Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/100



It may have been partly in consequence of their love of phonetic literature, and partly in order to keep themselves distinct from those great builders, the Turanians, that the Semitic races never erected a building worthy of the name; neitlier at Jerusalem, nor at Tyre or Sidon, nor at Carthage, is there any vestige of Semitic Architectural Art. Not that these have perished, but because they never existed. When Solomon proposed to build a temple at Jerusalem, though plain externally, and hardly so large as an ordinary parish church, he was forced to have recourse to some Turanian people to do it for him, and by a display of gold and silver and brass ornaments to make up for the architectural forms he knew not how to apply.

In Assyria we have palaces of dynasties more or less purely Semitic, splendid enough, but of wood and sunburnt bricks, and only preserved to our knowledge from the accident of their having been so clumsily built as to bury themselves and their wainscot slabs in their own ruins. Though half the people were probably of Turanian origin, their temples seem to have been external and unimportant till Sennacherib and others learnt the art of using stone from the Egyptians, as the Syrians did afterwards from the Romans. During the domination of the last-named people we have the temples of Palmyra and Baalbec, of Jerusalem and Petra: everywhere an art of the utmost splendor, but with no trace of Semitic feeling or Semitic taste in any part, or in any detail.

The Jewish worship being neither ancestral, nor the bodies of their dead being held in special reverence, they had no tombs worthy of the name. They buried the bodies of their patriarchs and kings with care, and knew where they were laid; but not until after the return from the Babylonish captivity did they either worship there, or mark the spot with any architectural forms, though after that epoch we find abundant traces of a tendency towards that especial form of Turanian idolatry. But even then the adornment of their tombs with architectural magnificence cannot be traced back to an earlier period than the time of the Romans; and all that we find marked with splendor of this class was the work of that people, and stamped with their peculiar forms of Art. Painting and sculpture Avere absolutely forbidden to the Jews because they were Turanian arts, and because their practice might lead the people to idolatry, so that these nowhere existed: though we cannot understand a people with any mixture of Turanian blood who had not an eye for color, and a feeling for beauty of form, in detail at least. Music alone was therefore the one æsthetic art of the Semitic races, and, wedded to the lyric verse, seems to have influenced their feelings and excited their passions to an extent unknown to other