nt in the fine arts at home indicates returning
prosperity, and a degree of security unknown since the fall of the
Achaemenidae."--Fergusson, _History of Architecture_, vol. i. pp. 381-3,
3d edition.

When Persia under the Sassanian princes shook off the barbarous yoke
to which she had submitted for the space of almost five centuries, she
found architecture and the other fine arts at almost the lowest possible
ebb throughout the greater part of Western Asia. The ruins of the
Achaemenian edifices, which were still to be seen at Pasargadae,
Persopolis, and elsewhere, bore witness to the grandeur of idea, and
magnificence of construction, which had once formed part of the heritage
of the Persian nation; but the intervening period was one during which
the arts had well-nigh wholly disappeared from the Western Asiatic
world; and when the early sovereigns of the house of Sassan felt the
desire, common with powerful monarchs, to exhibit their greatness in
their buildings, they found themselves at the first without artists
to design, without artisans to construct, and almost without models to
copy. The Parthians, who had ruled over Persia for nearly four hundred
years,' had preferred country to city life, tents to buildings, and had
not themselves erected a single edifice of any pretension during the
entire period of their dominion. Nor had the nations subjected to their
sway, for the most part, exhibited any constructive genius, or been
successful in supplying the artistic deficiencies of their rulers. In
one place alone was there an exception to this general paralysis of the
artistic powers. At Hatra, in the middle Mesopotamian region, an Arab
dynasty, which held under the Parthian kings, had thought its dignity
to require that it should be lodged in a palace, and had resuscitated a
native architecture in Mesopotamia, after centuries of complete neglect.
When the Sassanians looked about for a foundation on which they might
work, and out of which they might form a style suitable to their needs
and worthy of their power and opulence, they found what they sought in
the Hatra edifice, which was within the limits of their kingdom, and at
no great distance from one of the cities where they held their Court.

The early palaces of the Sassanians have ceased to exist. Artaxerxes,
the son of Babek, Sapor the first, and their immediate successors,
undoubtedly erected residences for themselves exceeding in size and
richness the buildi