History of Architecture

XIX.

CHAPTER I.

PRIMITIVE AND PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE.

Books Recommended: Desor, Les constructions lacustres du lac de Neufchatel. Fergusson, Rude Stone Monuments. R. C. Hoare, Ancients Wiltshire. Lyell, The Antiquity of Man. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times. Nadaillac, Prehistoric America. Rougemont, L’age du Bronze. Tylor, Primitive Culture.

EARLY BEGINNINGS. It is impossible to trace the early stages of the process by which true architecture grew out of the first rude attempts of man at building. The oldest existing monuments of architecture—those of Chaldæa and Egypt—belong to an advanced civilization. The rude and elementary structures built by savage and barbarous peoples, like the Hottentots or the tribes of Central Africa, are not in themselves works of architecture, nor is any instance known of the evolution of a civilized art from such beginnings. So far as the monuments testify, no savage people ever raised itself to civilization, and no primitive method of building was ever developed into genuine architecture, except by contact with some existing civilization of which it appropriated the spirit, the processes, and the forms. How the earliest architecture came into existence is as yet an unsolved problem.

PRIMITIVE ARCHITECTURE is therefore a subject for the archæologist rather than the historian of art, and needs here only the briefest mention. If we may judge of the condition of the primitive races of antiquity by that of the savage and barbarous peoples of our own time, they required 2only the simplest kinds of buildings, though the purposes which they served were the same as those of later times in civilized communities. A hut or house for shelter, a shrine of some sort for worship, a stockade for defence, a cairn or mound over the grave of the chief or hero, were provided out of the simplest materials, and these often of a perishable nature. Poles supplied the framework; wattles, skins, or mud the walls; thatching or stamped earth the roof. Only the simplest tools were needed for such elementary construction. There was ingenuity and patient labor in work of this kind; but there was no planning, no fitting together into a complex organism of varied materials shaped with art and handled with science. Above all, there was no progression toward higher ideals of fitness and beauty. Rudimentary art displayed itself mainly in objects of worship, or in carvings on canoes and weapons, executed as talismans to ward off misfortune or to charm the unseen powers; but even this art was sterile and never grew of itself into civilized and progressive art.

Yet there must have been at some point in the remote past an exception to this rule. Somewhere and somehow the people of Egypt must have developed from crude beginnings the architectural knowledge and resource which meet us in the oldest monuments, though every vestige of that early age has apparently perished. But although nothing has come down to us of the actual work of the builders who wrought in the primitive ages of mankind, there exist throughout Europe and Asia almost countless monuments of a primitive character belonging to relatively recent times, but executed before the advent of historic civilization to the regions where they are found. A general resemblance among them suggests a common heritage of traditions from the hoariest antiquity, and throws light on the probable character of the transition from barbaric to civilized architecture.

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PREHISTORIC MONUMENTS. These monuments vary widely as well as in excellence; some of them belong to Roman or even Christian times; others to a much remoter period. They are divided into two principal classes, the megalithic structures and lake dwellings. The latter class may be dismissed with the briefest mention. It comprises a considerable number of very primitive houses or huts built on wooden piles in the lakes of Switzerland and several other countries in both hemispheres, and forming in some cases villages of no mean size. Such villages, built over the water for protection from attack, are mentioned by the writers of antiquity and portrayed on Assyrian reliefs. The objects found in them reveal an incipient but almost stationary civilization, extending back from three thousand to five thousand years or more, and lasting through the ages of stone and bronze down into historic times.

The megalithic remains of Europe and Asia are far more important. They are very widely distributed, and consist in most cases of great blocks of stone arranged in rows, circles, or avenues, sometimes with huge lintels resting upon them. Upright stones without lintels are called menhirs; standing in pairs with lintels they are known as dolmens; the circles are called cromlechs. Some of the stones are of gigantic size, some roughly hewn into shape; others left as when quarried. Their age and purpose have been much discussed without reaching positive results. It is probable that, like the lake dwellings, they cover a long range of time, reaching from the dawn of recorded history some thousands of years back into the unknown past, and that they were erected by races which have disappeared before the migrations to which Europe owes her present populations. That most of them were in some way connected with the worship of these prehistoric peoples is generally admitted; but whether as temples, tombs, or memorials 4of historical or mythical events cannot, in all cases, be positively asserted. They were not dwellings or palaces, and very few were even enclosed buildings. They are imposing by the size and number of their immense stones, but show no sign of advanced art, or of conscious striving after beauty of design. The small number of carved stones, bearing singular ornamental patterns, symbolic or mystical rather than decorative in intention, really tends to prove this statement rather than to controvert it. It is not impossible that the dolmens were generally intended to be covered by mounds of earth. This would group them with the tumuli referred to below, and point to a sepulchral purpose in their erection. Some antiquaries, Fergusson among them, contend that many of the European circles and avenues were intended as battle-monuments or trophies.

