isappearance of such a vast mass of building as Mr. Fergusson's
hypothesis supposes. To account for this, Mr. Fergusson is obliged to
lay it down, that in this magnificent structure, with its solid
stone staircase, its massive pavement of the same material, and its
seventy-two stone pillars, each sixty-four feet high, the walls were of
mud. Can we believe in this incongruity? Can we imagine that a prince,
who possessed an unbounded command of human labor, and an inexhaustible
supply of stone in the rocky mountains close at hand, would have had
recourse to the meanest of materials for the walls of an edifice which
he evidently intended to eclipse all others upon the platform. And,
especially, can we suppose this, when the very same prince used solid
blocks of stone, in the walls of the very inferior edifice which he
constructed in this same locality? Mr. Fergusson, in defence of
his hypothesis, alleges the frequent combination of meanness with
magnificence in the East, and softens down the meanness in the present
case by clothing his mud walls with enamelled tiles, and painting them
with all the colors of the rainbow. But here again the hypothesis is
wholly unsupported by fact. Neither at Persepolis, nor at Pasargadae,
nor at any other ancient Persian site, has a single fragment of an
enamelled tile or brick been discovered. In Babylonia and Assyria, where
the employment of such an ornamentation was common, the traces of it
which remain are abundant. Must not the entire absence of such traces
from all exclusively Persian ruins be held to indicate that this mode of
adorning edifices was not adopted in Persia?

If then we resign the notion of this remarkable building having been a
walled structure, we must suppose that it was a summer throne-room,
open to all the winds of heaven, except so far as it was protected by
curtains. For the use of these by the Persians in pillared edifices, we
have important historical authority in the statement already quoted from
the Book of Esther. The Persian palace, to which that passage directly
refers, contained a structure almost the exact counterpart of this
at Persepolis; and it is probable that at both places the interstices
between the outer pillars of, at any rate, the great central colonnade,
were filled with "hangings of white and green and blue, fastened with
cords of white and purple to silver rings," which were attached to the
"pillars of marble;" and that by these means an undue