Machine summary:
It was something of a revival of the ancient Roman opus scctile anrl first appeared, according to Major {مراجعه شود به فایل جدول الحاقی} Previous to the Italians, the Persians used the term Parchin Kari:i for this form of pietm-dura decoration while the Arabian writers used the word Al-Fusai Fasa4 for glass mosaics generally found in Palestine of the Byzantine origin, which is different from pictra-dura, as far as technique is concerned.
Khan Arzu also brings it into his poetry, but we should content ourselves with the contemporary histories of the Mughal Emperors who decorated their masterpieces of architecture with this very _pietra-dura describing it by the same term Parchin Kari.
The floors of its platform and of the roof bear excellent speci• mens of inlay in geometrical traceries of striped marble, but the sarco• phagus has a unique form 'of pietra-dura decoration of precious stones of variegated colours, which had never been adopted before in India, and the same was also carried out on the sarcophagus of Asaf .
" Though the extensive use of marble and stone inlaid decoration in Indian buildings was most probably a fashion introduced by the Arabs, who had themselves borrowed it from the Byzantines, it seems that the practice had become a part of the Hindu craft tradition so long before the building of the Taj as effectually to dispose of the theory that the pietra-dura of the latter was derived from the Florentine work of the 16th century, to which it has no resemblance except in technique.