There are also walls of great antiquity in various parts of Europe, intended for fortification; the most important of these in Greece and Italy will be referred to in later chapters. They belong to a more advanced art, some of them even deserving to be classed among works of archaic architecture.

The tumuli, or burial mounds, which form so large a part of the prehistoric remains of both continents, are interesting to the architect only as revealing the prototypes of the pyramids of Egypt and the subterranean tombs of Mycenæ and other early Greek centres. The piling of huge cairns or commemorative heaps of stone is known from the Scriptures and other ancient writings to have been a custom of the greatest antiquity. The pyramids and the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus are the most imposing and elaborate outgrowths of this practice, of which the prehistoric tumuli are the simpler manifestations.

These crude and elementary products of undeveloped civilizations have no place, however, in any list of genuine architectural works. They belong rather to the domain of 5archæology and ethnology, and have received this brief mention only as revealing the beginnings of the builder’s art, and the wide gap that separates them from that genuine architecture which forms the subject of the following chapters.

MONUMENTS: The most celebrated in England are at Avebury, an avenue, large and small circles, barrows, and the great tumuli of Bartlow and Silbury Hills; at Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, great megalithic circles and many barrows; Sarsen stones at Ashdown; tumuli, dolmens, chambers, and circles in Derbyshire. In Ireland, many cairns and circles. In Scotland, circles and barrows in the Orkney Islands. In France, Carnac and Lokmariaker in Brittany are especially rich in dolmens, circles, and avenues. In Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy, in India and in Africa, are many similar remains.

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CHAPTER II.

EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE.

Books Recommended: Champollion, Monuments de l’Egypte et de la Nubie. Choisy, L’art de bâtir chez les Egyptiens. Flinders-Petrie, History of Egypt; Ten Years Digging in Egypt, 1881–91. Jomard, Description de l’Egypte, Antiquités. Lepsius, Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien. Mariette, Monuments of Upper Egypt. Maspero, Egyptian Archæology. Perrot and Chipiez, History of Art in Ancient Egypt. Prisse d’Avennes, Histoire de l’art égyptien. Reber, History of Ancient Art. Rossellini, Monumenti del Egitto. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians.

LAND AND PEOPLE. As long ago as 5000 b.c., the Egyptians were a people already highly civilized, and skilled in the arts of peace and war. The narrow valley of the Nile, fertilized by the periodic overflow of the river, was flanked by rocky heights, nearly vertical in many places, which afforded abundance of excellent building stone, while they both isolated the Egyptians and protected them from foreign aggression. At the Delta, however, the valley widened out, with the falling away of these heights, into broad lowlands, from which there was access to the outer world.

The art history of Egypt may be divided into five periods as follows:

I. The Ancient Empire (cir. 4500?-3000 b.c.), comprising the first ten dynasties, with Memphis as the capital.

II. The First Theban Monarchy or Middle Empire (3000–2100 b.c.) comprising the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth dynasties reigning at Thebes.

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The Hyksos invasion, or incursion of the Shepherd Kings, interrupted the current of Egyptian art history for a period of unknown length, probably not less than four or five centuries.

III. The Second Theban Monarchy (1700?-1000 b.c.), comprising the eighteenth to twentieth dynasties inclusive, was the great period of Egyptian history; the age of conquests and of vast edifices.

IV. The Decadence or Saitic Period (1000–324 b.c.), comprising the dynasties twenty-one to thirty (Saitic, Bubastid, Ethiopic, etc.), reigning at Sais, Tanis, and Bubastis, and the Persian conquest; a period almost barren of important monuments.

(Periods III. and IV. constitute together the period of the New Empire, if we omit the Persian dominion.)

