Page:Greek Buildings Represented by Fragments in the British Museum (1908).djvu/226

 210 appendix. Origins and Conclusion. On our page 196 has been mentioned the late entry into sanctioned " architecture " of that noblest building form, the dome. It is a commonplace that the arch and vault were not recognised in Greek " architecture." Yet these menial coverings of drains and stores were to become the master forces of a new architecture. It is a lesson for us that the dome, which originated in mud huts and beehive tombs, and was used in well coverings, kilns, and baths, and the like common necessities, only slowly came into higher structures, and then only as an interior form. Even in Roman architecture the conical exterior to the dome was general. The Pantheon is so much banked up at the springing that the external dome hardly counts. It is the same whatever " features " we examine. That which is now " Esthetic architecture " was once organic building. How long do past and cast-off needs remain in consciousness as taste ? Take the great typical moulding, the cornice. It was once, as Mr Flinders Petrie has shown, the spreading top of a fence of Egyptian reeds, plastered over with mud. Or it was the Doric eaves, made up of wall plate (bed mould), projecting rafter ends (mutules and corona), and terra-cotta gutter (cymatium). Again, Dr Dorpfeld has shown how that mysterious entity the Doric temple arose out of mud brick walls on a stone base course (orthostatae), with wooden frames (antae) and a surrounding protecting verandah (the peristyle), and so on. Many years ago Champollion pointed out the resemblance between the Doric order of columns and some pillars found in Egypt, and the argument was carried further by Falkener in the " Museum of Classical Antiquities." Actual relation has been alternately asserted and denied ; one of the grounds for the denial being the wide gap of time between early Doric architecture and the period of these Egyptian columns. The whole question is entirely altered by the establishment of Mycenaean art between the two. Certainly much of this art is of Egyptian derivation, and certainly also much of the Mycenaean was handed on in the Doric, as has been shown by Dorpfeld and others. There can be no doubt, I think, that the Doric order was in a large degree ultimately of Egyptian extraction, and