Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/508

Rh 450 ARCHITECTURE [A.NCIENT number, are ranged round the base of a liill and extend for ceveral miles. Each consists of au earthen mound about half a mile in circuit, having, at its base, a crenellated retaining wall 20 feet high. The mound has no entrance, nor any indication of the exact place of burial. To the south of the tomb is a temple in an open court, about 1200 feet by 500. The plan is just the ordinary one of a palace, and the names, &quot;The House of the living and the House of the dead,&quot; suum to show clearly that this resemblance was intended. The Chinese method of construction is very peculiar. Their roofs are put up first, supported on wooden posts, which are removed as the permanent fabric is built. The walls of the grand edifices are of stone, but the ordinary material is brick, and the work is often executed with beautifully close joints. In palaces and temples the whole was often gor geously coloured with glazed tiles, or the bricks themselves were coloured and glazed. A magnificent example of this is a temple near the summer palace at Peking, all of which is of bright majolica, except its marble base. As with all structures belonging to the emperor the colour was yellow, it being a capital offence for any other person to use that colour. The Chinese never use square timber when they can get round trees of a suitable size, probably on account of the lightness, strength, and convenience of the bamboo. The roofs are of very peculiar construction, and all timbers are left visible. The windows are filled in with the lining of the oyster shell, which looks like talc, and is quite as transparent ; and the main door is frequently a perfectly round aperture. The old buildings of the Chinese, like those of the Saracens, are fast going to decay, and the streets of even their grand capital, Peking, now exhibit immense ranges of ruined buildings. ANCIENT AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE. It was not long before the exhumation by Mr Layard, in Central Asia, of the wonderful remains of fine art entombed in earthen mounds, that Mr J. L. Stephens, when engaged on a mission from his Government that of the United States of North America to some of the mutable states FIG. 55. Ruins of Teocalli or Temple at Palenque. of Central America, heard of and tracked out in the forests of Yucatan 1 the remains of a bygone time, exhibited in sculptural and architectural monuments of a coarse charac ter, affording a strange counterpart to those which Mr 1 Lord Kingsborough s great work, The Antiquities of Mexico, con tains, in some of the later volumes, representations of monuments which would almost appear to be the same as some of those subse quently explored by Mr Stephens. Layard describes as having existed in and about tho valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. The remains of fifty or sixty cities have been discovered, the most interesting being those of Chololu, Palenque, Uxmal, Tescuco, and Mitla. The chief structures were evidently temples (Teocallis), raised high above the surrounding buildings on grand basements, square on plan, and rising by huge steps to the summit, so as to have the general outline of a low truncated pyramid. One at Palenque is 280 feet square at the base, and about GO feet high to the platform, on which stands the temple, the latter being oblong on plan, measuring about 76 feet by 25. It was a low building, with a roof formed by stone gradini, so as to be, in fact, a continuation of the pyramid. Other structures, supposed to be palaces, are described by Mr Stephens, Mr Catherwood, Lord Kingsborough, &c., and copiously illustrated in their works. Many of them are very extensive, but of no great elevation. They are chiefly built on massive stone basements and surmounted by cornices, the friezes of which are adorned with evident imitations of logs of wood in upright rows. The greater part of the roofs were of wood, but among the objects represented in Mr Catherwood s Vieivs of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, are several examples of vaults having the arch form, but not being arched vaults, that is to say, of vaults presenting the appearance internally, or upon the soffit, of arches, but formed by the gathering over of horizontally-coursed masonry, with the inner and lower angles worked away or cleaned off, as it is technically expressed to the appear ance on the inside which an arched vault would present. NORTH W 10 20 30 40 60 60 70 80 90 100 SOUTH Fia. 56. Plan of Temple at Palenque. (See fig. 59.) The circumstance tnat the arch form pre sented in the American monuments is produced by the gathering over of horizontally-ranged masonry, and not by means of arch structure, would seem to show clearly that if the builders ever had intercourse with the Old World, it was before the properties of the arch were known and exemplified in it. These remains show an advance on the