Fig. 124.—Plan of the Apadâna of Artaxerxes (after Dieulafoy).
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
Fig. 125.—Susian capital restored (Louvre).
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.