Chapter 8

PERSIAN, LYCIAN AND JEWISH ARCHITECTURE.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED: As before, Babelon; Bliss, _Excavations at Jerusalem_. Reber. Also Dieulafoy, _L’Art antique de la Perse_. Fellows, _Account of Discoveries in Lycia_. Fergusson, _The Temple at Jerusalem_. Flandin et Coste, _Perse ancienne_. Perrot and Chipiez, _History of Art in Persia_; _History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, and Lycia_; _History of Art in Sardinia and Judæa_. Texier, _L’Arménie et la Perse_; _L’Asie Mineure_. De Vogüé, _Le Temple de Jérusalem_.

+PERSIAN ARCHITECTURE.+ With the Persians, who under Cyrus (536 B.C.) and Cambyses (525 B.C.) became the masters of the Orient, the Aryan race superseded the Semitic, and assimilated in new combinations the forms it borrowed from the Assyrian civilization. Under the Achæmenidæ (536 to 330 B.C.) palaces were built in Persepolis and Susa of a splendor and majesty impossible in Mesopotamia, and rivalling the marvels in the Nile Valley. The conquering nation of warriors who had overthrown the Egyptians and Assyrians was in turn conquered by the arts of its vanquished foes, and speedily became the most luxurious of all nations. The Persians were not great innovators in art; but inhabiting a land of excellent building resources, they were able to combine the Egyptian system of interior columns with details borrowed from Assyrian art, and suggestions, derived most probably from the general use in Persia and Central Asia, of wooden posts or columns as intermediate supports. Out of these elements they evolved an architecture which has only become fully known to us since the excavations of M. and Mme. Dieulafoy at Susa in 1882.

+ELEMENTS OF PERSIAN ARCHITECTURE.+ The Persians used both crude and baked bricks, the latter far more freely than was practicable in Assyria, owing to the greater abundance of fuel. Walls when built of the weaker material were faced with baked brick enamelled in brilliant colors, or both moulded and enamelled, to form colored pictures in relief. Stone was employed for walls and columns, and, in conjunction with brick, for the jambs and lintels of doors and windows. Architraves and ceiling-beams were of wood. The palaces were erected, as in Assyria, upon broad platforms, partly cut in the rock and partly structural, approached by imposing flights of steps. These palaces were composed of detached buildings, propylæa or gates of honor, vast audience-halls open on one or two sides, and chambers or dwellings partly enclosing or flanking these halls, or grouped in separate buildings. Temples appear to have been of small importance, perhaps owing to habits of out-of-door worship of fire and sun. There are few structural tombs, but there are a number of imposing royal sepulchres cut in the rock at Naksh-i-Roustam.

+ARCHITECTURAL DETAILS.+ The Persians, like the Egyptians, used the column as an internal feature in hypostyle halls of great size, and externally to form porches, and perhaps, also, open kiosks without walls. The great +Hall of Xerxes+ at Persepolis covers 100,000 square feet--more than double the area of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak. But the Persian column was derived from wooden prototypes and used with wooden architraves, permitting a wider spacing than is possible with stone. In the present instance thirty-six columns sufficed for an area which in the Karnak hall contained one hundred and thirty-four. The shafts being slender and finely fluted instead of painted or carved, the effect produced was totally different from that sought by the Egyptians. The most striking peculiarity of the column was the capital, which was forked (Fig. 21). In one of the two principal types the fork, formed by the coupled fore-parts of bulls or symbolic monsters, rested directly on the top of the shaft. In the other, two singular members were interposed between the fork and the shaft; the lower, a sort of double bell or bell-and-palm capital, and above it, just beneath the fork, a curious combination of vertical scrolls or volutes, resembling certain ornaments seen in Assyrian furniture. The transverse architrave rested in the fork; the longitudinal architrave was supported on the heads of the monsters. A rich moulded base, rather high and in some cases adorned with carved leaves or flutings, supported the columns, which in the Hall of Xerxes were over 66 feet high and 6 feet in diameter. The architraves have perished, but the rock-cut tomb of Darius at Naksh-i-Roustam reproduces in its façade a palace-front, showing a banded architrave with dentils--an obvious imitation of the ends of wooden rafters on a lintel built up of several beams.

