Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/296

 280 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. within which the elders withdrew themselves on market days, to avoid the turmoil and bustle going on around them. To have fulfilled the condition of a place of rest, the house must have stood in the lower city ; for requiring old men to climb up the high and steep hill upon which the citadel was perched, would have been anything but a relief to their shaky aged limbs. The foundations at least of this important edifice must still exist, and would in all likelihood be found on one of the platforms staged between the flat level and the precipices terminating the Acropolis on the north. The fact that the palace lasted more than five centuries, is strong evidence that it was built of bricks baked in the kiln, Raw bricks were largely employed in the building of private houses ; these, if we are to believe Herodotus, 500 B.C., were nothing more than huts thatched with reeds ; and even in those instances when the walls were made of brick, the roof was invariably thatched ; 1 hence it was that one of these ephemeral huts having been set on fire, the flames soon spread to the whole town and brought about its destruction. Until the Persian conquest (divided from the Ionian rebellion by a little over forty years), buildings of great importance, as the tomb of Alyattes and the palace, were only erected by the kings and grandees of Lydia ; so that the town, which was open, had the appearance of a huge village. SCULPTURE AND NUMISMATICS. If not a single sculptured work remains which may be attributed to the Lydians with any reasonableness, this is to be accounted for in their marked preference for built tombs, those in which the vault is hidden away in the depths of the tumulus. Had they, like the Phrygians and the Paphlagonians, hollowed the sepulchres of their kings in the living rock, bas-reliefs would have been preserved about Tmolus and the neighbouring hills, akin to those we have met on the central plateau. But rock- sculptures are rare within the Lydian territory, and, to judge from their execution, they clearly belong to the time of the Roman dominion. 2 1 VITRUVIUS, De Architectura, ii. 10 ; PLINY, loc. tit., xxxv. 49. 2 In Voyage Archeologique of Le Bas, Plate LV., " Itine'raire," are reproduced three bas-reliefs, the originals of which are found at Ammam, in the Upper Hermus,