Crown the Persian column with two kneeling bulls (or lions, or griffins) set back to back; lay the main beam in the saddle between their necks, and the cross-beams on their heads.
Rules · Columns · Proportion · Spacing · Plans
Slender columns under a timber roof
Where the roof is of timber, make the columns tall, slender (about twelve diameters) and widely spaced, and fill the hall with them on a square grid.
height ≈ 12 D · spacing ≈ 5 D (Apadana: ≈ 19 m, D ≈ 1.6 m, axes ≈ 8.7 m)
The Apadana at Persepolis, begun by Darius I around 515 BC, is a square hall about 60 m across with thirty-six columns roughly 19–20 m tall, and porticoes of twelve columns on three sides. The columns are far more slender than any Egyptian or Greek stone column, and far more widely spaced. This was possible because they carried beams of cedar, not stone.
The effect is quite unlike an Egyptian hypostyle: not a dense forest but an open, lofty space in which several thousand people could stand.
Related rules
Make the hall square and fill it with columns on a square grid; put a portico two columns deep across the front, between solid corner towers; build the walls of mud brick and keep stone for columns, door and window frames.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Slender columns under a timber roof”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/apadana-slender-columns. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.