Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/135

 io6 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. that could be adopted with equal success. On the resaults of the circuit, which play the part of towers, we have put a crenela- tion formed by a huge single block, like those constituting the wall, and placed in such a way as to make it project beyond the terminal course. To have distributed and bedded hundreds of such blocks along the wall coping would have involved too protracted and arduous a labour. At Troy they discovered a more speedy process, which consisted in surmounting the stone wall by one made of clay. A brick embattlement could be run up in a few hours ; hence we have planned our parapets in this way both at Mycenae and Tiryns. There are no possible reasons for thinking that the Mycenian builder did not find out for himself the contrivances under notice. He was stimulated thereto by the conditions of the surroundings in which the sphere of his activity was exercised, and also by the wealth of the materials to his hand, the difficulty being only how to choose. If some should be inclined to believe that the solution of the problem was facilitated by the employment of certain types seen here, and imported from countries older in cultured ways, we should have no "difficulty in pointing out whence originated the models upon which they worked. In their distant- migrations and ad- venturous expeditions in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, >| Achaean and other tribes closely related to them landed more than once on Egyptian and Syrian shores, where the dash of their bands spent itself against the fortress-walls which they there 1 encountered. These, we know from the wall-paintings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasty, were all furnished with cre- nelations.^ Embattled edges, first as defence, then as ornament, played an equally important part in Phoenician buildings ; ^ it was the same for thousands of years throughout Anterior Asia. We are aware that Assyrian bas-beliefs, wherein are figured countless sieges and places taken by storm, are later in time than the citadels of Argolis, and that Assyria invented nothing. In her civil and military architecture she did little more than apply the methods she had inherited from Chaldsea, where embattlemenis had been popular at an early date, owing, as we have shown, to the ease and rapidity with which battlements can be constructed in a brick wall.^ Whether the form in question was suggested from with- 1 History of Art 2 /^/^. 8 /^/^. I f i:'