Beate Dignas & Engelbert Winter - Kaveh Farrokh

36 Enforced resettlement of prisoners 257
Fig. 18 The great hall of the palace in Bīˇsāpūr
(Ghirshman, R. (1962) Iran. Parthians and Sassanians: fig. 177.179)
(Photos: Paris, Museum Louvre, model by A. P. Hardy)
can be seen with regard to the throne room in the royal palace of Bīˇsāpūr
(fig. 18).
The altogether sixty-four recesses were decorated with Greek keypatterns,
leaf-scrolls and dentils, which give a Western ambience to the
room. The themes of the floor mosaics reveal that the Roman artists modelled
the room on the famous repertory of the mosaics of Antioch and
North Africa. 61 However, the models imported from the West were never
reproduced stereotypically but rather ‘adapted by local artists to Iranian
tastes and traditions’. 62
It is impossible to estimate how many Romans were resettled by ˇ Sāpūr
I but given that he conquered thirty-six cities in the year 260 the number
must have been large. Deportations were not uncommon in antiquity. 63
61 Ghirshman 1962: 140–1.
62 Ibid. 141; see also Shahbazi 1990: 594–5, who lists numerous examples illustrating the reciprocal
influence of Western and Eastern art; on Roman models for the design of the Sasanian rock reliefs
see Azarpay 1981–2; on the reception of Western motifs in Persian art see also Goldman 1989: 831–46.
63 Oded 1979; on a list of deportations in Iran ranging from Cyrus I (550–529 bc) to Xusrō II (ad
590–628) see Peeters 1924: 305–9; on methodological considerations see Olshausen 1997: 101–7; see
also Kulesza 1994: 221–50.