Persian Architecture

Architecture in Persia has a continuous history of more than 6,000 years, from at least 5000 B.C. to the present, with characteristic examples distributed over a vast area from Syria to North India and the borders of China, from the Caucasus to Zanzibar. Persian buildnings vary from peasant huts, tea houses and garden pavilions to some of the most beautiful and majestic structures the world has ever seen.

 In meaning and purpose, monumental Persian architecture was primarily religious at the beginning, magical and invocational in character by which man was brought into communication and participation with the powers of Heaven.

Available building materials dictated major forms. Clays, readily available at various places, encouraged the development of the primitive pise  molded mud, compressed as solidly as possible and allowed to dry. The abundance of heavy plastic earth, in conjunction with a tenacious gypsum mortar, also facilitated the development of brick. Brick construction lacks the sharp contours, the effects of hardness and waight normal to stone masonry, but on the other hand it permits large, well-defined masses whose broad plain surfaces invite ornamentation that would be inappropriate or even impossible on stone.

For more than 3,000 years, certain design elements of Persian architecture persisted. The most striking were a marked feeling for scale and a discerning use of simple and massive forms, a rather amazing consistency of decorative preferences, the high-arched portalset within a recess, columns with bracketcapitals, and recurrent types of plan and elevation. Some of the earliest styles still survive.

The columned porch, or talar, revealed in the rock-cut tombs near Persepolis; the dome on four arches; the vast ovoid arch of Ctesiphon may still recur in a twentieth century farm building; the four-ivan court, anticipated in Partian times; earthly towers reaching up toward the sky to mingle with the divine towers of Heaven; the interior court and pool, the angled entrance and extensive decoration are ancient but still common features.

Most structures are simple in mass and contour conveying, from a distance, a spirit  of repose and assurance combined with  the controlled excitement that is provided by vast areas of richly colored, intricate ornament which invite leisurely exploration. This combinatin of stimulation and repose is characteristic of the great friezes at Persepolis and the encrustation of superb faience, as at Mashhad, infinitely fascinating and absorbing in detail. A sumptuous and intensely developed surface ornament was an essential, hapily renewed with fresh invention in every period.

In addition to the influence of climate, available material, religious purpose and peripheral cultures, the patron also played a decisive role in the development of architecture. Great monuments were regarded as both the prerogative and duty of the ruler.
Darius and Xerxes, Chosroes II, Ghazan Khan, Timur, Mahmud of Ghazna, Shah Abbas, all comitted the nation´s resources as well as their own talents to building. Their great buildnings were personal monuments, demonstrations of power, personality, rivalries, taste and status.

The name Iran, "Land of the Aryans", derives from the tribes which settled on the Iranian plateau, the site of early highland settlements which date back some 10,000 years. The earliest known populations of this prehistoric Persia were distributed in widely scattered small villages. Relations with the more rapidly developing Mesopotamian plain, though warlike, gradually became more and more fruitful.

The religious motives so vital to architecture may have originated on the plateau, then been transmitted to the lowlands where they matured and subsequently returnedto the Iranians of the plateau. Out of these processes, content developed and maturity evolved.

Farming hamlets small houses with stone in the foundations, walls, and beaten floors dating from 8000-6000 B.C., have been disclosed by expeditions of the university of chicago directed by Professor Braidwood. Although these humble structures are hardly architecture, they were its necessary predecessors.

The earliest known phases of building in Iran are, for the most part, in the western valleys. Early neolithic communities at Ali Kosh, in the Deh Luran valley, are remains of large houses on a level datable circa 6200-5800 B.C. The rooms were quite spacious (10 * 16 feet), built of handmade bricks of local mud cut into approximate rectangles and sun-dried.

The Persian Empire was established by 560 B.C., when two powerful Aryan states, Media and Persia, were confederated by Cyrus the Great, the first Achaemenid. Because of two extraordinary men, Cyrus, and later Darius I, the whole of Western Asia was organized into the worlds first great empire-which lasted for two hundred and thirty years. From the nile to the Oxus, from the Aegean to the Ganges, a new epoch was initiated, an unaccustomed stability was assured; good government was imposed and a network of efficient communications encouraged commerce and produced immense wealth.

The Achaemenid Royal Road from Susa to Sardis covered over 1,600 miles and its one hundred and eleven stations for caravans enabled  transportation of goods throughout the empire in less than ninety days; dispatches covered the route in a mere weeks. The routs from Susa to Persepolis and from Susa to Ecbatana were even paved! All an anticipation of the Roman road. 

When Alexander left Persepolis in ruins, the spirit of Persian art was by no means totally extinguished. Under the successors of Alexander, Persia's design tradition became temporarily engulfed by Greek importations. After the death of Alexander in 323 B.C., Seleucus , about 312 B.C., took up the reins of the empire. The only Macedonian who had retained his Persian wife, in a limited way he individualized Alexander's vision of a combined Greek and Persian civilization. Hellenic design became dominant but never completely absorbed. Cities were laid out according to geometric Greek plans, temples were built on Greek models and characteristic elements of Greek design were used for ornament. However, acceptance of strongly Hellenic forms seems to have occurred only in areas with concentration of Greek and Macedonian personnel.

Although the ruins of some of these cities have been identified and partly studied, few architectural monuments remain to testify that Seleucid splendour or imagination ever existed. The meagre ruins visible today at Kangavar, though to have been constructed about 200 B.C., show a temple that was quite Greek in character. Only its enormous dimensions, about 66 feet on a side, and its megalithic foundations which echo Achaemenid  stone platforms, constitute Persian elements. So little remains of the Seleucid temple at Khurra that it can scarcely be called monument.    

Dr. Popes tightly concise introduction to Persian architecture is of epic scale… of concentrated authority, clarity and appeal. Attractively produced, richly illustrated (several plates in good colour) and most attractively priced, it impressively runs- yet without breathlessness-from the Choga Zambil ziggurat to the elegant nineteenth-century palaces of Shiraz, managing as it runs to keep touching on Persian culture so that the buildings are always seen in distinct context.

Sara Parsa, Stockholms Iranska Studenter (SIS)