Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/416

 394 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Perhaps there was no portico ; the walls may have been decorated only with string courses and cornices. There were two stories, because two distinct mouldings have been found, the one a string course, eighteen inches deep (l"ig. 269), the other a cornice with a depth of thirty inches. 1 These fragments from the northern part of the island are distin- guished from others found a little farther south by difference of material as well as simplicity of workmanship. At the latter point several drums of Numidian breccia and many fragments of marble cornices, decorated with oves, lentils, acanthus and other leaves, have been found. The old Carthaginian lodge was destroyed no doubt when the place was captured by Scipio, and a Roman palace in all the wealth of imperial luxury was raised in its stead when the city was re- founded. In the commercial port the combination of curved with straight lines which we had to divine in the case of the naval harbour has been actually traced. According to Beule's measurements the channel between the two basins was about eighty feet wide, which hardly differs from the width ascribed by Appian to the passage between the commercial harbour and the sea. This passage must have been altered in the Roman period, for we cannot recognize the opening described by Appian in the narrow gate, only nineteen feet six inches wide, which was discovered and measured by Beule. That explorer seeks to explain the change by the necessity under which the Carthaginians found themselves to provide against the silting up of their harbour by the sand brought down with the waters of the Bagrada. We need not go into this question here, however ; it will be decided by some future ex- cavator, who ought to find the ancient gates which, according to Appian, were closed with a pair of chains. Beule calculates that the combined area of the Carthaginian harbours was twenty-three hectares sixteen ares (about fifty-eight acres). 2 The old harbour at Marseilles covers twenty-seven hectares (about sixty-five acres) and is supposed to hold about i, i oo merchant-ships. Taking the average tonnage of the ships frequenting the port of Carthage to be about the same as that of the vessels entering the harbour which was sufficient for the 1 BEUL, Fonilles a. Carthage, pp. 103, 104. 2 If we adopt the trace proposed by Daux for the naval harbour we shall have to modify these figures considerably.