Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/374

 358 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. of our model leaves the impression that the timber hut has two stories above the ground floor : in the tomb, however, in order to enhance the effect of the frontispiece and the importance of the funereal chamber, the horizontal beam of the first story has been left out, so that door and panels are two stories high. If the door in our illustration is not indicated, it is because vaults were sealed with a slab fitting a grove a mode of closing improper to wooden constructions. The size of the pieces that make up the false timber-framing is proportionate to the scale of the tomb in which they occur. In a general way the uprights have a mean square of thirty centimetres, whilst the diameter of the small round beams is about ten centimetres. Here and there, particu- larities of a purely decora- tive nature are observable in the type we have just reconstituted, which cannot be explained by the exigencies of the materials, and must be ascribed to the individual taste or whim of a nation. Such would be the crocket-like ending of the cross-beams, B c (Fig. 249). In order to find aught resembling it, we must needs travel to the far East, to Japan, the doorways (turt] of whose temples exhibit, placed lintel-wise upon wooden shafts, beams turned up at the extremities exactly like these. 1 Then, too, the light salience of the entablature is quite as remarkable ; for its straight profiles, unbroken by curves of any kind, were not calculated to throw off rain water. It would be vain to deny that more than one detail about the structure under consideration is exceedingly singular ; yet its main lines are decidedly those of an ordinary timber structure, which any chance artisan could reproduce at will. When we see with what constancy the dispositions we have described reappear in every tomb, we are loth to believe that the type to which they 1 BENNDORF, Reisen, torn. i. p. 95, Fig. 52. FlG. 251. Tomb at Hoiran. Lateral eastern side. BENNDORF, Reisen, torn. ii. Fig. 16.