PERSIA.
THE fall of Nineveh, instead of being despicable—according to the common legend—from the weakness of Sardanapalus, the last Assyrian king, deserves rather, from the heroic ruin of the monarch with his city, to be compared to the fall of Carthage or of Jerusalem. It removed for some time the centre of Western Asiatic power farther to the east, beyond the Mesopotamian streams: first to mountainous Media, whose inhabitants, through want of culture, were better fitted to destroy than to build, and who, therefore, play almost no part in the history of art. As the short reign of Median greatness passed away, political power tended to the southeast, to Persia, which raised its world-renowned kingdom upon the ruins of the Median, and stretched the boundaries of the new empire far beyond any former compass of Western Asiatic sovereignty. Cyrus, the first historical monarch of Persia, not only conquered all resistance, notably that of Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian dominion, and of the Lydian king Crœsus (by no means remarkable solely on account of his great riches), but carried his victorious arms even to the Ægean Sea; so that Asia, in so far as it was known to Europe, was synonymous with Persia. Cambyses, successor to Cyrus, crushed the oldest power of the world, that of the Pharaohs; and the third Persian king crossed the Bosporos, that he might embody in the colossal Persian empire the eastern lands of Europe and the borders of the Pontos. Persia, by the personal greatness of some of its rulers, by the healthy force of its original inhabitants, as well as by marked good-fortune, thus attained a position in the history of the world hitherto equalled by no other country; and it was by no means wanting in a corresponding monumental expression of this advance.
The chief cities of the land—Susa, Pasargadæ, and Persepolis, for which latter, a name known through Greek historians, we might substitute New Metropolis of the Persians—strove, at least in their royal palaces, to surpass the cities of the Assyrians and Babylonians. Diodoros speaks of Persepolis as “the world-renowned royal fortress,” imposing even to the Greeks. The thousands of years that have passed have yet left remains sufficient for an ideal reconstruction of the whole, and a conception of the artistic ability of the Persians may there be obtained. This is less the case with Susa, more destroyed, and in no wise thoroughly examined. Its site, known by the name Shush, which still clings to the ruins, is revered by Mohammedan pilgrims as that of the tomb of Daniel, in like manner as the location of Nineveh found traditional confirmation among them in the Mohammedan chapel of Jonas. The remains of Pasargadæ, near Murgab, are somewhat better preserved than are those of Susa. Beside its palace terraces, among its other tombs, altars, etc., there rises, nearly intact, one of the most wonderful monuments of the world—the tomb of the great Cyrus. Most important, however, and worthy of chief consideration, is New Pasargadæ, or Persepolis, where the massive palace ruins near Istakr, known under the name of Chehil-Minar (forty columns) or Takt-i-Jemshid (throne of Jemshid), have for centuries been the wonder of travellers.
The Persians, of later development than the Mesopotamians, naturally based their art upon the older culture of the people conquered by them. The palaces were similarly placed upon extensive terraces, which, like those in Nimrud, seem to have been afterwards enlarged to make room for several royal dwellings. The palace terrace of Persepolis (Fig. 78) is, as an exception, not isolated, but so placed as to employ a rocky plateau, which, levelled partly by excavation, partly by filling, acquired architectural character by the vertical revetment of its borders: it abutted with one of its oblong sides upon a cliff, this forming a background of richly carved tomb-façades. The casing of the platform beneath the Palace of Kisr-Sargon (Corsabad) consisted of a masonry formed of quite regularly hewn stones. At Persepolis, on the other hand, is employed, in a similar position, a kind of Cyclopean masonry with predominant horizontal lines—a proof that this wall does not necessarily indicate a greater age than does a facing of hewn stone.
In spite of the close relationship of the architecture of Persia to that of Assyria, the ruins still show in many points such a fundamental difference that Mr. Fergusson’s nearly absolute identification of the art of the two nations cannot be accepted, and a higher grade of independent position, at least in architecture, must be granted to the Persians. The Assyrian ruins showed walls and no columns; in Persia, on the contrary, we find columns and no walls. In view of this, it is a daring hypothesis to assume that chance has preserved here only the one, there only the other, constructional member—that the Persian ruins exhibit the skeleton, as it were, the Assyrian the flesh, of one and the same architectural body, the totality of which is only to be understood and explained by the mutual complement, the combination of the two. For such is Mr. Fergusson’s view. The inadmissibility of transferring Persian columns to Assyrian palaces has already been made evident.
The peculiar formation of plan recognized in the ruins of Nineveh, the narrow and corridor-like chambers, required no interior supports. The clumsy disproportion of the long and cramped Assyrian rooms seems rather to have been decided by the lack of such constructive assistance; with it, on the other hand, the Persian palace was enabled to develop freely. The subordinate shafts in the windows of the palaces at Nineveh did not partake of the true nature of a column, they did not serve to enlarge an enclosed space, but were merely decorative substitutes for the piers which elsewhere separated the openings. It is not possible to transfer the characteristic Persian details either to these or to the columns in antis of the Assyrian temple cellas. The sculptured reliefs mentioned above, from which alone the columns of Assyria are known, present an entirely different class of forms. The Persians recognized the full importance of columnar construction in opening and enlarging enclosed spaces as no other nation has done except the Egyptians. It is in this that the artistic advance of the former beyond their Chaldæan and Babylonian predecessors consists.
