§ V Engraved Gems and Ornaments
The glyptic art and the jewellery of the Persians maintain nobly and without any sign of decadence the artistic traditions of Chaldæa and Assyria. Assurbanipal and Nebuchadnezzar, when they made expeditions into the most distant provinces of Persia, Media, and Armenia, had spread through all these countries the productions of Assyrian industry and the taste for luxury and works of art; their artists recruited their disciples there: like Alexander, they carried the torch of civilisation everywhere by their arms, and when the Achæmenids took up their residence at Susa and Ecbatana, they found the inhabitants profoundly impregnated with Chaldæo-Assyrian ideas and customs. To as high a degree as the Babylonians, the Persians love full dress and ornaments: each citizen of distinction has his cylinder or his seal hung from his neck; he is covered with bracelets, rings, necklaces; his tiara is decorated with pearls and sparkling stones; his tunic, delicately embroidered, is encrusted with gems. In his house he displays a luxury in furniture which, handed on to the Parthians, will astonish the Romans and Byzantines: cups of gold and silver enriched with crystal and coloured glass, and adorned with figures in relief; chairs, couches and tables overlaid with silver, gold, and carved ivory. In short, everything begotten of the passion for luxury among the Chaldæans in the matter of tapestry, embroidery, and goldsmiths’ work, is also found among the Persians.
Only, the Persians were not servile imitators; they could give an original turn to the productions of their industry, even when they copied the Assyrians. There is in their cylinders and their seals a dry and nervous execution which characterises them as distinctly as the bulls of Persepolis are distinguished from the Ninevite monsters. It goes without saying also that the inscriptions and the details of costume give an absolutely precise character to the classification of the productions of the glyptic art under the Achæmenids. Here is, for instance, the cylinder of Darius, preserved at the British Museum. The whole scene is evidently copied from Assyrian seals, but the figure of the rampant lion and those of the horses are quite different in treatment from Ninevite art; the denticulated tiara of the prince, the disk of Ormuzd hovering in the air, and finally the inscription traced with mathematical regularity, complete the proofs of Persian origin in this fine cylinder.
As we remove ourselves chronologically from the origin of the art, more perceptible modifications are introduced into the technique, and new foreign influences are revealed in Persian work. A cylinder (fig. 143), which belongs to a Russian collector, represents a scene which might be supposed to be imitated from the bas-relief at Behistun. Darius is here seen slaying with his lance a kneeling enemy, whose head-dress is Egyptian.
The special distinctions of the productions of the gem-engraver’s art under the Achæmenid dynasty are the sobriety and exactness of the work and the conventional character of the figured scenes; besides this, in consequence of the influence of Egypt and Phœnicia, the fashion spreads more and more of substituting for cylinders conical, rhomboidal or spherical stones, flattened on one side, in order to form a field for the engraving. On these cones of chalcedony or agate the most common subjects are: the “king of kings” standing or kneeling, crowned with the denticulated tiara or cidaris, and drawing his bow—a type analogous to that of the coins known under the name of Daries; the king stabbing a lion which stands erect before him; a pontiff before the fire-altar, adoring Ormuzd; sphinxes and gryphons which remind us of the Assyrian kirubu. An opal seal (fig. 145) obtained at Susa by M. Dieulafoy, shows two sphinxes crowned with the tiara of Upper Egypt in adoration before the winged disk of Ormuzd; in the centre, in a little medallion, is the portrait of the Achæmenid prince, no doubt Artaxerxes Mnemon. The delicate execution of the royal portrait is striking, and the elegant forms of the sphinxes are no less worthy of remark. As among the Assyro-Chaldæans, it is in the representation of animals—lions, deer, antelopes, sphinxes, and gryphons—that the genius of the Persian engraver reveals its full strength. The winged and horned gryphon found on an engraved gem (fig. 147) is significantly analogous to a small limestone bas-relief in the De Luynes collection (fig. 148) which shows in what fashion Persian art interpreted the Assyrian kirubu, and the modifications which it required. The monster has the body and fore paws of a lion; his hind legs, armed with powerful claws, are those of an eagle; he has the ears of an ox and the horns of a wild goat; his eye, face, and half-open beak belong to the falcon; a bristling mane adorns a neck proudly arched like that of a horse; he has a lion’s tail; his great wings with well-marked feathers resemble in their development those of the Persepolitan bulls. We know nothing in Persian art superior to this figure, the symbol of strength and power, in which so many discordant elements are combined with so fortunate a harmony.64 At Susa and Persepolis, as at Nineveh and Babylon, minor sculpture was not inferior to sculpture on a grand scale, and the style of the engraver sometimes produced as noble and as striking effects as the chisel of the statuary: the copy did not yield to the model.