Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/136

 ii6 HISTORY OK ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. than the time; of Alexander. 1 Nowhere else do we find the slightest trace of a voussoir. This well-ascertained fact confirms v> the hypothesis to which our reasoning has been directed. If the Pha-nicians made use of the vault at all, it was at long intervals and on quite exceptional occasions. It is difficult to see how any arch whatever could be introduced into such walls as those of Arvad or of the temples of Malta and Gozo, among blocks which the mason set in place exactly as they came from the quarry. On the other hand, nothing could be easier than to cover any open- ing, lintel-wise, with the longest stone that might happen to be at hand. Other blocks of the same nature furnished the horizontal lines of the cornice, which, moreover, they soon learnt to chisel into ornamental forms. Every building must have ended in a flat roof, a covering which is almost universal in Syria at the present day." 2 Another characteristic of Phoenician architecture is to be ex- plained by its early predilections. Born of the living rock, which it fashioned in a hundred ways, on which it reposed, which it con- tinued and prolonged, it had no liking for any kind of open construction, and especially made slight use of the pier and column. Very few fragments of columns, and those very small, have been found among the ruins of truly Phoenician buildings. A study of these remains brings out the fact that columns were almost always used as ornamental motives in the form of pilasters. They did not support the roof and framework of the building as in Egypt, Persia, and Greece. Reduced thus to play the part of a mere accessory, the column was not divided into different members, as it was among people who made a wider use of it. It was not turned into a kind of organic being by separating and clearly defining its different parts. We do not possess a single Phoenician base, but the capital, as in Assyria, was in one piece with the shaft. The column was, as a rule, a monolith, and on those few occasions when it was made up 1 In our chapter on " Sepulchral Architecture " we shall give a section of these tombs, taken from the Corpus Inscriptionum Scmiticarnm. See also in M. GAIL- LA ROOT'S journal of his excavations (A fission, p. 437) the mention of another arched tomb chamber. It contained an anthropoid sarcophagus. 2 "The early Phoenicians were unacquainted with the arch," says M. RENAN (Mission, p. 408).