These features of the architrave, as well as the fine flutings and moulded bases of the columns, are found in Ionic architecture, and in part, at least, in Lycian tombs. As all these examples date from nearly the same period, the origin of these forms and their mutual relations have not been fully determined. The Persian capitals, however, are unique, and so far as known, without direct prototypes or derivatives. Their constituent elements may have been borrowed from various sources. One can hardly help seeing the Egyptian palm-capital in the lower member of the compound type (Fig. 21).

The doors and windows had banded architraves or trims and cavetto cornices very Egyptian in character. The portals were flanked, as in Assyria, by winged monsters; but these were built up in several courses of stone, not carved from single blocks like their prototypes. Plaster or, as at Susa, enamelled bricks, replaced as a wall-finish the Assyrian alabaster wainscot. These bricks, splendid in color, and moulded into relief pictures covering large surfaces, are the oldest examples of the skill of the Persians in a branch of ceramic art in which they have always excelled down to our own day.

+LYCIAN ARCHITECTURE.+ The architecture of those Asiatic peoples which served as intermediaries between the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Assyria on the one hand and of the Greeks on the other, need occupy us only a moment in passing. None of them developed a complete and independent style or produced monuments of the first rank. Those chiefly concerned in the transmission of ideas were the Cypriotes, Phœnicians, and Lycians. The part played by other Asiatic nations is too slight to be considered here. From Cyprus the Greeks could have learned little beyond a few elementary notions regarding sculpture and pottery, although it is possible that the volute-form in Ionic architecture was originally derived from patterns on Cypriote pottery and from certain Cypriote steles, where it appears as a modified lotus motive. The Phœnicians were the world’s traders from a very early age down to the Persian conquest. They not only distributed through the Mediterranean lands the manufactures of Egypt and Assyria, but also counterfeited them and adopted their forms in decorating their own wares. But they have bequeathed us not a single architectural ruin of importance, either of temples or palaces, nor are the few tombs still extant of sufficient artistic interest to deserve even brief mention in a work of this scope.

In Lycia, however, there arose a system of tomb-design which came near creating a new architectural style, and which doubtless influenced both Persia and the Ionian colonies. The tombs were mostly cut in the rock, though a few are free-standing monolithic monuments, resembling sarcophagi or small shrines mounted on a high base or pedestal.

In all of these tombs we recognize a manifest copying in stone of framed wooden structures. The walls are panelled, or imitate open structures framed of squared timbers. The roofs are often gabled, sometimes in the form of a pointed arch; they generally show a banded architrave, dentils, and a raking cornice, or else an imitation of broadly projecting eaves with small round rafters. There are several with porches of Ionic columns; of these, some are of late date and evidently copied from Asiatic Greek models. Others, and notably one at Telmissus, seem to be examples of a primitive Ionic, and may indeed have been early steps in the development of that splendid style which the Ionic Greeks, both in Asia Minor and in Attica, carried to such perfection.

