this same base, the main characteristic of which is a large torus, both in Assyria[1] and the rock-cut architecture of Asia Minor, Phrygia, and Paphlagonia.[2]
Long before the conquering hosts of Iran appeared on these tablelands, the peoples of the peninsula were in constant touch with the inhabitants of the Euphrates and Tigris basins, and the traces of these relations are very apparent in their art. We are justified, then, in considering the Samian and the Pasargadian bases as varieties of a unique type which may be called the "Asianic base," a type which, like the volute capital, passed to the Greeks through the channel of the nations of Anterior Asia. If the horizontal flutes of the torus are common to both, their profiles are very distinct. It is not only the torus which is channelled in the Samos base, but the scotia below it is seamed with very similar striæ. Nor is this all. At Pasargadæ the torus rests upon a square plinth; the Ionic base, on the other hand, is invariably made up of mouldings on a circular plan, except in a few monuments of the decadence. The difference is all-important. The Greek base, even in its most elementary form, exhibits a more complex and skilful arrangement than the Gabre specimen. Now, a complex disposition is not the forerunner of a simple one. The two types are distantly related, and can look back to a common progenitor, but the kinship is too far removed to admit of copy or direct imitation.
As we have before remarked, the true Persian base is the campaniform (Figs. 12, 24). Some have sought to identify it in Egypt;[3] but none of the Theban edifices, so much admired
- ↑ Hist of Art, tom. ii. p. 227, Figs. 87, 88.
- ↑ Ibid. tom. V. Figs. 98, 138, 140, 142, 149.
- ↑ Dieulafoy (L'Arr antique, ii, 86) may say what he pleases, and trot out Lepsius at every turn in support of bis argument, but he cannot make me see campaniform bases in the thin discs which everywhere appear in the four plates of Prisse d'Avennes, representing types of this very architecture, and which are not a whit more important than those of the stone columns. Dieulafoy refers us also to the temple of Mesaurat-es-Sofia, in Nubia, published by Lepsius (tom. ii. Plate CXXXIX.); but, in the opinion of Maspero, the building in question dates at most in the reign of Axoum, e.g. the fifth century of our era. It is, in fact, a Christian church, built upon the ruins of an Egyptian temple. In it there is but one column, whose base has a distant analogy to the campaniform; but the whole column is evidently comparatively modem, and bears unmistakable signs of Roman influence, whilst a little beyond, at the side, as far as may be judged from a picturesque point of view, are columns thoroughly Byzantine in style. Let us for an instant suppose, though impossible, that a Nubian temple did really harbour
