Architecture of the Sassanians.  Its Origin.  Its Peculiarities.  Oblong Square Plan.  Arched Entrance Halls.  Domes resting on Pendentives.  Suites of Apartments.  Ornamentation:  Exterior, by Pilasters, Cornices, String-courses, and shallow arched Recesses, with Pilasters between them; Interior, by Pillars supporting Transverse Bibs,or by Door-ways and False Windows, like the Persopolitan.  Specimen Palaces at Serbistan, at Firuzbad, at Ctesiphon, at Mashita.  Elaborate Decoration at the last-named Palace.  Decoration Elsewhere.  Arch of Takht-i-Bostan.  Sassanian Statuary.  Sassanian Bas-reliefs.  Estimate of their Artistic Value.  Question of the Employment by the Sassanians of Byzantine Artists.  General Summary.

“With the accession of the Sassanians, Persia regained much of that power and stability to which she had been so long a stranger....  The improvement in the fine arts at home indicates returning prosperity, and a degree of security unknown since the fall of the Achaemenidae.”—­Fergusson, History of Architecture, vol. i. pp. 381-3, 3d edition.

When Persia under the Sassanian princes shook off the barbarous yoke to which she had submitted for the space of almost five centuries, she found architecture and the other fine arts at almost the lowest possible ebb throughout the greater part of Western Asia.  The ruins of the Achaemenian edifices, which were still to be seen at Pasargadae, Persopolis, and elsewhere, bore witness to the grandeur of idea, and magnificence of construction, which had once formed part of the heritage of the Persian nation; but the intervening period was one during which the arts had well-nigh wholly disappeared from the Western Asiatic world; and when the early sovereigns of the house of Sassan felt the desire, common with powerful monarchs, to exhibit their greatness in their buildings, they found themselves at the first without artists to design, without artisans to construct, and almost without models to copy.  The Parthians, who had ruled over Persia for nearly four hundred years,’ had preferred country to city life, tents to buildings, and had not themselves erected a single edifice of any pretension during the entire period of their dominion.  Nor had the nations subjected to their sway, for the most part, exhibited any constructive genius, or been successful in supplying the artistic deficiencies of their rulers.  In one place alone was there an exception to this general paralysis of the artistic powers.  At Hatra, in the middle Mesopotamian region, an Arab dynasty, which held under the Parthian kings, had thought its dignity to require that it should be lodged in a palace, and had resuscitated a native architecture in Mesopotamia, after centuries of complete neglect.  When the Sassanians looked about for a foundation on which they might work, and out of which they might form a style suitable to their needs and worthy of their power and opulence, they found what they sought in the Hatra edifice, which was within the limits of their kingdom, and at no great distance from one of the cities where they held their Court.