Francis Watson on exotic dynasties
Splendours of the East edited by Mortimer Wheeler (Paul Hamlyn £2.95) Just 2,300 years ago the young Alexander was celebrating his prodigious triumph in the vast Palace of Persepolis. As Sir Mortimer
Wheeler recalls the well-attested story. 'the riper moments of a good party had arrived', when the courtesan Thais had the spirited idea of burning the whole thing down: which was done, in a Hollywood set-piece of revenge for the sacking of the Athenian Acropolis at the hands of Xerxes.
Yet enough remains today to keep for Persepolis a commanding place in any an- thology of what I have called in a previous notice the Ozymandias Effect. Enough re- mains of the patterned brickwork and green- glazed domes of Samarkand to weave into the theme of desolation and renewal the oldest of enmities: the rough-riding nomads against the walled cities, the puritanism of the desert against sophisticated luxury. By another of history's extraordinary cliches the barbarians from the black tents. slaked with devastation, bequeath new cultures. Within a generation Genghis Khan's successor is decreeing his pleasure-dome. The terrible
Tamerlaine's memorial is the Timurid Renaissance,- and Babur, with the blood of
both of them in his veins, leaves towers of skulls on the route that makes Mongols into Moghuls. His son's tomb looks back to Samarkand and forward to the Taj Mahal, which is itself a mere item in the magnilo- quent legacy of Shah Jahan.
Such are the splendours of the East as the Western eye has commonly seen them, before plunging from desert into jungle—or what once was jungle—for the awesomely different confrontation with the monumental forms of Hinduism in India, Cambodia and Java, and the rediscovery of the Buddhist impact. And the splendour of the West, now that hegemony has in its turn recognised the elegiac imperative, lies finally in the preservation and interpretation of the
monuments of its predecessors. China has its own sense of history to compensate for a sparsity of architectural monuments. Japan, where a technological excursion that we can open at the arch of Ctesiphon can be closed with details of door-slides and window- catches, is curiously timeless in refusing the pleasure of ruins while prolonging the life of wood. But it is curious to-consider how much of the rest of this book, as it moves with a necessarily arbitrary selection among the legacies of exotic dynasts, is a memorial to the viceregal zeal of Lord Curzon.
The photographs are mostly by Ian Graham, and superlative. There are also some well-chosen reproductions of the engravings of earlier travellers. The writers assisting Sir Mortimer Wheeler include Jac- quetta Hawkes, J. Burton-Page, S. H. Hansford and John Figgess. As a piece of book-making, combining text and pictures to an unusually satisfactory effect, it deserves this cheaper reissue of the original Weidenfeld and Nicolson edition.
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