Thus in the low grade level of the atrium the light, the air, and freedom of movement suggested that lack of function and freedom from formal life which exists among the multitudes; the conscious effort of ascent in walking from the atrium to the hypostyle hall suggested the difficulties of rising from a lower to a higher social order, while the further ascent to the small, calm and dimly illuminated holy-of-holies symbolized the fact that only through struggle, loneliness and pain may a devout one hope to attain the quiet and sublime dwelling place of the gods.
When the Greeks rose to intellectual and artistic position they evolved the Greek form of temple, which was simply an Hellenic translation, through the medium of the Mosaic temple, of the Egyptian hieratic imagery. Perhaps the most typical of these temples is the great marble Parthenon (438 B. C.) which was reared upon a three-stepped crepidoma, a worthy stylobate support, a marvelous peristyle, reminiscent of the open air atrium of its Egyptian prototype. Further on, and beyond the peripteros, and at a higher level, the pronaos led through a great door into the shrine chamber of Athena. Thus did the architects, Ictinus and Callicrates, express in much the same manner as the Egyptians the essence of crystallized human experience.
GENERAL VIEW, WINGDALE PRISON, WINGDALE, N. Y.
Lewis F. Pilcher, New York State Architect
In the flat country of Mesopotamia the architects built lofty zekkurats in order to provide high substructures for the crowning cella or shrine, and these lofty, temple-capped pyramids had a materialistic as well as a spiritual value in that they helped to form in the minds of the people an ideal as to the position in the community of both temporal and spiritual power.
To the north, at Khorsabad, a city of Assyria, the rulers constructed, as part of the great wall, an enormous plateau. This artificial mound, towering as it did some sixty feet above the level of the city, was used as a place of residence for the king and his court, while back of it, and so high that it bathed the plateau with its shadows, was constructed the many-stepped, cella-crowned temple of the priests. Thus religion looked down upon royalty and royalty, in turn, on its walled city with its level streets and multitudinous inhabitants, and thus in this segregated and self-sufficient community a natural and unwitting psychological arrangement of class housing was worked out by these early architects.
This same community phenomenon which we have noted in the Orient existed at the same time at Mycenae, Thyrns, Argos, Attica and Rome,—the heights being always occupied by the rulers, the foot-hills by the nobles and the adjacent plains by the people.