Fig. 119.—Median cylinder (after Menant).
The most ancient[52] 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.
§ 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.
