A History of Architecture in all Countries, Volume 1, 3rd ed. / From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

by James Fergusson

It was this possession of an alphabet, conjoined with the sublimity of their monotheistic creed, that gave these races the only superiority to which they have attained. It is this which has enabled them to keep themselves pure and undefiled in all the catastrophes to which they have been exposed, and that still enables their literature and their creed to exert an influence over almost all the nations of the earth, even in times when the people themselves have been held in most supreme contempt.

Arts.

It may have been partly in consequence of their love of phonetic literature, and partly in order to keep themselves distinct from those great builders the Turanians, that the Semitic races never erected a building worthy of the name; neither at Jerusalem, nor at Tyre or Sidon, nor at Carthage, is there any vestige of Semitic Architectural Art. Not that these have perished, but because they never existed. When Solomon proposed to build a temple at Jerusalem, though plain externally, and hardly so large as an ordinary parish church, he was forced to have recourse to some Turanian people to do it for him, and by a display of gold and silver and brass ornaments to make up for the architectural forms he knew not how to apply.

In Assyria we have palaces of dynasties more or less purely Semitic, splendid enough, but of wood and sunburnt bricks, and only preserved to our knowledge from the accident of their having been so clumsily built as to bury themselves and their wainscot slabs in their own ruins. Though half the people were probably of Turanian origin, their temples seem to have been external and unimportant till Sennacherib and others learnt the art of using stone from the Egyptians, as the Syrians did afterwards from the Romans. During the domination of the last-named people, we have the temples of Palmyra and Baalbec, of Jerusalem and Petra: everywhere an art of the utmost splendour, but with no trace of Semitic feeling or Semitic taste in any part, or in any detail.

The Jewish worship being neither ancestral, nor the bodies of their dead being held in special reverence, they had no tombs worthy of the name. They buried the bodies of their patriarchs and kings with care, and knew where they were laid; but not until after the return from the Babylonish captivity did they either worship there, or mark the spot with any architectural forms, though after that epoch we find abundant traces of a tendency towards that especial form of Turanian idolatry. But even then the adornment of their tombs with architectural magnificence cannot be traced back to an earlier period than the time of the Romans; and all that we find marked with splendour of this class was the work of that people, and stamped with their peculiar forms of Art.

Painting and sculpture were absolutely forbidden to the Jews because they were Turanian arts, and because their practice might lead the people to idolatry, so that these nowhere existed: though we cannot understand a people with any mixture of Turanian blood who had not an eye for colour, and a feeling for beauty of form, in detail at least. Music alone was therefore the one æsthetic art of the Semitic races, and, wedded to the lyric verse, seems to have influenced their feelings and excited their passions to an extent unknown to other nations; but to posterity it cannot supply the place of the more permanent arts, whose absence is so much felt in attempting to realise the feelings or aspirations of a people like this.[^[19]]

As regards the useful arts, the Semites were always more pastoral than agricultural, and have not left in the countries they inhabited any traces of such hydraulic works as the earlier races executed; but in commerce they excelled all nations. The Jews—from their inland situation, cut off from all access to the sea—could not do much in foreign trade; but they always kept up their intercourse with Assyria. The Phœnicians traded backwards and forwards with every part of the Mediterranean, and first opened out a knowledge of the Atlantic; and the Arabs first commenced, and for long afterwards alone carried on, the trade with India. From the earliest dawn of history to the present hour, commerce has been the art which the Semitic nations have cultivated with the greatest assiduity, and in which they consequently have attained the greatest, and an unsurpassed success.

In Asia and in Africa at the present day, all the native trade is carried on by Arabs; and it need hardly be remarked that the monetary transactions of the rest of the world are practically managed by the descendants of those who, one thousand years before Christ, traded from Eziongeber to Ophir.

Sciences.

Although, as before mentioned, Astronomy was cultivated with considerable success both in Egypt and Chaldæa, among the more contemplative Turanians, nothing can be more unsatisfactory than the references to celestial events, either in the Bible or the Koran, both betraying an entire ignorance of even the elements of astronomical science; and we have no proof that the Phœnicians were at all wiser than their neighbours in this respect.