Ancient Near Eastern Art: The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v ...

9
9), symbols of Ishtar, the great Mesopotamian
goddess of love and war (see fig.
27), are from the walls of the processional
road leading to the Bit Akitu,
or house of the New Year's Festival
(see p. 23).
The Babylonian taste for molded and
glazed bricks spread to Iran, and in
the Achaemenid period (550-331 B.C.)
the walls of the palaces at Susa had
brightly colored glazed surfaces. The
most familiar Achaemenid architecture,
however, is at the site of Persepolis, in
southwestern Iran. Many of the stone
sculptures decorating the entrance gates,
stairs, and walls of the royal buildings still
stand, but the mud bricks that formed the
walls of these buildings have long since
crumbled away. Some of the halls at
Persepolis had huge stone columns over
sixty feet high. On the tops of these
columns and the capitals surmounting
them, impost blocks held the wooden
ceiling beams. These blocks were carved
to represent the foreparts of various
animals: griffins, bulls, and human-headed
bulls. The head of a bull (fig. 6) in the
Museum's collection is part of one of
these blocks and combines realistic and
decorative forms in the typical style of the
Achaemenid royal workshops. The animal's
ears and horns, now lost, were
made from separate pieces of stone.
Royal and cult buildings were constructed
with considerable care and
deliberation. The ground chosen for tem-
12