The Road to Oxiana (23 page)

The carvings on the cliff at Naksh-i-Rustam range over twenty centuries, from Elamite to Achemenian to Sasanian. Below them stand two fire-altars of uncertain date and an Achemenian tomb-house. Only the last is beautiful. The rest are negative art or repellent. But while the mountains last, the rock-maniacs who commanded these things must be remembered—and they knew it. They were indifferent to the
gratitude
of posterity. No perishable aestheticism or legal benevolence for them! All they ask is attention, and they get it, like a child or Hitler, by brute insistence. In this one sentence of gigantic ideographs, they have recorded a crucial moment in the history of human ideas, when the divine right of kings emerged from pre-history to the modern world.

The accent is struck by the four tombs of the Achemenid kings, regular landmarks hacked out of the cliff in the form of crosses. Each is carved with a tedious uniformity of low reliefs. These begin at the top with the usual pact between god and king—the god at this period being a human scarab—continue with a couple of couches in the Tutankhamen style, one above the other, which enclose lines of tributaries, and then expand into the arms of the cross with a false façade of pillars in half-round supporting bull's-head capitals. The face of the rock between the pillars is covered with cuneiform writing. With the help of a goat-hair rope let down by two men who were living in it, I climbed up to one tomb, the second from the west it was, as the cliff faces south. The inside was arranged in three niches, each divided into three bins; one or two of the latter had conical lids which have been prized open. The whole chamber must have been sealed by a stone
door revolving on stone pins at the top and bottom, whose sockets are still visible.

The panels at Naksh-i-Rustam, below the tombs, have been often described and identified. The cliff faces south. From east to west I noted the following, without reference to their historical meaning:

Between the angle of the cliff and the second tomb
—

1. A blank ready for carving but bearing only a small modern inscription.

2. A Sasanian group. The king, wearing muslin cowboy trousers, square-toed shoes fluttering long ribbons, and a hair-balloon, confronts an allegorical figure whose municipal crown, piled with sausage curls, might have been designed by Bernard Partridge. This creature, whose sex is disputed, upholds the ring denoting a pact between the king and itself. Between them stands a child, and behind the king a man in a Phrygian cap. The whole extends below the existing ground level which has been excavated to show it.

Below the second tomb
—

3. A Sasanian king in a hair-balloon tilting with an enemy. This is much damaged.

4. Beneath the above, the heads and shoulders of two other warriors tilting. Here the ground has not been excavated and most of the relief is hidden.

Between the second and third tombs
—

5. A composition three times life-size of Shapur on horseback receiving homage from the kneeling Emperor Valerian. The horse has borrowed a Roman pose, but has no strength. Like all Sasanian reliefs it is unmuscular: a stuffed dummy. One of the heads on the east side has an Achemenian look. Is it possible there was an earlier relief here, which the Sasanids destroyed to make way for their own advertisements?

Below the fourth tomb
—

6. A Sasanian king tilting with a losing enemy. His hair-balloon is smaller than the others, lemon-shaped, and attached to the head by a stalk. This carving has more spirit. Its debt to Rome is less and it approaches those equestrian figures on silver plates which display the real genius of the period.

Beyond the fourth tomb
—

7. A Sasanian king and his court in a pulpit or gallery. This curious composition is carved on the front of a three-sided bulge in the rock. The king stands in the middle of the group, where a gap in the balustrade allows his full length to be seen. Three half-length figures attend him on either side, and two more on the west facet of the bulge. These figures have an Achemenian look too, though the king's head is typically Sasanian. Again I wonder if there was an Achemenian relief here before, or if this look is the result of conscious antiquarianism.

