The Lost Treasures Persian Art. Vladimir Lukonin
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BCE), and bronze handles of whetstones, terminating in protomes of a goat with splendid horns or birds.
Of later date (8th-7th centuries BCE) are the bronze psalia – parts of horse harnesses fashioned entirely in the Assyrian style (similar to those depicted on the relief of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, for example), or showing Elamnite or local Lorestan deities, and psalia with depictions of beasts – moufflons, horses, unicorns (similar to those on Marlik metalwork), stags and even elks. Representations of some local deities, fabulous creatures, “demons”, and anthropomorphic figures combined with complicated zoomorphic images which appear not only on psalia but on heavy bronze pins, on the finials of standards and on weapons, etc., have no iconographic parallels beyond the bounds of Lorestan itself. The most characteristic standard finial takes the form of a hybrid image – an anthropomorphic deity ringed with fabulous animals and birds of prey (these are what were termed “idols”) – or a female deity with the heads of birds growing from her shoulders. No less typical are the large, disc-shaped or openwork heads of pins ornamented with floral motifs or representing a female deity surrounded by beasts, birds, fish, and plants. Sometimes these are in the form of plaques with a polymorphic deity combining feminine and masculine characteristics or the features of a youth and an old man.
Evidently, it will be a long time before we succeed in understanding this imagery, for in Lorestan only one local temple where such items might have survived has been excavated to date. This is the temple of Surkh Dum where exploratory excavations were carried out in the 1930s, but the material from these excavations has still not been published. However, those articles fashioned in the Assyrian or Elamite style were evidently made to order. The craftsmen of Lorestan who, as excavations show, had thousands of years of tradition and extensive experience in the field of metallurgy, manufactured weapons and parts of horse harnesses for various customers, among whom were kings, princes and chiefs of tribes of different ethnic origin.
Miniature: The Fall of Bahram Gor into the Ditch, from Amir Khusraw Dihlavi’s masterpiece, Chamse or The Collection of Five, c. 1370–1380. Gouache on paper, 8.7 × 12.8 cm. Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies. Documentary heritage submitted by Uzbekistan, Tashkent.
These were the craftsmen who manufactured psalia in the form of Iranian beasts – a stag with legs drawn in, an ibex, an elk; it was they who made bronze quivers with the same pictorial quotations seen in the Marlik age. But no unified representational language was created here out of such images; the articles were simply made in accordance with the customer’s taste. A native, and very complex, art coexisted here alongside the foreign articles. But the important fact about them is that they can be dated much more precisely than, say, objects from Marlik and Ziwiye, and here it turns out that the “Iranian animals” portrayed on them have a date – the 8th century BCE – demonstrably earlier than any item hitherto discovered in the Scythian animal style.
There are no prestigious objects from Lorestan exhibiting Iranian characteristics. This is understandable, for in the 9th-7th centuries BCE the Iranian tribes, which had by then already settled in the vicinity of Lorestan, had not yet evolved any sort of strong or stable unified state.
On turning to an analysis of the art forms developed in the Achaemenid empire, one of the world empires of antiquity, we should describe at least one architectural complex, such as Persepolis.
Persepolis, Parsa in Old Persian, is situated some 30 miles from Shiraz in the south of Iran. Its construction began c. 520 BCE and continued until c. 450 BCE. The city was erected on a high artificial platform reached by a wide stairway with 111 steps made of limestone blocks.
On the platform there is a unified architectural complex made up of two types of palace – the Tachara (an inhabited palace) and the Apadana (an audience hall). The best known of them is the Apadana of Darius and Xerxes – a square audience hall, its ceiling supported by 72 stone columns. The Apadana was raised 13 foot above the terrace and was reached by a wide stairway decorated with reliefs. On the left side are three tiers of identical soldiers of Elamite regiments with spears, bows and quivers, Persian guards with spears and shields, and Medes with swords, bows and spears. There are also warriors carrying the king’s throne, leading the royal horses and driving the royal chariots. On the right side the reliefs depict a procession of the nations which formed part of the Achaemenid empire. At the head of each group is a courtier, possibly a satrap – the governor of a province who was always chosen from one of the leading aristocratic families – in ceremonial Persian dress with a high tiara. The different nations are depicted in approximately the same order as that of the kingdoms composing the empire on official inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings.
Here are the Medes with their famous horses of Nisa, bearing gold vases, goblets and torques, Elamites with tame lionesses and gold daggers, Africans with okapi, Babylonians with bulls, Armenians with horses, vases and rhytons, Arabs with camels, and other peoples.
The stairway leading to another palace, the Tripylon, is decorated along the outside with a solemn procession of the royal guard, and along the inner side with a procession of servants carrying rams, vessels and wineskins. By the east door of the Apadana of Darius-Xerxes; close to the door Darius I, the king of kings of the Achaemenid state, is represented, seated on his throne, and behind him stands the heir to the throne, Xerxes. The hands of both of them are raised and stretched out in a gesture of worship towards the symbol of the royal deity, Khwarnah. At the north entrance to the throne room, the king of kings is depicted fighting a monster with the head, body and forelegs of a lion, the neck, wings and hindlegs of a bird and the tail of a scorpion. Identical monsters appear on several pieces from Ziwiye.
The Persepolis reliefs form a slow procession, a rhythmic, solemn and magnificent parade of hundreds of soldiers, courtiers, civil servants, priests and hundreds of representatives of subject nations, occasionally interrupted at specific points by the figure of the king of kings himself on a throne supported by these same representatives of subject nations, or by the struggle of the king of kings with a monster, or, lastly, by the scene of a lion attacking a bull – an ancient eastern religious symbol. The separate figures and scenes do not themselves form a sequence, rather the sequence is of groups or complexes of scenes (“the Apadana complex”, “the Tripylon complex”, etc.). Close examination of them gives rise to the impression that the king’s army was innumerable, that the whole world was subject to the king, that he himself was like a god and fought with the monsters of evil, as the god of light and goodness himself fought against them.
The laws governing the imagery are meticulously elaborated and carefully observed in such details as weapons, dress, headdress, masterful depiction of valuable vessels, ornaments and details of horse harness. Such articles of Achaemenid applied art as have survived are reproduced with absolute accuracy in the sculpted reliefs at Persepolis. We may restrict ourselves to a single example – the relief on the western doorpost of the Apadana shows Darius wearing a garment, the hem of which is decorated with an engraved procession of lions. A wool hem with the same figures of lions – identical down to the minutest detail – was found in one of the Pazyryk burial mounds in the Altai.
Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.
The “portraits” at Persepolis are extremely stylised but the subjects are distinguished by details of attire – crowns, weapons or bracelets, by their position in the scene depicted or by clearly delineated “ethnographic” features.
In the first Achaemenid capital, Pasargadae, which was built twenty-five years before Persepolis, only remains of reliefs decorating walls and entrances to the palaces have been found. Comparing these to the Persepolis reliefs, one can trace the rise of the “Achaemenid style” of sculpture and its evolution. Above all, at Pasargadae the prototype for these reliefs can be more clearly discerned, going back to the stone orthostats of Assyrian palaces.
Their style and imagery also derive from the Mesopotamian traditions of Assyria and Elam. Several of them have exact counterparts in Assyrian art, especially amongst the orthostats of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, where portrayals of fish-people and “demons” recur with great frequency. These images were probably seen by the Persians as guardians of the Assyrian rulers.
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