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Updated: June 27, 2025
We may conclude from this picture, and from the general tenor of the classical notices, that the Arsacidae revived and maintained very much such a Court as that of the old Achaemenian princes, falling probably somewhat below their model in politeness and refinement, but equalling it in luxury, in extravagant expenditure, and in display.
Under the great Ormazd were a number of subordinate deities, the principal of whom were Mithra and Serosh, Mithra, the Sun-God, had been from a very early date an object of adoration in Persia, only second to Ormazd. The Achaemenian kings joined him occasionally with Ormazd in their invocations. In processions his chariot, drawn by milk-white horses, followed closely on that of Ormazd.
The architecture of the royal palace will be discussed in another chapter; but a few words may be said in this place with respect to its furniture and general appearance. The pillared courts and halls of the vast edifices which the Achaemenian monarchs raised at Susa and Persepolis would have had a somewhat bare and cold aspect, if it had not been for their internal fittings.
But it was a well-organized state, with a culture of its own; and enough military power to stand throughout its existence the serious rival of Rome. Its arts and crafts became famous, thanks largely to Mani; in architecture it revived the Achaemenian tradition, with modifications of its own; and passed the result on to the Arabs when they rose, to be the basis of the Saracenic Style.
The conferring of an office of such importance on the priest of an alien religion is the earliest indication which we have of a diminution of zeal for their ancestral creed on the part of the Achaemenian kings, and the earliest historical proof of the existence of Magism beyond the limits of Media.
Their art, though remarkable, considering the almost entire disappearance of art from Western Asia under the Parthians, is, compared with that of Achaemenian times, rude and grotesque.
Only the trouble is that the seed of something native always remains in regions so overflowed with an alien culture; and Alexander dreamed never of what might lie quiescent, resurrectable in time, in the mountains of Persis, the Achaemenian land, out of the path of the eastward march of his phalanxes; or indeed, in those wide deserts southward, parched Araby, that none but a fool and such was not Alexander would trouble to invade or think of conquering: something that should in its time reassert West Asia over all Hellenedom, in Macedonia itself, and West beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the limits of the world.
Persepolis, indeed, was gone, and only its vast and pillared ruins remained in the wilderness; but near by the town of Istakhr had grown up, to be what Persepolis had been in the old Achaemenian days, the heart and center of Fars, which is spiritually, the heart and center of all Iran.
They convey an idea of decline below the standard reached by the Persians of the Achaemenian times, which was itself a decline from the earlier art of the Assyrians. Had they been the efforts of a race devoid of models, they might fairly have been regarded as not altogether without promise.
Under the mild yoke of the Achaemenian princes had been held together for two centuries, not only all the nations of Western Asia, from the Indian and Thibetan deserts to the AEgean and the Mediterranean, but a great part of Africa also, that is to say, Egypt, north-eastern Libya, and the Greek settlements of Cyrene and Barca.
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