CHAPTER VI—ARCHITECTURE
Origin of the architecture in rock dwellings—Second style,
a combination of the native rock with the ordinary wall—
Later on, the use of the native rock, discarded—Employment
of huge blocks of stone in the early walls—Absence of
cement—Bevelling—Occurrence of Cyclopian walls—Several
architectural members comprised in one block—Phoenician
shrines—The Maabed and other shrines at Amrith—Phoenician
temples—Temple of Paphos—Adjuncts to temples—Museum of
Golgi—Treasure chambers of Curium—Walls of Phoenician
towns—Phoenician tombs—Excavated chambers—Chambers built
of masonry—Groups of chambers—Colonnaded tomb—Sepulchral
monuments—The Burdj-el-Bezzâk—The Kabr Hiram—The two
Méghâzil—Tomb with protected entrance—Phoenician
ornamentation—Pillars and their capitals—Cornices and
mouldings—Pavements in mosaic and alabaster—False arches—
Summary.
The architecture of the Phoenicians began with the fashioning of the native rock—so abundant in all parts of the country where they had settled themselves—into dwellings, temples, and tombs. The calcareous limestone, which is the chief geological formation along the Syrian coast, is worked with great ease; and it contains numerous fissures and caverns,[61] which a very moderate amount of labour and skill is capable of converting into fairly comfortable dwelling-places. It is probable that the first settlers found a refuge for a time in these natural grottos, which after a while they proceeded to improve and enlarge, thus obtaining a practical power of dealing with the material, and an experimental knowledge of its advantages and defects. But it was not long before these simple dwellings ceased to content them, and they were seized with an ambition to construct more elaborate edifices—edifices such as they must have seen in the lands through which they had passed on their way from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the seaboard of the Mediterranean. They could not at once, however, divest themselves of their acquired habits, and consequently, their earliest buildings continued to have, in part, the character of rock dwellings, while in part they were constructions of the more ordinary and regular type. The remains of a dwelling-house at Amrith,[62] the ancient Marathus, offer a remarkable example of this intermixture of styles. The rock has been cut away so as to leave standing two parallel walls 33 yards long, 19 feet high, and 2 1/2 feet thick, which are united by transverse party-walls formed in the same way.[63] Windows and doorways are cut in the walls, some square at top, some arched. At the two ends the main walls were united partly by the native rock, partly by masonry. The northern wall was built of masonry from the very foundation, the southern consisted for a portion of its height of the native rock, while above that were several courses of stones carrying it up further. At Aradus and at Sidon, similarly, the town walls are formed in many places of native rock, squared and smoothed, up to a certain height, after which courses of stone succeed each other in the ordinary fashion. It is as if the Phoenician builders could not break themselves of an inveterate habit, and rather than disuse it entirely submitted to an intermixture which was not without a certain amount of awkwardness.
