Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/385

 FORTIFIED WALLS. 363 The width and depth of the upper chambers were quite in- dependent of the size of the subterranean cisterns, because the two were separated by a huge mass of solid masonry. Any restoration of the upper part of the rampart can hardly be more than conjecture, and it is therefore as a sort of graphic hypothesis, if we may be allowed the phrase, that we have reproduced the principal wall of Thapsus as restored by Daux (Fig. 240). Some of its details may be open to dispute, but on the whole it is not without probability. Here we must bring this study of Phoenician defences to an end. Perhaps it is already too long, but we were tempted to discuss the question in some detail because we thought the prin- ciples of the Greeks as laid down by Philo were to be traced in the plan of the ramparts of Carthage. On the other hand the Carthaginian masonry, as we see it at Byrsa, is connected with the much earlier system in use at Arvad and Sidon by the intermediate stage illustrated by those walls of Eryx on which the Phoenician mason's marks may still be traced. And who knows but that the Tyrian and Carthaginian engineers contributed much by their example towards the preparation of those rules and formulae which the Greek theorists drew up under the successors of Alexander ? The ramparts of Tyre have disappeared even more completely than those of Carthage, but is it possible they could have offered so long and stubborn a resistance to the Macedonian attack had they been otherwise than admirably designed and amply provided with military engines ? During the whole duration of the famous siege the Tyrian artillery held its own with that of Alexander. Tyre fell not because her defenders were less skilled or less inventive than her assailants, but because Alexander was gifted with a boldness of imagination and a prodigious energy which did not hesitate to attack nature herself. At Tyre, as on all the battle-fields of Europe and Asia on which Greece was then a combatant, she triumphed through the impetuous genius of the young hero I had nearly said the young god by whom she was led. And science carried on the work begun by arms. The Greek language soon became a kind of universal tongue ; under- stood almost to the Indus, it allowed many active spirits to set about the inventory of the Greek inheritance ; the traditions of that old eastern world whose course seemed to be over were gathered up ; every technical formula or receipt, all the secret