Persia, the mountain-fringed high plateau to the east
of Mesopotamia, takes its name from the people who occupied Babylon in
539
B.C. and became the heirs of what had been the
Assyrian empire. Today the country is called Iran, its older and more
suitable name, since the Persians, who put the area on the map of world
history, were latecomers who had arrived on the scene only a few
centuries before they began their epochal conquests. Inhabited
continuously since prehistoric times, Iran seems always to have been a
gateway for migratory tribes from the Asiatic steppes to the north as
well as from India to the east. The new arrivals would settle down for a
while, dominating or intermingling with the local population, until they
in turn were forced to move on—to
Mesopotamia, to Asia Minor, to southern Russia—by
the next wave of migrants. These movements form a shadowy area of
historical knowledge; all available information is vague and uncertain.
Since nomadic tribes leave no permanent monuments or written records, we
can trace their wanderings only by a careful study of the objects they
buried with their dead. Such objects, of wood, bone, or metal, represent
a distinct kind of portable art which we call the nomad's gear: weapons,
bridles for horses, buckles, fibulas and other articles of adornment,
cups, bowls, and the like. They have been found over a vast area, from
Siberia to Central Europe, from Iran to Scandinavia. They have in common
not only a jewellike concentration of ornamental design but also a
repertory of forms known as the "animal style." And one of the sources
of this animal style appears to be ancient Iran.
ANIMAL STYLE.
Its main feature, as the name suggests,
is the decorative use of animal motifs in a rather abstract and
imaginative manner. We find its earliest ancestors on the prehistoric
painted pottery of western Iran, such as the fine beaker in figure
108,
which shows an ibex (a wild mountain goat)
reduced to a few sweeping curves, so that the body of the animal becomes
a mere appendage of the huge horns. The racing hounds above the ibex are
little more than horizontal streaks, and on closer inspection the
striations below the rim turn out to be long-necked birds. In the
historic art of Sumer, this style soon gave way to an interest in the
organic unity of animal bodies (see figs.
93
and 94),
but in Iran it survived despite the powerful influence
of Mesopotamia.
Several thousand years later, in the ninth to seventh
centuries B.C., the style reappears in the small bronzes of the Luristan
region, nomad's gear of a particularly resourceful kind. The pole-top
ornament (fig. 109)
consists of a symmetrical pair of
rearing ibexes with vastly elongated necks and horns. Originally, we
suspect, they were pursued by a pair of lions, but the bodies of the
latter have been absorbed into those of the ibexes, whose necks have
been pulled out to dragonlike slenderness. By and for whom the Luristan
bronzes were produced remains something of a mystery. There can be
little doubt, however, that they are somehow linked with the
animal-style metalwork of the Asiatic steppes, such as the splendid
Scythian gold stag from southern Russia, which is only slightly later in
date (fig. 110). The
animal's body here shows far less arbitrary distortion, and the smoothly
curved sections divided by sharp ridges have no counterpart among
Luristan bronzes; yet the way the antlers have been elaborated into an
abstract openwork ornament betrays a similar feeling for form. In its
compact form we will recognize the descendant of the prehistoric
Bison from La Madeleine (fig.
36).
Whether or not this typically Scythian piece reflects
Central Asiatic sources independent of the Iranian tradition, the
Scythians surely learned a good deal from the bronze casters of Luristan
during their stay in Iran. They belonged to a group of nomadic
Indo-European tribes, including the Medes and the Persians, that began
to filter into the country soon after
1000 B.C. An
alliance of Medes and Scythians, it will be recalled, had crushed
Nineveh in 612 B.C. The
Persians at that time were vassals of the Medes, but only
60 years
later, under Cyrus the Great of the family of the Achaemenids, they
reversed this situation.
108.
Painted beaker, from Susa.
ń 5000-4000 B.C. Height 11
1/4"
(28.3 cm).
Musee du Louvre,
Paris
109.
Pole-top ornament, from Luristan. 9th—7th century B.C. Bronze, height
7
1/2"
(19 cm).
British Museum, London
110.
Stag, from Kostromskaya. Scythian. 7th-6th
century B.C.
