Fig. 52.—The Palace at Firouz-Abad; from Flandin and Coste.
Fig. 53.—The palace at Sarbistan; from Flandin and Coste.
The corporations of architects and workmen must have preserved the traditions of their craft from century to century, traditions which had their first rise in the natural capabilities of their materials and in the data of the problem they had to solve. The historian cannot, then, be accused of going beyond the limit of fair induction in arguing from these modern buildings to their remote predecessors. After the conquest of Alexander, the ornamental details, and, still more, the style of the sculptures, must have been affected to a certain extent, first by Greek art and afterwards by that of Rome; but the plans, the internal structure, and the general arrangement of the buildings must have remained the same.
Fig. 54.—Section through the palace at Sarbistan; from Flandin and Coste.
There is nothing hazardous or misleading in these arguments from analogy; from the palace of Chosroes to that of Sargon is a legitimate step. Some day, perhaps, we may attempt to pursue the same path in the opposite direction; we may endeavour to show that the survival of these examples and traditions may very well have helped to direct architecture into a new path in the last years of the Roman Empire. We shall then have to speak of a school in Asia Minor whose works have not yet been studied with the attention they deserve. The buildings in question are distinguished chiefly by the important part played in their construction by the vault and the dome resting upon pendentives; certain constructive processes, too, are to be found in them which had never, so far as we can tell, been known or practised in the East. We can hardly believe that the chiefs of the school invented from the foundation a system of construction whose principles were so different from those of the Greeks, or even of the later Romans. They may, indeed, have perfected the system by grafting the column upon it, but it is at least probable that they took it in the first place from those who had practised it from time immemorial, from men who taught them the traditional methods of shortening and facilitating the labour of execution. The boundaries of Asia Minor "march" with those of Mesopotamia, and in the latter every important town had buildings of brick covered with domes. The Romans frequented the Euphrates valley, to which they were taken both by war and commerce; their victories sometimes carried them even as far as Ctesiphon on the Tigris, so that there was no lack of opportunity for the study of Oriental architecture on the very spot where it was born. They could judge of and admire the beauty it certainly possessed when the great buildings of Mesopotamia were still clothed in all the richness of their decoration. The genius of the Greeks had come nigh to exhausting the forms and combinations of the classic style; it was tired of continuous labour in a narrow circle and sighed for fresh worlds to conquer. We can easily understand then, how it would welcome a system which seemed to afford the novelty it sought, which seemed to promise the elements of a new departure that might be developed in many, as yet unknown, directions. If we put ourselves at this point of view we shall see that Isidore and Anthemius, the architects of St. Sophia, were the disciples and perpetuators of the forgotten masters who raised so many millions of bricks into the air at the bidding of Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar.[208]