Abstract
One of the most heated controversies of modern scholarship, the 1901 "Orient or Rome" debate was inflamed by the simultaneous publication of two books. While Italian archaeologist Giovanni Rivoira argued for the origin of Western architecture in Roman ingenuity, Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski contended, "The true source of Western artistic genius is located in the Indo-Germanic Geist," pointing instead to Iran. Between 1896 and 1926, Iran's intelligentsia not only engaged one side of the debate in claiming sociopolitical hegemony but also invented an eclecticism that echoed Strzygowski's Aryan architecture and destabilized universalistic discourses on artistic purity and cultural hybridity.