Chased gold, height
ń 12" (30.5
cm). Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Achaemenid
After conquering Babylon in
539
B.C., Cyrus (c. 600-529
B.C.) assumed the title king of Babylon along with the
ambitions of the Assyrian rulers. The empire he founded continued to
expand under his successors. Egypt as well as Asia Minor fell to them,
and Greece escaped the same fate only by the narrowest of margins. At
its high tide, under Darius I (c. 550-486
B.C.) and Xerxes (519-465
B.C.), the Persian empire was far larger than its
Egyptian and Assyrian predecessors together. Moreover, this huge domain
endured for two centuries—it
was toppled by Alexander the Great (356-323
B.C.) in 331
B.C.—and
during most of its life it was ruled both efficiently and humanely. For
an obscure tribe of nomads to have achieved all this is little short of
miraculous. Within a single generation, the Persians not only mastered
the complex machinery of imperial administration but also evolved a
monumental art of remarkable originality to express the grandeur of
their rule. Despite their genius for adaptation, the Persians retained
their own religious beliefs drawn from the prophecies of Zoroaster. This
faith was based on the dualism of Good and Evil, embodied in Ahuramazda
(Light) and Ahriman (Darkness). Since the cult of Ahuramazda centered on
fire altars in the open air, the Persians had no religious architecture.
Their palaces, on the other hand, were huge and impressive structures.
PERSEPOLIS.
The most ambitious palace, at Persepolis,
was begun by Darius I in
518
B.C. Its general layout as shown in figure 111 - a great
number of rooms, halls, and courts assembled on a raised platform—recalls
the royal residences of Assyria (see fig.
102).
Assyrian traditions are the strongest single
element throughout. Yet they do not determine the character of the
building, for they have been combined with influences from every corner
of the empire in such a way that the result is a new, uniquely Persian
style. Thus at Persepolis columns are used on a grand scale. The
Audience Hall of Darius and Xerxes, a room 250
feet square, had a wooden ceiling supported by
36 columns
40 feet tall, a few of which are
still standing (fig. 112).
111. (right) Plan of the Palace of Darius and
Xerxes, Persepolis.
518 — 460
B.C. Solid triangles show the processional route taken
by Persian and Mede notables; open triangles indicate
the way taken by heads of delegations and their suites.
112.
Audience Hall of Darius and Xerxes, Persepolis, Iran,
ń 500
B.C.
Such a massing of columns suggests Egyptian architecture
(compare fig. 76),
and Egyptian influence does indeed
appear in the ornamental detail of the bases and capitals, but the
slender, fluted shaft of the Persepolis columns is derived from the
Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor, who are known to have furnished artists to
the Persian court. Entirely without precedent in earlier architecture is
the strange "cradle" for the beams of the ceiling, composed of the front
parts of two bulls or similar creatures, that crowns the Persepolis
columns (fig. 113). While
the animals themselves are of Assyrian origin, the way they are combined
suggests nothing so much as an enormously enlarged version of the
pole-top ornaments of Luristan. This seems to be the only instance of
Persian architects drawing upon their native artistic heritage of
nomad's gear (fig.
109).
113.
Bull
capital, from Persepolis. ń
500 B.C. Musee du Louvre,
Paris
The double stairway leading up to the Audience Hall is
decorated with long rows of solemnly marching figures in low relief
(fig. 112).
Their repetitive, ceremonial character
emphasizes a subservience to the architectural setting that is typical
of all Persian sculpture. We find it even in scenes of special
importance, such as Darius and Xerxes Giving Audience (fig.
114).
Here the expressive energy and narrative skill of
Assyrian relief have been deliberately rejected.
114.
Darius and Xerxes Giving Audience,
ń 490 B.C. Limestone, height 8'4"
(2.5 m). Archaeological Museum, Teheran
PERSIAN STYLE.
The style of these Persian carvings
seems at first glance to be only a softer and more refined echo of the
Mesopotamian tradition. Even so, we discover that the
Assyrian-Babylonian heritage has been enriched in one important respect.
There is no precedent in Near Eastern sculpture for the layers of
overlapping garments, for the play of finely pleated folds such as we
see in the Darius and Xerxes relief. Another surprising effect is the
way the arms and shoulders of these figures press through the fabric of
the draperies. These innovations stem from the Ionian Greeks, who had
created them in the course of the sixth century B.C.
Persian art under the Achaemenids, then, is a
remarkable synthesis of many diverse elements. Yet it lacked a capacity
for growth. The style formulated under Darius I about
500
B.C. continued without significant change until the end
of the empire. The main reason for this failure, it seems, was the
Persians' preoccupation with decorative effects regardless of scale, a
carry-over from their nomadic past that they never discarded. There is
no essential difference between the bull capital (fig.
113) and the fine goldsmith's
work (fig. 115), textiles,
and other portable art of Achaemenid Persia. The latter tradition,
unlike that of monumental architecture and sculpture, somehow managed to
survive the more than 500
years during which the Persian empire was
under Greek and Roman domination, so that it could flower once more when
Persia regained its independence and seized Mesopotamia from the Romans.
115. Gold
rhyton. Achaemenid. 5th—3rd
century B.C.
Archaeological Museum, Teheran
|
