Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/123

 CHAPTER II. ON THE' GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND CHARACTERISTICS OF PHOENICIAN ARCHITECTURE. i. Materials and Construction. PHOENICIA is a country of mountains. The whole territory is cut up by the Lebanon and by the spurs it throws out westwards to the sea. Consequently there is no lack of stone, but its quality is mediocre. Neither marble nor sandstone are to be found. Near Safita, as in certain cantons of Galilee, a few quarries exist, but their produce has hardly been taken beyond the immediate district. The common material of the country is a rather soft calcareous stone, which crops up through the surface of the soil. The first idea of the tribes who came to settle in the coun- try must have been to cut the living rock where they found it. Wherever it did not stand above the qround in ridges or isolated o o masses, it was to be encountered at a very slight depth under the thin stratum of vegetable earth which was deposited in the valleys, at the feet of the cliffs, and on the less abrupt slopes from the hills to the sea. From one end of maritime Syria to the other, tombs were hollowed in the rock down to the last days of antiquity ; and such labours were undertaken for the living as well as the dead. o In the beginning, perhaps, the settlers took up their abode in natural grottoes, which could be easily enlarged and made more convenient, and even in later days, vhen their ideas had outgrown those humble dwellings, they continued to profit by the accidents of their rocky territory. Thus " one of the most curious of the remains at Amrit is a monolithic house, cut entirely from a single mass of rock (Fig. 37). The material was cut away in such a fashion that only thin walls and partitions were left adhering to