Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/383

 Pii. IV-Ch. Y. / TOMBS. 351 That, the main object of the building was sepulchral seems hardly doubtful, but we have no other instance in Europe of a tomb with such a staircase leading to a chamber above it. That Marseilles was a Phoenician and then a Phocian colony long before Roman times seems generally to be admitted, and that in the temple of Diana (Woodcuts Nos. 188 and 189) and in this building there is an Etruscan or Eastern element which can hardly be mis- taken, and may lead to very important ethnographical indications when more fully investigated and beUor understood. Eastern Tombs. This scarcity of tombs in the western part of the Roman Empire is to a great extent made up for in the East ; but the history of those erected under the Roman rule in that j)art of* the world is as yet so little known that it is not easy either to classify or to describe them ; and as nearly all those which have been preserved are cut in the rock, it is sometimes difficult — as with other rock-cut objects all over the world — to understand the form of building from which they were copied. The three principal groups of tombs of the Roman epoch are those of Petra, Cyrene, and Jerusalem. Though many oilier important tombs exist in those countries, they are so little known that they must be passed over for the present. From the time when Abraham was laid in the cave of Machpelah until after the Christian era, we know that burying in the rock was not the exception but the general practice among the nations of this part of the East. So far as can be known, the exani])le was set by Egypt, which was the parent of much of their civilization. In Egypt the fa9ade of their rock-cut tombs were — ■ with the solitary exception of those of Beni Hassan i — ornamented so simply and unobtrusively as rather to belie than to announce their internal magnificence. All the oldest Asiatic tombs seem to have been mere holes in the rock, wholly without architectural decorations. We have seen, however, how the Persian kings copied their j)ahice facades to adorn their last resting-places, and how about the same time in Lycia the tomb-builders copied, first their own wooden structures, and afterwards the architectural fa9ades which they had learned from the Greeks how to construct. But it was not till the Roman period that this species of magnificence extended to the places enumerated above ; when to such an extent did it prevail at Petra as to give to that now deserted valley the appearance of a petrified city of the dead. The typical and most beautiful tomb of this place is that called See p. 110, and Woodcut 15.