Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/385

 FUNERARY ARCHITECTURE. 369 connected with a sepulchral chamber (Fig. 263), of which a perspective view is given in Fig. 261. It was an open vestibule, divided into two sections by a pilaster, wherein we recognize a copy of the beam which in the wooden house upheld the roof of the pent-house. The entrance to the hypogeum was closed with a slab, and stood behind this kind of porch ; but it was neither on the axis of the vestibule nor of the chamber an irregularity that may have been due to the shape of the rock in which the sepulchre was excavated. As to the doorway, if in defiance of the laws of symmetry it faces a side opening in the porch, it was to facilitate the passage of the bodies. Nowhere in this region do we find rows of chambers, such as obtained in the centre of the peninsula ; whilst no attempt at architectonic effect is perceptible in the specimens whose approaches testify to more ambi- tious aims. Hence it is that Lycian tombs, even the most ornate, always remind us of what they originally were mere holes, just large enough to receive a corpse. No transition is observable between the primitive tomb and that which simulates the front of a wooden house covered with a flat roof; so that we are led to conclude that, from the day when they adopted this mode of construction, imitation of carpentry- work was everywhere faithful and complete. There is but one notable deviation from this universal rule. In addition to the terrace-roof sustained by small beams (roundels), we find a second covering, a roof with double slope, which, seen front-ways, yields a curvilinear gable, ogee-shaped (Fig. 264). l Some have supposed that this was in imitation of those light constructions set up, in warm countries, on the terraces terminating the houses, so as to screen the inmates against the sun or evening dew, and which become the living apartment during great part 1 Instances of an arched gable roof, though less frequent, are also met with. Such would be the covering of a tomb at Hoiran (BENNDORF, Reisen, torn. i. p. 33. Fig- 25). 2 B FIG. 263. Plan of tomb. Pinara. BEN N DORK, A'etsen, torn. i. Fig. 34.