Materials. 49 were edifices admitting of multitudinous pieces skilfully and care- fully adjusted (Fig. 8). The royal constructions of Persia required, therefore, timber in considerable quantity, and of a calibre to furnish large beams of sufficient reach and resisting power. Now, the Iranic plateau, at the present day, is the region most destitute of trees in the habitable world ; none are seen except in orchards where the hand of man has succeeded in bringing subterraneous waters to the land. It must have been the same in antiquity. Persia is not, like Asia Minor and Greece, a country made bare by ill-judged tillage, or conflagrations, or die gnawing tooth of animals, by which the forest trees nature had taken centuries to grow have been destroyed, but a country condemn^ by the a>nfiguration and composition of its soil to perpetual denudation from the first day of its existence. Whither, then, did they go for the wood that is so largely introduced in the complicated work M. Chipiex has undertaken to restore? True^ palms grow plentifully in the plain of Susiana and the lower grades of the plateau, but the wood they yield is mediocre in the extreme. On the other hand, remains of oak forests, few and far between, enough are found in the Bakhtiyari mountains, intervening between Persia, Susiana, and Elam ; in ancient times, however, they may have been more thickly studded, and the trees of greater size.* Cypress groves and vralnut trees are seen within the garden walls of Shiraz and about the villages of Fars, and certain data seem to indicate that formerly they were much more common in this region.* The
- No traveller has more thoroughly explored the Bakhtiyari district than Sir Henry
Layard, who remained there nearly a whole year. His account of the places he visited is interpeised with the foUoving phrases : *' thickly wooded with oaks," " wooded by magnifioent trees" {Eurfy Aioetitttns in Pem^ 2 vols., Svoj 1887, vol. i. pp. 247, 349, 414).
- In the sequel of this work we shall have more than one o( ( asion to refer to the
diminutive plain to which the name of Sarvistan, " cypress plantation, grove," has been allied j at the present day, however, no such tree grows there. The ftct of its being the only tree figured in the bas-reliefs at Persepolis leads to the inference Fig. 8.— Detail of uillar slill siaadtDg in palace Na 4, Pier> aepolis. Flani>im and Costs, Any mobmr, Plate CXVIU. Digitized by Google
