Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/380

 35^ HISTORY or ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DKI'KNDENCIES. important work of Phoenician engineers. And they were impos- ing by their workmanship as well as their mass ; their masonry has a regularity that we find in no other work of the same race. Of this we may judge from the section of the walls of Byrsa uncovered by Beule (Fig. 47). He was mistaken in thinking this fragment belonged to the great wall ; it formed part of the defences of the citadel, but we have no reason to believe that the wall of the Acropolis and the great rampart in the plain were not built in the same fashion. As at Eryx, the stones are set without mortar, and the hori- zontality of the courses is carefully preserved. But more care has been taken over the face of the structure ; most of the stones are of exactly the right height for the course in which they are placed, but there are some which encroach upon those above and below, and, being held by tenon and mortise, add greatly to the solidity of the work. None of those hollows filled in with small stones which we encountered at Eryx are to be seen here. Joints are almost always so placed as to stand upon the centre of the blocks below them. The perfection of the finest Greek masonry is not reached, but looked at from a little distance the whole has much the appearance of a Greek structure, and we are driven to ask whether the masons who built the enceinte of Carthage, or at least that part which has been recovered, may not have found their models in some of the buildings on the neighbouring island of Sicily. The walls of Carthage were often repaired, 1 and we have no reason to suppose that the fragment laid bare by Beule dates from a very remote epoch or belongs to the primitive defences of the town ; most likely it was built about the time of Regulus or Agathocles, in the fourth or third century before our era. The following is Beule's description of the foundations he dis- covered to the south of Byrsa, about sixty feet below the present surface of the ground, and beneath a thick layer of ashes, which show how terrible was the conflagration in which Carthage dis- appeared. " Imagine a wall thirty-three feet seven inches thick, built entirely of large blocks of tufa ; not massive, but containing chambers as shown in the annexed figure (Fig. 251). Standing outside Byrsa one looks upon the wall which faced the enemy ; it is six feet eight inches thick. Behind it runs a corridor six feet four inches wide ; from this open a number of apse-ended 1 Livv, xxx. ix.