Vaulted Structures. i8i crenelations (Fig. 63). As was said before, the part they play over the hypogeum is of a purely ornamental character. They are carved here in the living rock, instead of in the upper course of the edifice, as at Persepolis, or made of bricks, as at Nineveh ; and served no other object than to present to the eye a mode of finishing the top which had obtained for centuries. Having now gone over all the instances that testify to the intellectual bias we have pointed out, will it appear rash to suppose that, long after the fall of the Achxmenidae, a prince, with no inconsklerable means at his disposal, took into his head not only to build himself a palace^ but tried to embellish and add to its importance and effect, in reproducing something of the arrangement and decoration of the structures of old ? Clumsy pretensions such as we find here, which aimed at clothing an edifice constructed of broken stone after the Persepolitan fashion, are of a piece both with the figured decorations carved in the flank of the rock, the bull-shaped brackets at Shapur, and the embattled edge of the Tagh ; they one and all harked back to the glorious past of Persia, and enabled their perpe- trators to claim a share in those reminiscences, and benefit from the halo that surrounded them. To give themselves the air of building in the same taste ns the Dariuses and Xerxeses, it only needed introducing in the fabric some such adjuncts as appear here, but they were inadequate to change its general character. The general principle of architecture which obtained at Feruz- Abad is opposed both to that of the royal architecture of the Achaemcnidae, which makes no use of the arch, and to that of Assyria, although in the latter occur several varieties of the barrel vault. No square chambers, to speak of, are met with at Calach and Nineveh ; and there is nothin<; to prove in those instances where their existence has been proclaimed that they were covered with a dome ; neither do wc see those enormous porches and wide tunnelled galleries extending through the whole depth of the edifice. The masons who built these two palaces were not the pupils and direct continuators of those who worked for the last Ninevite princes, as we should be obliged to admit if we accepted the date proposed by Dieulafoy ; their constructive art is at one and the same time much less advanced, more daring and ambitious. There are marked differences between their membering and the processes of their decoration and those manifested at Khor-
