Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/256

 234 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD/EA AND ASSYRIA. had come down to us from antiquity. The archaeological dis- coveries of the last fifty years have singularly falsified his opinion and o-iven an acre to the vault never before suspected. Even in O 3 the days of the Ancient Empire the Egyptians seem to have understood its principle ; in any case the architects of Amenophis, of Thothmes, of Rameses, made frequent and skilful use of it long before the Ninevite palaces in which we have found it were erected. 1 But the possession of stones of enormous size enabled the Egyptians to dispense to a great extent with the arch, and we need not be surprised, therefore, that they failed to give it anything like its full development. They kept it in the back- ground, and while using it when necessary in their tombs, in the out-buildings of their temples, in their private dwellings and warehouses, they never made it a conspicuous element of their architectural system. They may well be admired for the majesty of their colonnades and the magnificence of their hypostyle halls, but not for the construction of their vaults, for the imitation of which, moreover, they gave little opportunity. In Chaldaea and Assyria the conditions were different. Sup- posing the architecture of those two countries to be yet entire, should we find in it vaults rivalling in age the arch in a tomb at Abydos which Mariette attributes to the sixth dynasty ? 2 Probably not. So far as we can judge, Chakkuan civilization does not date from so remote a past as that of Egypt, but it appears certain that the principles of the vault were discovered and put in practice by the Chaldees long before the comparatively modern times in which the segmental and pointed arches of Nineveh were erected. The latter alone are preserved because they have been hidden during all these centuries under the heaped-up ruins of the buildings to which they belonged, while those of Chaldaea have been carried away piece by piece, and their materials used again and again by the modern population of Mesopotamia. In spite, however, of the absence of such direct evidence, we may affirm without fear that the Chaldaean architects soon dis- covered the principle of the arch, and used it at least in its simplest and least complex forms. We are led to these con- clusions not only by their restriction to small units of construction 1 Art in Ancient Egypt, vol. i. p. 112, and vol. ii. cap. ii. 4. 2 Ibid. vol. ii. fig. 44.