A Letter From Persepolis
PERSEPOLIS is one of the great places of the earth; and for a chosen few it has been a place of pilgrimage, difficult of access but wonderful in the seeing, for three centuries. And even now it is a place to be seen by a far wider but still limited number of travelers. There is no doubt that some day, and that soon, when Persia has become quite ‘opened up,’ it will become as worldknown as Athens and Rome.
The ruins are built on a vast terrace of Cyclopean blocks of stone, set up against a rocky ridge, and looking east across a wide plain to the usual bordering mountains of a Persian view. The terrace alone is a marvelous work, several hundred feet high at its highest, and approached from the plain by a tremendous double stairway, wide enough for an army to climb, and graded in small, easy steps. At the top of this, one comes out on to the terrace, far larger in area than it looks from the plain, and covered all the way back to the mountains with tremendous ruins. At the top of the stairway is the gatehouse of Xerxes, a great stone entrance way of four pillars (two now standing), and, looking out over the plain, two enormous winged bulls with their heads gone, but still impressively guarding this only ancient entrance to the enclosure. For originally the whole area was enclosed with a high mudbrick wall built on top of the terrace all the way around. It was a fortified palace area. There are two more great winged creatures facing in toward the mountain, and these are human-headed demons — enormous, passive faces, expressionless, with their neat, symmetrically curled beards and hair and their stylized faces; they were made to stare blankly at the mountains for an eternity of time.
To the right is the Apodana, or audience hall of Darius and Xerxes, to me perhaps the most impressive of the buildings, and the one that has needed no excavation; has always been there and has been noted by the earliest travelers. It was a tremendous columned hall, perhaps open at the sides; and the thirteen columns of the original seventy or more alone show how awe-inspiring through sheer height this hall must have been. Slim, tapering columns they are, originally with lionhead and bull-head capitals, and all of them fluted. It is almost impossible to imagine a cedar roof high above, and stretching across, not thirteen columns, but seventy; and underneath this unnatural forest the Great King seated on his little throne, receiving his subjects and his vassals from all over the earth.
Still farther over and still to the front of the terrace are the royal palaces — Darius’s, the smallest and best preserved, and Xerxes’; and finally the foundations of the uncompleted palace of one of the Artaxerxes’. The heavy doorways and window frames alone remain, the rest being of mud brick and long since gone — but these stone gates and frames are set close together, and are massive, so that the outline of the palace can easily be seen. And inside each doorway there is a more than life-size bas-relief of the King walking through the doorway with his umbrella held over his head by a slave, just as he must have done many a time. Or he is shown fighting a lion; at grips with it, or sticking a dagger at rather close quarters into its stomach. There is a hunting tradition here as at Toq-iBostan; as in all Persian history, which has so many extraordinarily continuous threads. Probably the first palaces of the Medes were such halls of wooden columns, and certainly the first mosques in Persia after the Arab conquest were not domed buildings, but columned buildings — a forest of columns upholding a flat roof!
The palace of Xerxes is larger, and far more ruined, than that of Darius, but both are very similar, with their massive stone doorways — two thick side blocks, and a third across the top with a rather Egyptian flaring cornice to it — and the great figures sculptured on the two inside panels of each gateway. Behind the palaces, which are set. up on terraces of their own, and in a depression between them and the mountain, lies the Harem, of which only one wing has been reconstructed by the expedition, and finally, filling up the space between the Apodana and the mountain, is the very much ruined Hall of a Hundred Columns, another audience hall and the largest of the buildings on the terrace. But it is harder to reconstruct this in imagination — all the columns are fallen, fallen all over one another in the vast enclosed space in a hopeless tangle of broken fluted drums and masonry. The north and south doorways have within them the King seated on a throne, and underneath it rows of little figures with hands raised, supporting the throne: the subject nations, each depicted accurately in its own costume and facial type (where the Arabs have left any faces), including the unmistakable Negro from upper Egypt.
Between the Apodana and the Hall of a Hundred Columns is a sunken court, excavated a few years ago by the expedition, and here on the double staircases leading up to the Apodana are carved the best friezes, the most impressive sculpture. On one side, on the face of the stairway, there are rows of subject nations bringing tribute to the Great King at New Year’s, each group led by a Persian guard, and separated one from the other by a tree. The costumes, the facial types, the food and the clothes, and the sheep, camels, goats, chariots, weapons, that they bring are fascinating to study. And they march along in orderly rows, always in one direction, in a mounting crescendo, a continuously more and more hurried approach to something great, something omnipotent to which all things here lead. You follow along with them, slowly at first, then faster, until the last guard has passed, the last tribute bearer, and you feel that next must come the Great King, the focus of all this movement. But suddenly the procession is interrupted, not by the Great King, but by an inscription in three languages, one of those vaunting inscriptions of the Achæmenids: ‘I am the King of Kings, son of a King, King over many nations . . .’ So that not yet can you see the King — this is only his voice, his proclamation. The King of Kings is inside the great hall, under the columns, waiting for the nations of his earth to bring him the best of their lands.
