Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/166

 144 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. (PI. viii) than to any plan to which we could refer the reader. It represents that part of the colonnade, in the second court of the temple at Medinet-Abou, which veils the wall of the pronaos, and it shows how little space the Egyptian architects thought necessary for the purposes of circulation. The spaces between the columns and the wall on the one hand and the osiride piers on the other, are not quite equal to the diameter of the bases of those columns, which have, however, been expressly kept smaller than was usual in Egypt. If they had been as large as some that we could point out, there would have been no room to pass between them and the wall. Did the Egyptians ever employ isolated columns, not as structural units, but for decorative purposes, for the support of a group or a statue ? Are there any examples of pillars like those which the Phoenicians raised before their temples, or the triumphal columns of the Romans, or those reared for com- memorative purposes in Paris and other cities of Modern Europe ? It is impossible to give a confident answer to this question. The remains of the great colonnade which existed in the first court at Karnak, of which a single column with bell-shaped capital is still upright (Fig. 130), suggest, perhaps, that such monumental pillars were not unknown to the Egyptians. These columns display the ovals of Tahraka, of Psemethek, and of Ptolemy Philopator. The width of the avenue between them, measuring from centre to centre, is so great, about fifty-five feet, that it is difficult to believe that it could ever have been covered with a roof. Even with wood it would have been no easy matter — for the Egyptians — to cover such a void. We have, moreover, good reason to believe that they never used wood and stone together in their temples. A "velarium has been suggested, but there is nothing either in the Egyptian texts or in their wall paintings to hint at their use of such a covering. It would have been quite possible to connect the summits of these columns together lengthwise. The architraves would have had less than twenty feet to bridge over. But not the slightest relic of such a structure has been found, and it is difficult to see what good purpose it could have served had it existed. The authors of the Description came to the conclusion that there had been no roof of any kind to the avenue formed by the columns, that they merely formed a kind of monumental approach