be sought not so
much in their fear of the earthquakes with which they are constantly
threatened as in their narrow-mindedness and lack of ambition; they saw
no reason why an edifice should outlast the generation for which it was
constructed.

Judging from the ruins of Persepolis, the Medes and Persians must have
attained to a high degree of civilization in the time of Cyrus, but we
have no authentic records concerning their civil architecture. Their art
is derived from the Babylonians and Assyrians, from whom they must have
largely borrowed their customs.

The Assyrian palaces consisted of three wholly distinct groups of
buildings, three divisions which we find exactly reproduced to-day in
the seigneurial and princely dwellings of Persia, India and Turkey.
First, there was the seraglio, or the palace properly so-called, which
comprised the reception-halls and the men's apartments, and which is
known now throughout the East under the name of _selamlik_; then came
the harem containing the private rooms where the master saw his wives
and children with their guards of eunuchs and their throngs of
attendants; and lastly, there was the _khan_, a cluster of dependent
structures including servants' quarters and out-buildings. In princely
palaces each of these divisions included several courts, and the whole
was disposed around a principal court, the court of honor. The entire
assemblage of edifices was nothing more than one vast ground-floor. "The
design followed in the arrangement of these composite dwellings," it has
been said, is almost naive in its simplicity: the plan is merely divided
into as many right parallelograms as there are services to be provided
for, and these rectangles are so disposed as to touch along one side or
at one of the angles, but they never interfere with or command one
another; they are contiguous or adjacent but always independent. Thus
each of the three divisions (seraglio, harem and khan) presents a
rectangular figure, and each borders one side of the principal court,
which is neutral ground,--the common centre around which all are
grouped. The same principle of arrangement is applied to the
subdivisions of the great quarters; the latter are composed of smaller
rectangles distributed about an uncovered space, on which each apartment
opens, with no direct communication between adjoining rooms through
partition-walls. In this way all the sections of an edifice were
clustered together and at the s