Another striking example of the mixed system is found at a little distance from Amrith, in the case of a building which appears to have been a shrine, tabernacle, or sanctuary. The site is a rocky platform, about a mile from the shore. Here the rock has been cut away to a depth varying from three to six yards, and a rectangular court has been formed, 180 feet long by 156 feet wide, in the centre of which has been left a single block of the stone, still of one piece with the court, which rises to a height of ten feet, and forms the basis or pedestal of the shrine itself.[64] The shrine is built of a certain number of large blocks, which have been quarried and brought to the spot; it has a stone roof with an entablature, and attains an elevation above the court of not less than twenty-seven feet. The dimensions of the shrine are small, not much exceeding seventeen feet each way.[65]
From constructions of this mixed character the transition was easy to buildings composed entirely of detached stones put together in the ordinary manner. Here, what is chiefly remarkable in the Phoenician architecture is the tendency to employ, especially for the foundations and lower courses of buildings, enormous blocks. When the immovable native rock is no longer available, the resource is to make use of vast masses of stone, as nearly immovable as possible. The most noted example is that of the substructions which supported the platform whereon stood the Temple of Jerusalem, which was the work of the Phoenician builders whom Hiram lent to Solomon.[66] These substructions, laid bare at their base by the excavations of the Palestine Exploration Fund, are found to consist of blocks measuring from fifteen to twenty-five feet in length, and from ten to twelve feet in height. The width of the blocks at the angles of the wall, where alone it can be measured, is from twelve to eighteen feet. At the south-west angle no fewer than thirty-one courses of this massive character have been counted by the recent explorers, who estimate the weight of the largest block at something above a hundred tons![67]
A similar method of construction is found to have prevailed at Tyre, at Sidon, at Aradus, at Byblus, at Leptis Major, at Eryx, at Motya, at Gaulos, and at Lixus on the West African coast. The blocks employed do not reach the size of the largest discovered at Jerusalem, but still are of dimensions greatly exceeding those of most builders, varying, as they do, from six feet to twenty feet in length, and being often as much as seven or eight feet in breadth and height. As the building rises, the stones diminish in size, and the upper courses are often in no way remarkable. Stones of various sizes are used, and often the courses are not regular, but one runs into another. A tower in the wall of Eryx is a good specimen of this kind of construction.[68]
Where the stones are small, mortar has been employed by the builders, but where they are of a large size, they are merely laid side by side in rows or courses, without mortar or cement of any kind, and remain in place through their own mass and weight. In the earliest style of building the blocks are simply squared,[69] and the wall composed of them presents a flat and level surface, or one only broken by small and casual irregularities; but, when their ideas became more advanced, the Phoenicians preferred that style of masonry which is commonly regarded as peculiarly, if not exclusively, theirs[610]—the employment of large blocks with deeply bevelled edges. The bevel is a depression round the entire side of the stone, which faces outwards, and may be effected either by a sloping cut which removes the right-angle from the edge, or by two cuts, one perpendicular and the other horizontal, which take out from the edge a rectangular bar or plinth. The Phoenician bevelling is of this latter kind, and is generally accompanied by an artificial roughening of the surface inside the bevel, which offers a strong contrast to the smooth and even surface of the bevel itself.[611] The style is highly ornamental and effective, particularly where a large space of wall has to be presented to the eye, unbroken by door or window.[612]
Occasionally, but very rarely, and only (so far as appears) in their remoter dependencies, the Phoenicians constructed their buildings in the rude and irregular way, which has been called Cyclopian, employing unhewn polygonal blocks of various sizes, and fitting them roughly together. The temples discovered in Malta and Gozzo have masonry of this description.[613]
A peculiarity in Phoenician architecture, connected with the preference for enormous blocks over stones of a moderate size, is the frequent combination in a single mass of distinct architectural members; for instance, of the shaft and capital of pillars, of entire pediments with a portion of the wall below them, and of the walls of monuments with the cornice and architrave. M. Renan has made some strong remarks on this idiosyncrasy. “In the Grecian style,” he says, “the beauty of the wall is a main object with the architect, and the wall derives its beauty from the divisions between the stones, which observe symmetrical laws, and are in agreement with the general lines of the edifice. In a style of this kind the stones of a wall have, all of them, the same dimension, and this dimension is determined by the general plan of the building; or else, as in the kind of work which is called ‘pseud-isodomic,’ the very irregularity of the courses is governed by a law of symmetry. The stones of the architrave, the metopes, the triglyphs, are, all of them, separate blocks, even when it would have been perfectly easy to have included in a single block all these various members. Such facts, as one observes frequently in Syria, where three or four architectural members are brought out from a single block, would have appeared to the Greeks monstrous, since they are the negation of all logic."[614]
In cannot be denied that the habit of preferring large to small blocks, even in monuments of a very moderate size, involved the Phoenician architects in awkwardnesses and anomalies, which offend a cultivated taste; but it should be remembered, on the other hand, that massiveness in the material conduces greatly to stability, and that, in lands where earthquakes are frequent, as they are along all the Mediterranean shores, not many monuments would have survived the lapse of three thousand years had the material employed been of a less substantial and solid character.