Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/200

 114 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. those who had to cut through the thickness of walls in the process of excavation. If voids have to be covered in pise, one of those self-supporting curves which we have described under the name of vaults, must be made use of, and the vault must be constructed over a centring of wood. But we have no 'v- evidence that the Egyptians could carry the art of con- struction to this point in pise. On the contrary, we have fjood reason to believe that they generally made use of this material for the quiescent body of the edifice alone, and that voids were mostly covered with stone or wood. In a word, the Egyptians did not carry the use of artificial material far enough to form a complete system based upon it. They made great use of it, but only in a strictly limited fashion. It is only found in certain well-defined parts of buildings, which were never of any very great interest from an artistic point of view (Fig. 80). It deserved to be mentioned, if only for the frequency of its use in Egypt, in the private architecture of both ancient and modern times (Fig. 81), but it need not detain us longer. Fig. Si. — Modern pigeon house, Thebes. § 6. — Consh'uction by Assemblage. Carpentry, or construction by assemblage, played a considerable part in ancient Egypt, but, as may easily be understood, few traces of it are to be found in our day. Those edifices which were con- structed of wood have, of course, all perished ; but, in spite of their disappearance, we can form a very good idea of their aspect and of the principles of their construction. In the most ancient epoch of Egyptian art, the people took pleasure in copying, in their stone buildino^s, the arranofements which had characterised their work in wood ; besides which, their paintings and reliefs often represent