V. The Revival (from 324 b.c. to cir. 330 a.d.) comprises the Ptolemaic or Macedonian and Roman dominations.

THE ANCIENT EMPIRE: THE PYRAMIDS. The great works of this period are almost exclusively sepulchral, and include the most ancient buildings of which we have any remains. While there is little of strictly architectural art, the overwhelming size and majesty of the Pyramids, and the audacity and skill shown in their construction, entitle them to the first place in any sketch of this period. They number over a hundred, scattered in six groups, from Abu-Roash in the north to Meidoum in the south, and are of various shapes and sizes. They are all royal tombs and belong to the first twelve dynasties; each contains a sepulchral chamber, and each at one time possessed a small chapel adjacent to it, but this has, in almost every case, perished.

Three pyramids surpass all the rest by their prodigious size; these are at Ghizeh and belong to the fourth dynasty. They are known by the names of their builders; the oldest and greatest being that of  Cheops , or Khufu; 1  the second,  8 that of  Chephren , or Khafra; and the third, that of  Mycerinus , or Menkhara. Other smaller ones stand at the feet of these giants.

FIG. 1.—SECTION OF GREAT PYRAMID.

a, King’s Chamber; b, Queen’s Chamber; c, Chamber cut in Rock.

The base of the Great Pyramid measures 764 feet on a side; its height is 482 feet, and its volume must have originally been nearly three and one-half million cubic yards (Fig. 1). It is constructed of limestone upon a plateau of rock levelled to receive it, and was finished externally, like its two neighbors, with a coating of polished stone, supposed by some to have been disposed in bands of different colored granites, but of which it was long ago despoiled. It contained three principal chambers and an elaborate system of inclined passages, all executed in finely cut granite and limestone. The sarcophagus was in the uppermost chamber, above which the superincumbent weight was relieved by open spaces and a species of rudimentary arch of Λ-shape (Fig. 2). The other two pyramids differ from that of Cheops in the details of their arrangement and in size, not in the principle of their construction. Chephren is 454 feet high, with a base 717 9feet square. Mycerinus, which still retains its casing of pink granite, is but 218 feet in height, with a base 253 feet on a side.

FIG. 2.—SECTION OF KING’S CHAMBER.

Among the other pyramids there is considerable variety both of type and material. At Sakkarah is one 190 feet high, constructed in six unequal steps on a slightly oblong base measuring nearly 400 × 357 feet. It was attributed by Mariette to Ouenephes, of the first dynasty, though now more generally ascribed to Senefrou of the third. At Abu-Seir and Meidoum are other stepped pyramids; at Dashour is one having a broken slope, the lower part steeper than the upper. Several at Meroë with unusually steep slopes belong to the Ethiopian dynasties of the Decadence. A number of pyramids are built of brick.

FIG. 3.—PLAN OF SPHINX TEMPLE.

TOMBS. The Ancient Empire has also left us a great number of tombs of the type known as Mastabas. These are oblong rectangular structures of stone or brick with slightly inclined sides and flat ceilings. They uniformly face the east, and are internally divided into three parts; the chamber or chapel, theserdab, and the well. In the first of these, next the entrance, were placed the offerings made to the Kaor double, for whom 10also scenes of festivity or worship were carved and painted on its walls to minister to his happiness in his incorporeal life. The serdabs, or secret inner chambers, of which there were several in each mastaba, contained statues of the defunct, by which the existence and identity of the Ka were preserved. Finally came the well, leading to the mummy chamber, deep underground, which contained the sarcophagus. The sarcophagi, both of this and later ages, are good examples of the minor architecture of Egypt; many of them are panelled in imitation of wooden construction and richly decorated with color, symbols, and hieroglyphs.

FIG. 4.—RUINS OF SPHINX TEMPLE.

OTHER MONUMENTS. Two other monuments of the Ancient Empire also claim attention: the Sphinx and the adjacent so-called "Sphinx temple" at Ghizeh. The first of these, a huge sculpture carved from the rock, represents Harmachis in the form of a human-headed lion. It is ordinarily partly buried in the sand; is 70 feet long by 66 feet high, and forms one of the most striking monuments of Egyptian art. Close to it lie the nearly buried ruins of the temple once supposed to be that of the Sphinx, but now proved by Petrie to have been erected in connection with the second pyramid. The plan and present aspect of this venerable edifice are shown in Figs. 3 and 4. The hall was roofed with stone lintels carried on sixteen square monolithic piers of alabaster. The whole was buried in a rectangular mass of masonry and revetted internally with alabaster, but was wholly destitute internally as well as externally of decoration or even of mouldings. With the exception of scanty remains of a few of the pyramid-temples or chapels, and the 11temple discovered by Petrie in Meidoum, it is the only survival from the temple architecture of that early age.

