and surmounted with bas-reliefs. Two rows of soldiers fully armed raise their hands to sustain a sort of platform, the borders of which are decorated with two symbolical figures of lions provided with bulls’ horns. These Persian warriors remind the spectator of the Assyrian soldiers who form the decoration of Sennacherib’s throne. On the platform stands Darius on a pedestal in steps, dressed in the persis described by Herodotus, crowned with the cidaris, resting the end of his bow on the ground and stretching out his hand. Opposite him is a lighted fire-altar and the image of Ormuzd. Round this bas-relief and serving as its frame stand the figures of the satraps who helped Darius to slay Gaumates. The door of the cave is opened in the central intercolumniation. The interior of the chambers was as severe as possible; the roof is hewn into the form of a vault; in obedience to the law of Ormuzd there is no trace anywhere of painting or inscription. The cavities for the sarcophagi are formed in the side walls, as in the sepulchral caverns of Egypt, Palestine, and Phœnicia.