+JEWISH ARCHITECTURE.+ The Hebrews borrowed from the art of every people with whom they had relations, so that we encounter in the few extant remains of their architecture Egyptian, Assyrian, Phœnician, Greek, Roman, and Syro-Byzantine features, but nothing like an independent national style. Among the most interesting of these remains are tombs of various periods, principally occurring in the valleys near Jerusalem, and erroneously ascribed by popular tradition to the judges, prophets, and kings of Israel. Some of them are structural, some cut in the rock; the former (tomb of Absalom, of Zechariah) decorated with Doric and Ionic engaged orders, were once supposed to be primitive types of these orders and of great antiquity. They are now recognized to be debased imitations of late Greek work of the third or second century B.C. They have Egyptian cavetto cornices and pyramidal roofs, like many Asiatic tombs. The openings of the rock-cut tombs have frames or pediments carved with rich surface ornament showing a similar mixture of types--Roman triglyphs and garlands, Syrian-Greek acanthus leaves, conventional foliage of Byzantine character, and naturalistic carvings of grapes and local plant-life. The carved arches of two of the ancient city gates (one the so-called Golden Gate) in Jerusalem display rich acanthus foliage somewhat like that of the tombs, but more vigorous and artistic. If of the time of Herod or even of Constantine, as claimed by some, they would indicate that Greek artists in Syria created the prototypes of Byzantine ornament. They are more probably, however, Byzantine restorations of the 6th century A.D.

The one great achievement of Jewish architecture was the national +Temple of Jehovah+, represented by three successive edifices on Mount Moriah, the site of the present so-called “Mosque of Omar.” The first, built by Solomon (1012 B.C.) appears from the Biblical description[6] to have combined Egyptian conceptions (successive courts, lofty entrance-pylons, the Sanctuary and the sekos or “Holy of Holies”) with Phœnician and Assyrian details and workmanship (cedar woodwork, empaistic decoration or overlaying with _repoussé_ metal work, the isolated brazen columns Jachin and Boaz). The whole stood on a mighty platform built up with stupendous masonry and vaulted chambers from the valley surrounding the rock on three sides. This precinct was nearly doubled in size by Herod (18 B.C.) who extended it southward by a terrace-wall of still more colossal masonry. Some of the stones are twenty-two feet long; one reaches the prodigious length of forty feet. The “Wall of Lamentations” is a part of this terrace, upon which stood the Temple on a raised platform. As rebuilt by Herod, the Temple reproduced in part the antique design, and retained the porch of Solomon along the east side; but the whole was superbly reconstructed in white marble with abundance of gilding. Defended by the Castle of Antonia on the northwest, and embellished with a new and imposing triple colonnade on the south, the whole edifice, a conglomerate of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Roman conceptions and forms, was one of the most singular and yet magnificent creations of ancient art.

[Footnote 6: 1 Kings vi.-vii.; 2 Chronicles iii.-iv.]

The temple of Zerubbabel (515 B.C.), intermediate between those above described, was probably less a re-edification of the first, than a new design. While based on the scheme of the first temple, it appears to have followed more closely the pattern described in the vision of Ezekiel (chapters xl.-xlii.). It was far inferior to its predecessor in splendor and costliness. No vestiges of it remain.

+MONUMENTS.+ PERSIAN: at Murghab, the tomb of Cyrus, known as Gabré-Madré-Soleiman--a gabled structure on a seven-stepped pyramidal basement (525 B.C.). At Persepolis the palace of Darius (521 B.C.); the Propylæa of Xerxes, his palace and his harem (?) or throne-hall (480 B.C.). These splendid structures, several of them of vast size, resplendent with color and majestic with their singular and colossal columns, must have formed one of the most imposing architectural groups in the world. At various points, tower-like tombs, supposed erroneously by Fergusson to have been fire altars. At Naksh-i-Roustam, the tomb of Darius, cut in the rock. Other tombs near by at Persepolis proper and at Pasargadæ. At the latter place remains of the palace of Cyrus. At Susa the palace of Xerxes and Artaxerxes (480-405 B.C.).

There are no remains of private houses or temples.

LYCIAN: the principal Lycian monuments are found in Myra, Antiphellus, and Telmissus. Some of the monolithic tombs have been removed to the British and other European museums.

JEWISH: the temples have been mentioned above. The palace of Solomon. The rock-cut monolithic tomb of Siloam. So-called tombs of Absalom and Zechariah, structural; probably of Herod’s time or later. Rock-cut Tombs of the Kings; of the Prophets, etc. City gates (Herodian or early Christian period).