Its style is a singular mixture of Assyrian and Asiatic Greek. Built of large blocks of white polished marble, it consists of a platform of seven steps, on the top of which is a small shrine or cella, rectangular in plan, covered by a pitched roof that terminates in the front and rear, in a gable-end or pediment. It is, in fact, a Greek temple of very rudimentary simplicity, mounted on a ziggurat. The ruins show that the tomb was surrounded on three sides by colonnades. Following the Assyrian precedent, the =Palace of Cyrus= occupied a platform, of about 40,000 square feet, which still exists and is known to the natives as “The Throne of Solomon.” But here the terrace is of natural rock, faced round the sides with cut stone walls distinguished by the beauty of the masonry. It is the earliest instance known of the so-called _drafted_ masonry, of which a magnificent example is found in the terraces of Herod’s temple at Jerusalem. It represents a method of cutting, which leaves the surface of the block of stone rough-hewn, as when it left the quarry, but dresses the edges to a “draft,” or smooth, bevelled surface. Such scanty remains as have been found suggest that Cyrus’s palace was of the simplest kind, including a central hall, the roof of which was carried by two rows of stone columns, thirty feet high, with porticoes _in antis_. The latter is a feature borrowed from Greek-Asiatic temple-building; the term, _in antis_, being used when the columns of the portico are set between the prolongation of the side walls of the main building. It is, however, from the remains of the group of buildings at =Persepolis= that the magnificence of Persian architecture can be best appreciated. Here, again, is a terrace of natural rock; but of vast size, covering an area of about one million six hundred thousand square feet. This, like the terrace of the Escoriál of the Spanish Kings, projects from the foot of a rocky mountain side. The Escoriál includes a royal mausoleum, built within the confines of the palace; but, at Persepolis, three tombs, one of them unfinished, are excavated behind the palace in the mountain wall. Two are supposed to be the resting places of later kings, Artaxerxes II and III, while the unfinished one is that of Arses, who reigned only two years. Meanwhile the =Tomb of Darius I=, the founder of Persepolis, has been identified as one of four tombs, eight miles distant from the palace. These also are excavated in the mountain side, and at such a height from the bottom of the valley, that they corroborate the account which Ctesias, the Greek historian of Persia, gives of the tomb of Darius, that it was on the face of a rock and only to be reached by an apparatus of ropes. The three other tombs of this group are ascribed to Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II.