The march is taken up again after the inscription by a long and orderly row of bearded, dignified spearmen, the famous Immortals, the great bodyguard of the King, each standing erect with his spear before him, looking ahead, indistinguishable from his fellows. With them come the officers, standing at ease, conversing as they wait their turn to enter the great hall, and above the Immortals servants carry the trappings of war of the King — his campstool, his horses, his chariot. And finally you walk up the wide staircase itself, and small, erect spearmen keep company with you, each placing a tiny foot on the step above you as you go higher and higher. One cannot enter the presence of the monarch of the world unguarded, unattended!
The top is nearly reached, the procession has been passed by — the tribute bearers with their varied costumes, the Immortals, the officers, standing and waiting. You alone have been allowed to pass. You alone are to enter the presence of the Monarch of Monarchs, with his royal son standing behind the chair and large incense burners sending streamers of hazy smoke up into the quiet depths of the great curtained hall, up to the brightly painted cedar roof far above; and below the slender columns the great King Xerxes, King of Kings, son of Darius, King of the Persians and the Medes and the other nations of the earth; Xerxes, the King who wasted his vast strength on the tiny land of Greece. The top of the steps has been reached, you turn to the left to enter the great hall — and there is a desolate grassy space, and broken pillars are tumbled in the grass, and alone against the sky some few battered columns stand precariously, and all around is a place of death, with only the dripping of the rain into a little pool collected under three broken, fluted column drums; and beyond, the white, staring entrances of the Great King’s palace, each surrounded by its heavy black border, like snakes’ eyes never closing.
Such are the sculptures, and such the processional climax. There are other stairways. There is another on a second side of the same court — a long row of notables and officers standing at ease all the way up the staircase, conversing, holding hands, gesturing, waiting again to enter the Queen’s palace. These are the most human, the most natural of the processions. And then there are two more staircases in a small court between the palace of Darius and that of Xerxes. Here servants bear food up the stairways into the palace; bread, pigskins of water just such as you see carried all over Persia to-day, goats and little lambs carried in the arms. The recently discovered little back stairway to the palace of Xerxes has the most perfectly preserved foodbearing procession — very small figures, neat and here brightly polished, the hard black stone smooth to the touch, and lustrous and perfect as the day it was finished. This was the way all the sculptures were originally. Here too, and on the other ‘food-bearing’ staircases, there are spearmen and guards on the outer wall, and always the same large, ferocious lion sinking his jaws greedily into the hind quarters of a stag at bay, in distress, with its head turned back over its shoulder, looking at the lion with terrified face.
The finest or at least best-preserved sculpture of all was uncovered a few months ago in the mud-brick structure set back toward the mountain, which they are now excavating. This section is tentatively called the ‘administration building,’ and on two sides of one of the largest chambers were set two great stone plaques of the King seated on his throne, with incense burner and courtiers in front of him, and soldiers, one with a magnificently carved sword scabbard, behind him. The figures are life-size or larger, and are perfect in every detail; and the hard black polish of the stone, preserved under the earth, is as fine as it ever was. These extraordinary finds at Persepolis leave too little to the imagination!
The friezes are beautifully precise, technically perfect work; but — and this seems to me to be true of all the bas-reliefs — they are not great sculpture, they are not really art. This came back to me when I saw, in the living room of the Harem, a superb fifthcentury marble torso of a weeping woman, found in the so-called ‘administration building’ only a few months ago. It is Greek, and the best Greek — lovely drapery over a living, a real, an individual body. One glance at it showed me right away what these Persepolis sculptures really were: architectural ornament — beautifully ex= ecuted, accurately conceived decorations, with little life and no individuality as sculpture. Practically every face, always in profile, is the same, and when they vary they run in distinct types. The same scenes will be repeated over and over again mechanically, the same in every detail. The costumes, the beards, the faces of the figures will be finished with consummate craftsmanship, but there is no life to any figure anywhere on the terrace.
The supple curve of the woman’s body underneath the drapery on that Greek fragment, strayed here somehow, suddenly unmasked the whole show; showed the stiffness, the stylization, the empty, uniform expressions on all these Persian faces of two thousand years ago. The same blank, carved face that stares eternally at the hills from the great winged bulls of the gateway is repeated a thousand times on every relief on the terrace. The clothes, the beards, the hair, even the shapes of the vases and the same thin, handsome mouths of the Persians of to-day, all are there, but the lives within died two thousand and more years ago — the souls were never there. Persepolis is indeed a place of death.