Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/157

 FUNEREAL ARCHITECTURE. 141 fa$ade are not those which would have commended themselves to an Ionian architect called in from Phocsea or Ephesus. The modillions have a breadth, shape, and relief unknown to Greek modules, and the angle of the pediment is more acute than in classic buildings. There are no columns ; the very peculiar cornice belongs to no distinct order, and in some respects it still recalls a primitive wooden construction. The inference to be deduced from analysis and comparison alike is that the monuments we have just passed in review form a continuous series, without break or discrepancy. We are led by almost imperceptible stages from those of unquestionable hoary antiquity on to exemplars which testify to the inroads Grecian art was making in the inland districts of the peninsula, foreshadowing its final and complete victory. Hence, it behoves us to guard against a conjecture, apt to arise in the mind of the archaeologist by superficial and hasty inspection of the fa9ades under consider- ation. Many a tomb of Caria, Pamphylia, and Lycia displays forms which at first startle the student by their seeming strange- ness, but when dissected and examined in detail, they turn out to be nothing more than Greek shapes, the poor or clumsy style of which is due to imperfect technique, local habits, or corrupted taste. Thus, about this and that structure one had been inclined to think very old there crops up a characteristic feature, a dated inscription which discloses the fact of its being the work of the decadence, of the second or third century A.D. In like manner, there is danger of antedating, doubts are felt, in regard to a number of monuments of the Ayazeen necropolis. Similar doubts we think we have forestalled. Here, in this district where the old Phrygian kingdom had its political and religious centre, all the monuments explorers have disinterred or reported are certainly the fruit of a primitive national art. The difference between them resides in the fact that some travel back to the age when this art created types and adopted processes of its own, whilst others belong to the period when, unwillingly and whilst disputing the ground step by step, it began to yield to the greater charms continental Greece was offering to her neigh- bours. The monuments embraced within the period which has the Midas rock at one end and the Kumbet tomb at the other, the older as the more recent, are all prior to the triumph of Hellenic genius a triumph which, prepared by the conquests of