8. Whatever the Achemenians did on this particular surface, the Sasanians were preceded by somebody, who seems to have lived about the middle of the second millennium
B.C.,
and may therefore be called Elamite. On the east side of the bulge can be seen a primitive, bird-like figure in very flat relief, whose angular outline reminds one of a Mexican hieroglyph. On the west side, below the two half-length figures, appears a single head in the same style. Both heads are in profile, but have eyes in full, a convention familiar from Egypt.
¹

9. Almost touching the pulpit group on the west stand a couple of affronted horsemen, each leaning
forward to grasp the symbolic ring. Here, the Sasanian king wears his balloon on top of a Phrygian cap, while the god has a municipal crown. The horses trample on their riders' enemies and present a fine exhibition of Sasanian saddlery. An enormous tassel, suspended by cords from the saddle, dangles between the hind legs of each.

The cliff turns to the north after this relief, and is gradually absorbed in a gentler slope. The two fire-altars are round the corner. They are four feet six inches high, and could be mistaken, if painted brown, for a pair of neo-Greek wine-coolers.

The Achemenian tomb-house stands by itself, opposite the fourth tomb. It is known as the tomb of Zoroaster, a name long ridiculed by archaeologists until Herzfeld discovered that there might be some reason for it.

This is real architecture; or perhaps one should say, since its function has no relation to its form, that it represents a real architectural tradition of which we are otherwise ignorant. It is a copy of a house. Where was that house? In Persia? It gives no hint of that expensive, cross-bred sophistication about to blossom at Persepolis. If it stood in a Mediterranean country, it would be hailed as the original source of domestic architecture in quattrocento Italy and Georgian England. Unlike the Greek temple, which developed out of a wooden form concerned with the stress of weights, this tomb-house derives from a form of brick or mud conveying an idea of content; its beauty is in the spacing of ornament on a flat wall. It is surprising to find this principle, on which all good domestic building since the Renascence has depended, fully stated in Persia about the middle of the VIth century
B.C.
It is equally surprising to remember how little attention, from this point of view, visitors to Naksh-i-Rustam have so far given it.

The building stands about seventeen feet square, and twenty-seven high above the present ground-level; though originally, as revealed by an unenterprising trench dug round the north side only, it must have been some ten feet higher. The walls are four and a half feet thick, and are constructed of large white marble blocks as well fitted as those in the Golden Gate at Constantinople. Each angle is reinforced by shallow buttresses, between which, but not outside them, runs a miniature cornice. The flat roof is composed of two enormous monoliths laid side by side.

The east, south, and west sides are each adorned with three pairs of windows, framed in a darker stone flush with the marble, and containing blind panels; these panels are enclosed by secondary, inside frames along the sides and top only. The lower windows are taller than they are broad; the middle windows square; and the upper windows copies of the lower ones, but in miniature, and touching the cornice: an arrangement which recalls Vitruvius and Palladio. Vertically, the distances between the pairs are equal. But horizontally, the distance between each window is more than twice the distance between it and the inside of the corner buttresses. Apart from windows, the walls are decorated with a pattern of small shallow niches, oblong and upright, which cut across the joints of the stonework as if they were clamps—though clamps with the light and shade reversed, in the manner of a photographic negative.

The north side, facing the cliff, has no pairs of windows, but only a single low aperture more than halfway up the building, whose threshold, and the floor inside it, cut across the level of the middle side-windows. This entrance is surmounted by a horned architrave, on which sits a small blind window without any frame. One can climb up to it, as attempts have been made to cut through the masonry below into a supposed lower chamber.

In the afternoon I went to Persepolis, and gave my letter from the Governor of Fars to Dr. Mostafavi.

Herzfeld joined us. He was very entertaining as he showed me round the excavations, and let loose Bul-bul, his wild sow, who made off with a stone belonging to her enemy, a grumpy old airedale. The result was a grotesque pursuit through the ruins, in which the sow's trotters slithered about stairways and pavements like Charlie Chaplin's feet, to an orchestra of growls and grunts and roars from the Professor. Eventually we sat down to tea in the house Krefter has built for the diggers. I say house; it is a palace, reconstructed of wood on the site, and in the style, of its Achemenian predecessor, whose stone door and window frames are incorporated in it. The money was supplied by Mrs. Moore and the University of Chicago, and the outcome is a luxurious cross between the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. This is as it should be, for it will have to serve the purposes of both when the excavations are finished.

