Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/386

 364 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DKI-KNDKNCIKS. processes elaborated during centuries of unceasing work, were registered for the benefit of the new power. A rich and indus- trious community like that of the Phoenicians must have counted for much in such an inventory. Their wealthy cities had such treasures to guard that they must have spared no time or trouble in supplementing their military weakness in the field by the strength of their ramparts and the efficiency of their artillery. The Greeks were the first to compile treatises on the subject, treatises which did not become obsolete till the invention of gun- powder, but no doubt they owed more than one idea and useful suggestion to the men who built the ramparts of Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage. 2. Towns and Hydraulic IVorks. The remains of Phoenician towns are even slighter than those of their defences. Here and there a rocky site bears traces of the buildings for which it once supplied a foundation (Figs. 37 and 38), some of them having been partly cut from its mass. Such buildings, however, only stood on the outskirts or suburbs of cities. Within the ramparts the population was so closely packed that houses had to be carried to a great height; at Tyre, Strabo tells us, they were higher than at Rome, and those of Arvad were no less lofty. 1 In one district at least of Carthage, along those three great streets of the commercial quarter which led from the bazaar up to Byrsa, the closely packed houses were six stones high ; 2 they had flat roofs and the streets were narrow. 3 With a climate like that of Syria and North Africa wide streets would have been a waste of space. To get some idea of the internal appearance of one of these Phoenician cities it is enough to have penetrated into the old parts of Naples and Genoa, or, without going so far, to have visited the old Breton city of St. Malo, which in the close embrace of its walls has been compelled to turn every foot of soil to good account, and to push its roofs so near the sky 1 STRADO, xvi. ii. 23 and 13. " APPIAN, viii. 128. 3 This we gather from Appian's narrative. He speaks of the combats which went on on the roofs when the Romans attacked this quarter, and of the bridges they threw across from one block to another as they gradually made their way.