Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/371

 FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE. 355 entitled to figure them here as survivals and witnesses of a remote past, as true representatives of national architecture. 1 Sepulchral mounds are unknown in Lycia, and are proper to flat countries. If we have met the type on the borders of the Smyrnian bay, in the Hermus valley, and the coasts of Caria, it is just possible that we ought to look upon it as the survival of an old habit contracted in far-off days, when Mysian and Phrygian tribes still occupied the plains of Thracia ; a type they had brought with them when they invaded Asia Minor, and which long practice caused them to retain for a while at least. The neighbouring tribes of Lydia and Caria borrowed it from them, The populations that inhabited the western part of the peninsula were all closely related ; the languages they spoke resembled each other, and some of their cults were common to all ; hence amalgamation between many of these clans had been easy, and so complete that they could not be distin- guished one from the other. Not so with the Lycian people. Wherever they came from we find them entrenched behind Taurus apart from the rest. Their territory was a network of narrow valleys, and the rock was everywhere to hand, but of suffi- cient softness to lend itself to be attacked without much effort, and of sufficient firmness to retain almost entire shapes traced by the chisel. Hence it is that from the outset, tombs were excavated in the depth of the stone. Rectangular niches are recognized on all hands as the most ancient type ; these are generally met with in the neighbourhood of towns, their dark apertures looming out of the face of tall walls perpendicularly cut. 2 They are cut to a depth of about two metres, and quite plain ; the rock in places is perfectly honeycombed with them, so that a little way off below the Acropolis at Pinara, for example the stone surface looks as if covered with gigantic wasps' nests. Such niches are open, and seem always to have been open ; nor is there much probability that thieves, even the most reckless and daring, would have cared to risk breaking their necks in order to rifle them. They are almost all inaccessible, so that to excavate even the lower- most scaffolding had to be set up close to the calcareous rock, and 1 Our account of Lycian tombs is no more than a summary of Benndorf's exposition in Reisen, pp. 95-113, torn. i. chap. ix. By far the greater proportion of the woodcuts found in the book are reduced copies of Niemann's skilful and accurate pencil drawings. Others are taken from the photograph plates of von Luschan, which serve to illustrate Benndorfs work. a BENNDORF, Reisen, torn. i. pp. 48 and 96, Plates XVIII. and XL.