R. B.
: Perhaps you misunderstood my letter.

Herzfeld
: I perfectly understood it. You cannot photograph anything here at all. If the Persians saw you, they would make trouble.

R. B.
: I think you must be mistaken. The Governor of Fars said he wanted me to take pictures here.

Herzfeld
: It is inconceivable the difficulties I have had on this point. When I first came here, I sent my pictures to be developed in Shiraz. The photographer made copies of the plates and sold the prints as his own. Then that terrible fellow X——came when I was away and took 100 pictures of my discoveries. The first I knew of it was when they appeared in the newspapers as his discoveries. Now Mr. Myron Smith has been asking permission. He has influence with my supporters in America, and
in order to get rrrrid of him I have presented my whole collection of photographs to the University of Chicago. I have had to write as many as twelve letters on the subject of this man.

R. B.
: I quite see that if other people sell pictures of your discoveries, they are stealing money from the excavation fund. But listen to my point of view. I'm not an archaeologist. I've no concern with your discoveries. All I'm interested in here is the architectural forms, not because they are old, but because they are a part of architectural history. The doors for instance. Doors only exist in relation to the human figure; you can judge these doors and Renascence doors and Corbusier's doors all by the one same standard. To make that kind of comparison I simply want a few reference pictures of things people have been looking at for 2000 years and have already sketched and photographed hundreds of times. And I want to take these pictures myself, because I know exactly what details I want to illustrate. If you don't trust me to leave your discoveries alone, you can send someone round with me; that's reasonable, isn't it? You may think you have the legal right to prevent my taking any photographs at all. But you must admit it would be morally indefensible. It would be as if the Parthenon had suddenly become a private villa and the rest of the world been excluded from it.

Herzfeld
(
bridling
): Not at all. In Europe there have always been these rules. When I was a young man, making excavations, we were never allowed to photograph anything.

R. B.
: But that is no reason why you should follow a bad example now you are older.

Herzfeld
(
puffing furiously at his cigarette
): I think it is perfectly rrrright!

This attitude of German authoritarianism seemed unbecoming in a man about to be turned out of his own country by the Nazis. Fortunately, I was prevented from saying so by the entrance of Krefter, at which I got up to go.

“Where is your car?” asked Herzfeld more affably. “We have a garage at the back. I will tell them to bring your luggage in.”

“It's very kind of you, but I'm staying at the teahouse up the road.”

“That is not comfortable. Why don't you stay here?” They looked quite haggard when I refused, not at the loss of my company, but at my escaping the shackles of their hospitality.

“Well,” said Herzfeld cheerfully, “perhaps we shall see you tomorrow.”

“Yes, indeed,” I beamed. “Goodbye, and thank you for your kind offer. I only wish I could accept it.”

That was true. No one in his senses enjoys forsaking comfort and good company for a dung-heap.

Persepolis
,
March 2nd
,
midday
.—I delivered this letter early:

D
EAR
D
R
. H
ERZFELD
,

Since both the Governor of Fars and Dr Mostafavi have stated categorically that you have no right to prevent my photographing the portions of arches and columns which have always been above ground, the only means of stopping my photographing them are either

(1) to show me the wording of your concession proving that you have the right, or

(2) force.

Please choose your means.

While I was photographing, a small round figure twinkled across the platform. “I have never”, it said, “met with a way of acting as illoyal as yours”, pirouetted, and twinkled away again.

Illoyal to whom, I wondered.

It was a question of principle. I got my pictures, and did a service to travellers in calling Herzfeld's bluff. But it was a pity to lose his conversation.

There are still things to be said about Persepolis.