The interior of the chambers was as severe as possible; the roof is hewn into the form of a vault; in obedience to the law of Ormuzd there is no trace anywhere of painting or inscription. The cavities for the sarcophagi are formed in the side walls, as in the sepulchral caverns of Egypt, Palestine, and Phœnicia. § V. ENGRAVED GEMS AND ORNAMENTS. The glyptic art and the jewellery of the Persians maintain nobly and without any sign of decadence the artistic traditions of Chaldæa and Assyria. Assurbanipal and Nebuchadnezzar, when they made expeditions into the most distant provinces of Persia, Media, and Armenia, had spread through all these countries the productions of Assyrian industry and the taste for luxury and works of art; their artists recruited their disciples there: like Alexander, they carried the torch of civilisation everywhere by their arms, and when the Achæmenids took up their residence at Susa and Ecbatana, they found the inhabitants profoundly impregnated with Chaldæo-Assyrian ideas and customs. To as high a degree as the Babylonians, the Persians love full dress and ornaments: each citizen of distinction has his cylinder or his seal hung from his neck; he is covered with bracelets, rings, necklaces; his tiara is decorated with pearls and sparkling stones; his tunic, delicately embroidered, is encrusted with gems. In his house he displays a luxury in furniture which, handed on to the Parthians, will astonish the Romans and Byzantines: cups of gold and silver enriched with crystal and coloured glass, and adorned with figures in relief; chairs, couches and tables overlaid with silver, gold, and carved ivory. In short, everything begotten of the passion for luxury among the Chaldæans in the matter of tapestry, embroidery, and goldsmiths’ work, is also found among the Persians. Only, the Persians were not servile imitators; they could give an original turn to the productions of their industry, even when they copied the Assyrians. There is in their cylinders and their seals a dry and nervous execution which characterises them as distinctly as the bulls of Persepolis are distinguished from the Ninevite monsters. It goes without saying also that the inscriptions and the details of costume give an absolutely precise character to the classification of the productions of the glyptic art under the Achæmenids. Here is, for instance, the cylinder of Darius, preserved at the British Museum. The whole scene is evidently copied from Assyrian seals, but the figure of the rampant lion and those of the horses are quite different in treatment from Ninevite art; the denticulated tiara of the prince, the disk of Ormuzd hovering in the air, and finally the inscription traced with mathematical regularity, complete the proofs of Persian origin in this fine cylinder. [Illustration: Fig. 142.--Cylinder of Darius (after J. Menant).]