Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/292

 276 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. blocks at the four corners of the chambers, thus making a rect- angle within a rectangle and reducing the opening. The only attempt to decorate the bare surface of the walls is found in a tiny cornice, a simple quarter round, which surrounds the roof of the vault (Fig. 185). The eastern and western walls are straight, as in the Tantaleis tomb of Smyrna (Fig. 186). Springing from the other walls, at a height of i m. 55 c., is a corbel arch, made of two courses of four blocks, two on each side (Fig. 187). Fearing that the system would yield under the weight of accumulated earth, the builder placed a discharging chamber above the roof, which is entered by an opening pierced in the vault. The material employed in the building of this loft was not prepared with the same care as in the other sections of the struc- ture ; nevertheless the end aimed at was obtained by setting the courses slightly in advance one of the other, thus nar- rowing by degrees a space of more than two metres in height. The fact that the tomb has been opened for centuries, explains the absence of a funereal bed and of any fragment by which it might be approximately dated. The ex- plorer who has described it insists on the regularity of the material employed, and is led to infer from it that the tomb was erected under Greek influence, at an age when the taste was felt for a better and more perfect art than could have been known to the contemporaries of Alyattes and Croesus. The draw- ings he has furnished are inade- quate, however, and on too small a scale to permit us properly to judge of the difference between the two sets of monuments. FK;. 184. Plan of chambers. Weber, Plate I. Fig. 7. FIG. 185. Perspective view of second chamber, F. Ibid., Fig. 5.