Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/147

Rh Instead of the precise orientation and careful masonry of the old kingdom, the buildings of the new race are placed anywhere, facing in any direction, and generally affected with a symmetriphobia that it is difficult to understand. The pylons are seldom in the axis of the temples; the courts seldom square; the angles frequently not right angles, and one court succeeding another without the least reference to symmetry.

The masonry, too, is frequently of the rudest and clumsiest sort, and would long ago have perished but for its massiveness; and there is in all their works an appearance of haste and want of care that sometimes goes far to mar the value of their grandest conceptions.

In their manners, too, there seems an almost equal degree of discrepancy. War was the occupation of the kings, and foreign conquest seems to have been the passion of the people. The pylons and the walls of the temples are covered with battle-scenes, or with the enumeration of the conquests made, or the tribute brought by the subjected races. While not engaged in this, the monarch's time seems to have been devoted to practising the rites of the most complicated and least rational form of idolatry that has yet been known to exist among any body of men in the slightest degree civilized.

If the monuments of Memphis had come down to our times as perfect as those of Thebes, some of these differences might be found less striking. On the other hand, others might be still more apparent; but judging from such data as we possess—and they are tolerably extensive and complete—we are justified in assuming a most marked distinction; and it is indispensably necessary to bear it in mind in attempting to understand the architecture of the valley of the Nile, and equally important in any attempt to trace the affinities of the Egyptian with any other races of mankind. So far as we can now see, it may be possible to trace some affinities with the pyramid builders in Assyria or in Western Asia; but if any can be dimly predicated of the southern Egyptian race, it is in India and the farther East; and the line of communication was not the Isthmus of Suez, but the Straits of Babelmandeb and the Indian Ocean.

Although, as already mentioned, numerous buildings of the great Pharaonic dynasties are to be found scattered all alone: the banks of the Nile, it is at Thebes only that the temples are so complete as to enable us to study them with advantage, or to arrive at a just appreciation of their greatness. That city was practically the capital of Egypt during the whole of the 18th and 19th dynasties and has been fortunate in having had no great city built near it since it fell into decay; unlike Memphis in this respect, which has been used as a quarry during the last 14 or 15 centuries. It has also had the advantage