Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/375

 FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE. 359 gave rise was the work of a single day, invented for the sole purpose of entombment, and the conviction forces itself upon the mind that it is no more than a petrified wooden house, the copy of a style of domestic dwelling which at one time obtained through- out the country. On the ground floor were the stables ; the household occupied the rooms of the first story, over which was the loft or store-room. For the rest, the building was of the simplest description no oblique joining of the timbers, no gable roof; and as its component parts were apt to shrink and give way, it always failed in the one essential of solidity. Finally, as every man who has travelled in Syria has learnt to his cost, horizontal roofs are doubtless capital screens against the heat, but their very flatness unfits them for throwing off the rains that fall in great abundance for days together during the winter months. A system with serious drawbacks such as these would never have been retained unless coeval with Lycian civilization itself, long habit having made its creators insensible to its defects. A parallel case may be observed in Japan, where for thousands of years the natives have been faithful to a style of house, of which the timber framing is still more elementary than that which we surmise behind the veil of the rock-cut sepulchre. Some have advanced the opinion that tombs of this kind are an exact representation of a funereal pyre. 1 The notion is so strange that we find some difficulty in understanding how it ever was allowed at all. Is it conceivable that the Lycians would have endowed their pyres with so complicated a shape, and have been at the trouble of squaring and connecting timbers about to be destroyed ? The conjecture is all the more risky that the internal dispositions of these sepulchres presuppose that bodies rather than human ashes were deposited in them. The remains of stone houses, said to exist on the site of Lycian cities, are adduced in support of the above theory ; but similar remains are seldom found except in districts where wood is scarce. Moreover, wherever irrefragable evidences have permitted to fix the date of such fragments at Istlada, for instance it is found that they do not lead back to high antiquity. 2 From the day when Lycians adopted Greek models, the chief citi- zens, those with Ionian sculptors in their employ, must have directed them not only to decorate their tombs, but to construct them stone 1 SEMPER, Der Slil, i. pp. 230, 315, 318, 430, and following. 3 BENNDORF, Reisen, torn. i. pp. 30, 99.