Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/372

 356 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. a whole apparatus of pulleys fixed to the apex of the cliff for the upper specimens. Similar recesses may have received human ashes, but there is no reason why corpses enclosed within coffins should not have been safe in them, since nothing short of a pair of wings would enable one to get so high up. Then, too, it is probable that these niches are not all of one date, or very ancient ; since we know that they continued to be pierced in the flank of the hill for the accommodation of the poor, even when funerary architecture, bent upon gratifying the conceit FIG. 249. Wooden house in Lycia. Restoration of primitive type. BENNDORF, Reisen, torn. i. Fig. 53. of the wealthy, had learned to fashion more complicated stone shapes. The most original tomb of Lycia is also the most ancient, and the reproduction on stone of a wooden construction. It admits of many variations, but they are all reducible to one type, the characteristics of which are clearly brought out in the annexed diagram (Fig. 249), due to M. Niemann, the architect who accom- panied M. Benndorf to Lycia. Upon a plinth which represents the ground, or rather the low wall which was to prevent the planks from