Fig. 7. Persepolis, Apadana of Xerxes. (From Iranische Felsreliefs, by kind permission of the authors.)
Before the khilâni palace was taken up again by Persian hands, an immense revolution had swept over western Asia. Alexander’s invasion is a turning-point
Fig. 8. Persepolis, Palace of Darius.
(From L’Art antique de la Perse, by kind permission of M. Dieulafoy.)
in history. The Mesopotamian arts emerged from the period of Greek rule profoundly modified by direct intercourse with the West; for the Seleucid kingdom, with one capital on the Tigris and another on the Orontes, had bridged the gulf between Babylonia and the Mediterranean coast-lands. Greek culture, Greek artistic conceptions were carried across Asia by the invaders; but the further they penetrated, the less they overmastered local tradition. Babylonia, Assyria and Persia were never Hellenized in the sense in which Syria was Hellenized. The ancient East, with 3,000 years and more of a highly elaborated civilization behind her, assimilated what was brought to her, but she used it after her own fashion. She turned the Greek kings into oriental despots, and translated Greek ideas into her own forms of expression. The architectural remains of this period are as yet scanty. Seleucia and Antioch are unexplored, and except for the Greek theatre at Babylon, the excavation of Mesopotamian sites has yielded little but fragments.[84] But if the Seleucid era is comparatively unknown, the new elements which the Greek conquest had introduced into oriental architecture stand out with an amazing vividness in Parthian buildings. Loftus, whose excavations at Warka were the first to reveal a great Parthian settlement on a Babylonian mound, was not slow to appreciate the significance of his discoveries.[85] Together with capitals which bore an obvious relationship to the Ionic, and walls enriched with Ionic half-fluted engaged columns, he found plaster ornaments and fragments of wall-surface decoration covered with continuous geometric patterns in which he recognized an art that was essentially oriental. The Chaldaean monuments at Warka were covered with mosaics set in geometric designs which are the prototypes of the Parthian coloured reliefs.[86] Hellenistic houses of the Parthian period have been unearthed in the Amrân mound at Babylon. The small Parthian palace at Niffer, with its columned hall of audience, opening through an anteroom, which is in the nature of a closed lîwân, into a square peristyle, resembles a Greek dwelling-house seen through a Babylonian medium[87] ([Fig. 9]). At Assur, together with a temple (if temple it were) which is almost peripteral,[88] and a stoa,[89] we have a palace on a lîwân plan, with ionicizing capitals and a façade of stucco mock-architecture