Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/396

 v ;74 HISTORV 01- Aur IN Pmr.NiciA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. all this it follows that the little cemetery dates from the period of Carthaginian independence, and that before the Romans were established in Africa their great rivals understood how to employ concrete on a large scale ; so that we are free to believe that they made use of it to build such things as the domes of their reservoirs and the vaulted chambers of the admiralty at Utica. Whatever may be the date of the walls and vaults which lie open to the modern traveller in the great cisterns of Carthage, we may be sure that the plan on which they are built dates from a very early period in the history of African Phoenicia. In Car- hage, as in many more of these African towns, the reservoirs were divided into two series, which could be separated or allowed to communicate at the will of their managers. The rain-water in- o evitably brought with it a considerable deposit of sand and earth, so that by directing it into alternate basins one could be cleaned Fir,. 253. Carthaginian coin. while the next was in use. By examining some rural structures of the kind we shall see how this mechanism was worked. The foresight which provided the large towns with plentiful supplies of fresh water did not rest there ; it performed the same service for those rural districts in which agricultural operations and the rearing of great herds of cattle and horses could not be carried on without a steady provision of water. From one end of Tunis to the other the ruins of vast isolated reservoirs are encountered. Those near towns are repetitions in small of the urban reservoirs ; but in the more distant cantons we find cisterns open to the sky ; as a rule these are in pairs, the one tangent to the other. The best preserved of them all is on the road from Adrumetum to Aquae Regime ; our Fig. 254 gives a good idea of its arrangement. These two basins stand in the lowest part of the plain ; the diameter of the larger varies from forty to about sixty-seven feet. They may be compared to a pair of huge tuns in masonry. Their