Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/370

 354 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. CHAPTER II. ARCHITECTURE. FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE. THE Lycians, to consider them only during the period of their independence, have left but few monuments outside of their tombs ; but they are of so marked a character as to have struck travellers such as Leake, Fellows, Texier, Spratt, and many more, who, in the beginning of this century, revealed them to Europe along with the country in which they occur. In the number of these tombs (of which plans and drawings were made), very few travel back to the period within which we wish to confine ourselves in this history of art. The vast majority of the exemplars we shall cite are later than the Persian conquest, and not a few, accompanied by Greek inscriptions, date from the Macedonian era. Nevertheless, we shall find that the original aspect of these monuments was not suggested by Grecian art, since the forms that are proper to the latter, have naught comparable to the bulk of those that appear in the Lycian necropoles. To account for the fact that types so peculiar as these should have persisted ages after their creation, we must suppose that they were truly indigenous, with all the term implies ; and had originated from practices, imposed by the nature of the materials employed, intimately bound up with the life of the Lycian people, who persistently clung to them even when their statuary had made itself thoroughly Greek in style, and borrowed most of its themes from Hellenic myths, to decorate these very tombs. Consequently, whatever be the date, real or supposed, these strange monuments carry about them, and which Lycia alone possesses, we are