The Macedonian conquest of the Orient (334-323 BC) suddenly turned Achaemenian Iran into hellenized Iran. For a better understanding of the effects of this change on the arts, it seems necessary briefly to look back on what Achaemenian art had been. In the 6th century BC, with the Achaemenians achieving for the first time the political unity of the civilized countries of the Ancient Near East, the arts of this area had reached the last stage of their development. At Pasargadae under Cyrus, at Susa and Persepolis under Darius, great palaces had been raised, whose architecture and decoration reflected and blended the various national traditions of the conquered countries: of Mesopotamia, of Egypt, of Anatolia, and even of the Asiatic Greeks.

The purpose of these great sovereigns had been to provide adequate seats for the "universal," spranational power which Ahura Mazda had granted them. In spite of their architects heavily borrowing from foreign arts, the palaces may be said to be original creations by the peculair way in which these foreign elements are associated and combined together into a harmonious and new synthesis. It might be suggested that just as the Achaemenian sovereign assumed the new position of a "King of kings," Achaemenian art was conceived as an "Art of arts," drawing, by deliberate choice, from the national arts of the Orient, some techniques, architectural forms, figurative or ornamental motifs, and rejecting no less deliberately other techniques, forms and motifs, which, although traditional in these arts, were not found convenient- an art, in short, "superior" to those national arts by reason of a resolute purpose of borrowing from each only "the best." In other words, the predominant characteristic of that art was its eclecticism. It was consciously aiming at an ideal of final perfection by means of selection; and, feeling this ideal to have been attained, it stuck to it for the two centuries that it lasted.

Achaemenian art is contemporary with classical Greek art. Whereas at Susa and Persepolis traditions sometimes going back two and a half millennia into the past result in this ultimate effort towards perfection which freezes them into immutability- at that very time, on the banks of the Aegean Sea, there developed an art interested in movement and life, always in quest of progress, never satisfied with the results achieved and engaged in a constant effort to outdo itself. This surprising situation suddenly comes to an end with the conquest of Alexander. The Macedonians become masters of the Orient, naturally bringing with themselves the living art, the "modern" art of the time, in other words, Greek art. The results have been described by the great German archaeologist E. Herzfeld in teh following words: "There is no deeper caesura in the 5,000 years of history of the Ancient East than the conqeust of Alexander the Great, and there is no archaeological object produced after this time that does not bear his stamp.

The long period of nearly a thousand years introduced by the Macedonian conquest and ending with the Muslim conquest, may be divided into two great periods: the first, lasting five and a half centuries (330 BC-AD 225), is the hellenized period of Iran; the second, lasting over four centuries (AD 225-642), sees the birth and the growth of a new national art, the art of Sasanian Iran.

-The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3(2): The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (NY: Cambridge UP, 1983), 1027-1028.