Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/408

 392 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. CHAPTER IV. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF LYCIAN CIVILIZATION. IT would be natural that some surprise should have been felt at the place we have assigned to Lycia, inasmuch as the plan pur- sued in this history does not extend to that class of Lycian monu- ments which have most occupied the attention of archaeologists. In so doing we were actuated by the fact that Lycia, in virtue of her origin, alphabet, language, and certain sides of her plastic art, belongs to that very old world of Anterior Asia whose develop- ment preceded, as it prepared, the unfolding of Hellenic culture. Nowhere is her primaeval social state more evident, than in the curious rock-inscriptions seen on the fa9ades of tombs built in imitation of wood structures. Timbers are connected at right angles in the valley of the Nile. This habit of the Egyptian builder arose out of his predilection for perpendicular and horizontal lines, which led him carefully to banish from the walls and roofs of his edifices oblique pieces. The fact that the woods within reach of his hand were mediocre in the extreme, that stately beams could not be obtained, nor square pieces of any length, and far less curvilinear ones, may have had something to do with, but was not the sole reason for a choice which endows his wooden house with its look of firmness and chest-like aspect, since he carried these same elements into constructions scarcely needing them, in those light open structures, which we attempted to restore from paintings where they often figure. In both classes of buildings he had recourse to almost smooth faces and flat attics. With him square vertical beams play an all-important part ; they are put close to each other over the whole surface, the only voids being those required for the piercing of doorways and windows, whilst their width is so feeble as only to allow of narrow divisions or panelling. On the other hand, the balance between uprights and cross-