FIG. 5.—TOMB AT ABYDOS.

THE MIDDLE EMPIRE: TOMBS. The monuments of this period, as of the preceding, are almost wholly sepulchral. We now encounter two types of tombs. One, structural and pyramidal, is represented by many examples at Abydos, the most venerated of all the burial grounds of Egypt (Fig. 5). All of these are built of brick, and are of moderate size and little artistic interest. The second type is that of tombs cut in the vertical cliffs of the west bank of the Nile Valley. The entrance to these faces eastward as required by tradition; the remoter end of the excavation pointing toward the land of the Sun of Night. But such tunnels only become works of architecture when, in addition to the customary mural paintings, they receive a decorative treatment in the design of their structural forms. 

FIG. 6.—TOMB AT BENI-HASSAN.Such a treatment appears in several tombs at Beni-Hassan, in which columns are reserved in cutting away the rock, both in the chapel-chambers and in the vestibules or porches which precede them. These columns are polygonal in some cases, clustered 12in others. The former type, with eight, sixteen, or thirty-two sides (in these last the arrises or edges are emphasized by a slight concavity in each face, like embryonic fluting), have a square abacus, suggesting the Greek Doric order, and giving rise to the name proto-Doric (Fig. 6). Columns of this type are also found at Karnak, Kalabshé, Amada, and Abydos. A reminiscence of primitive wood construction is seen in the dentils over the plain architrave of the entrance, which in other respects recalls the triple entrances to certain mastabas of the Old Empire. These dentils are imitations of the ends of rafters, and to some archæologists suggest a wooden origin for the whole system of columnar design. But these rock-cut shafts and heavy architraves in no respect resemble wooden prototypes, but point rather to an imitation cut in the rock of a well-developed, pre-existing system of stone construction, some of whose details, however, were undoubtedly derived from early methods of building in wood. The vault was below the chapel and reached by a separate entrance. The serdab was replaced by a niche in which was the figure of the defunct carved from the native rock. Some of the 13tombs employed in the chapel-chamber columns of quatrefoil section with capitals like clustered buds (Fig. 7), and this type became in the next period one of the most characteristic forms of Egyptian architecture.

FIG. 7.—SECTION AND HALF-PLAN OF A TOMB AT BENI-HASSAN.

TEMPLES. Of the temples of this period only two have left any remains of importance. Both belong to the twelfth dynasty (cir. 2200 b.c.). Of one of these many badly shattered fragments have been found in the ruins of Bubastis; these show the clustered type of lotus-bud column mentioned above. The other, of which a few columns have been identified among the ruins of the Great Temple at Karnak, constituted the oldest part of that vast agglomeration of religious edifices, and employed columns of the so-called proto-Doric type. From these remains it appears that structural stone columns as well as those cut in the rock were used at this early period (2200 b.c.). Indeed, it is probable that the whole architectural system of the New Empire was based on models developed in the age we are considering; that the use of multiplied columns of various types and the building of temples of complex plan adorned with colossal statues, obelisks, and painted reliefs, were perfectly understood and practised in this period. But the works it produced have perished, having been most probably demolished to make way for the more sumptuous edifices of later times.

THE NEW EMPIRE. This was the grand age of Egyptian architecture and history. An extraordinary series of mighty men ruled the empire during a long period following the expulsion of the Hyksos usurpers. The names of Thothmes, Amenophis, Hatasu, Seti, and Rameses made glorious the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties. Foreign conquests in Ethiopia, Syria, and Assyria enlarged the territory and increased the splendor of the empire. The majority of the most impressive ruins of Egypt belong to this period, and it was in these buildings that the characteristic 14elements of Egyptian architecture were brought to perfection and carried out on the grandest scale.

FIG. 8.—PLAN OF THE RAMESSEUM.

a, Sanctuary; b, Hypostyle Hall; c, Second court; d, Entrance court; e, Pylons.

TOMBS OF THE NEW EMPIRE.  Some of these are structural, others excavated; both types displaying considerable variety in arrangement and detail. The rock-cut tombs of Bab-el-Molouk, among which are twenty-five royal sepulchres, are striking both by the simplicity of their openings and the depth and complexity of their shafts, tunnels, and chambers. From the pipe-like length of their tunnels they have since the time of Herodotus been known by the name  syrinx . Every precaution was taken to lead astray and baffle the intending violator of their sanctity. They penetrated hundreds of feet