Page:History of Art in Persia.djvu/114

The Column. lOI erected by the architects in the pay of the heirs of Cynis^ they seem to have adopted the plan, data, and style of the sumptuous buildings grouped about the famous platform. • At Persepolis, during the sway of the AchsemenidaCi there was no other style of architecture except that which they had made the fashion. Of this we have proofs at Susa and Hamadan. Stone in the former place was quarried from mountains three and four days' journey, yet it played precisely the same part as at Persepolis, where it is found on the spot. The Susian palaces signed by Darius and Artaxerxes Mnemon, are almost faithful reduplications of the palaces at Persepolis. At Hamadan have been exhumed fragments of fluted shafts and bases, the sole relics of ancient monuments to which they belonged. Now, these bases are identical with the bell- shaped examples of Persepolis and Susa>' and, no doubt, belonged to one of those hypostyle halls whose type we know from the ruins around Istakhr. The inscription of Artaxerxes Mnemon seen on one of them is almost an exact copy of that which was discovered at Susa. Besides the king's pedigree, it also contains the state- ment that "he has built the Apadana," a fragment of which building is now in the Tiflis Museum.^ Here we have the remains of the palace which the successors of Cyrus had built in their northern capital, on the models of the edifices of Persepolis, and they are certainly not those of the wooden palace, the chief characteristics of which are so graphically described by Polybius, than whom no one was more particular as to the authorities he consulted. The air at Hamadan, summer and winter, is shaip and ' Ker Portek, TVorafr, torn, ii p. 1x5; Moribr, A Seeond Journey tkrouf^ Persia, p. 268. Sir H. Rawlinsonpud several visits to Hamadan between 1835 and 1839. He descried five or six bases of the Persian classic type, one of which is figured after Moher in vol. ii. p. 266, of five Monarchies^ etc, by Frolessor RairiiiMoa. These interesting fragments escaped in sraie unacGomitabk way the notice of MM. Coste and Flandin ; the remains of shafts and bases published bjr them are much simpler and more primitive in character. ' I am indebted to M. James Darmesteter for a photograph and translation of part of the above inscription (Oppert, Le ^uple des Mcdes, No. 18), which, unlike that of Susa, makes no mention of a testmntion. Anaxoxes dechres himsdf the builder of the palace. A translation of the epigraph in question was read at the meeting of the Society of Biblical Arthrcolog)', May 5, 1885 ; but its author does not seem to have detected the difference to which Darmesteter has called attention. To know the rights of the case, a more complete copy of the text is required, portions of whidi are somewhat Uunred on tike blodt, owing to the letten being incised on a curved shape or torus. The translation referred to will be found a little further on.— Trs. L.i^u,^cci by Google