Anatoly Ivanov

Achaemenid empire. At the head of each group is a courtier, possibly a satrap – the governor of a province who was always chosen from one of the leading aristocratic families – in ceremonial Persian dress with a high tiara. The different nations are depicted in approximately the same order as that of the kingdoms composing the empire on official inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings.

When they arrived on the Iranian plateau, the Iranians did not have their own written language.

They used the cuneiform script of the Near East in order to set down the official manifestos of the Achaemenid rulers, and Aramaic writing and language in order to conduct their state and business affairs. Neither did these Iranians have their own representational art.

It is only in late Zoroastrian works that we find faint hints of anthropomorphic representation. In fact only a single Iranian goddess – the goddess Anahita – is depicted anthropomorphically. All the other deities of the ancient Iranian religion are represented abstractly, only through their “hypostases” or incarnations (chiefly as certain birds or beasts). The Yasna Haptanhaiti – one of the oldest parts of the Avesta, the ancient Iranian sacred text – mentions the worship of mythical creatures such as, for example, the sacred three-legged ass Khara and a few others, but the deities of the ancient Iranians were not pictorially represented.

This probably explains why, when the need arose to depict the Iranian gods, artists had to seek a suitable iconography amongst examples of ancient eastern art. These were foreign to them both as regards religious content

At Marlik and Ziwiye a native Iranian representational language was created on the basis of foreign representational languages; this was, in effect, a native Persian art which, by the Ziwiye stage, one can justifiably term Median.

ecialists in glazed tiles, sculptors and builders (Ionians, Lydians, Babylonians and Egyptians)

But the pictorial quotations are as chaotic as those at Ziwiye and the total sacrifice of the meaning of the Assyrian composition indicates that the original religious message was of no consideration. At any rate, we are faced here with the earliest example of imagery intended to convey a message adopted from kingdoms destroyed by the Achaemenids and used by them in order to glorify their own majesty and power.

When analysing Achaemenid monuments we should recall an Egyptian hypostyle hall, the image of the Egyptian winged sun-disc, the Egyptian crown of one of the fabulous creatures on a relief at Pasargadae, the obvious Ionic influence in the form of the columns, and especially the Lydian features in the layout of the palaces and the Urartian techniques of erecting buildings on enormous artificial platforms, as well as the already mentioned Assyrian and Elamite reliefs.

The paradox of Achaemenid art lies in the fact that all, or nearly all, the details of any particular image or any particular architectural construction can be traced back to prototypes of previous