FOURTH BAS-RELIEF. 
547 
transfixed by the arrows to the ground, needing no other 
language to declare their despair. It may not be out of place 
to remark here, that, from the time that Arsaces, a Parthian 
chief, recovered Persia from the Grecian successors of Alexander, 
until the Sassanian dynasty extinguished the Arsacedian race, 
the whole nation went by the name of the Parthian empire; but 
with the accession of Ardashir, the father of Shapoor, Persia 
resumed its imperial title. 
Having described the person of the principal warrior in this, 
the fourth bas-relief, I proceed to the caparison of his steed. 
Two full tassels, like that attached to the chain in the preceding- 
sculpture of Shapoor, are here fixed to a sort of rope, and fly, 
as if from under the saddle, over the rump of the horse. Two 
more are seen on the animal’s neck and chest; but their con¬ 
necting cords are broken away. Along the belly, from the 
bottom of the chest, apparently quite under the stomach, to the 
hinder legs, runs a string of globular forms, hanging down in 
the fashion of bells. A horseman, mounted, and also clad in 
mail, rides immediately behind the diademed warrior, bearing 
a standard, much like the one in the second bas-relief. This is 
ornamented with five globular forms, on a cross bar. Pausanias 
remarks, that, at the celebration of a Grecian festival in honour 
of the sun, an olive-branch was carried in the procession ; de¬ 
corated at the top with a globe of brass, to represent the sun; 
with a smaller, a little below, to represent the moon ; and divers 
lesser ones, suspended in different parts of the bough, to repre¬ 
sent the stars. The objects of worship in Persia, having from 
the earliest ages been the host of heaven, and the monarchs 
arrogating divinity, by claiming descent from the solar god, 
might intend something of the same planetary reference in the 
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