bait centres round each alternate court, which communicates with the two chambers on either side, and the intermediate court is merely a yard common to two baits. The bait of Ṭûbah is therefore the same as the typical bait of Qasṭal. The enclosing walls and the foundation of all other walls are of stone, the rest of the building is constructed of brick tiles. The western end of the palace, and most of the northern side were completed; the eastern and south-eastern parts were never carried above the foundations. The doorways are covered by brick and stone arches, but a stone or wood lintel was placed under the arch. Where the lintel is of stone its outer side is adorned with an interesting early Mohammadan pattern, which has affinities with the carving on the eastern end of the façade at Mshattâ. The stone lintels are not carried through to the inner side of the arch. The arches, which are round, are built of stone, as is the wall below them. The wooden lintels have rotted away or have been removed by the Arabs. They were laid in brick walls and covered by brick relieving arches composed of two rings of brick tiles. In the inner ring the bricks are set vertically, parallel to the main axis of the arch, with the broad side outwards; in the outer ring they are laid horizontally, at right angles to the main axis, with the narrow end outwards. It is the principle on which many of the smaller arches at Ukhaiḍir are constructed. The brick arches at Ṭûbah are a stilted, slightly pointed oval; that is to say that the transition from the ovoid to the pointed arch is illustrated here in much the same manner as at Ukhaiḍir.

Kharâneh lies a few hours to the west of Qṣair ‘Amrah[257] (Fig. 29). It is two stories high and about 35 metres square, and it consists of baits grouped round a central court (Plate 79, Fig. 1). A rounded tower is set at each of the four corners, a semicircular tower in the middle of each of three sides, and in the fourth side stands a gate between semicircular towers, which are cut away on the interior face, like the towers on the south, east, and west gateways of Ukhaiḍir (Plate 79, Fig. 2). The rooms on the ground floor are ill lighted, and were probably intended for stables, storehouses, and guard-rooms. The court was surrounded by a cloister, the roof of which rested on arches springing from angle piers. On the upper floor this roof, which was constructed of stone slabs, provided a passage or gallery into which the baits of the first floor opened (Plate 80, Fig. 1). The rooms on the upper floor correspond with those below, but in some of the larger chambers (three, according to Musil’s plan) the vault is divided into sections by means of transverse arches borne on slender engaged columns in groups of three (Plate 80, Fig. 2). The column groups recall with singular fidelity the triple reed-columns on the façade of Sarvistân. Beyond the evidence afforded by Dr. Moritz’s photograph, we have no information regarding structural details, though they must be well worth a careful study. The vaults and transverse arches seem to belong to the same family as those of room 32 at Ukhaiḍir. The end of the chamber at Kharâneh is closed by a semi-dome reaching from the back wall to the first transverse arch—the same arrangement as has been described in the mosque and in gallery No. 134 at Ukhaiḍir. It is also extremely significant that the semi-dome at Kharâneh should be carried over the angles of the walls on squinch arches. The arches spring over the angle instead of being filled in with a small semi-dome. The fillets round the arches and round the rectangular windows must be compared with the fillets round the arched niches in room 32 and round the archivolts of squinch and niche at Chehâr Qapû. Another very important point is mentioned by Dr. Moritz. To the right of the audience chamber, which he photographed, and connected with it by a door, is a small rectangular room, beyond which lies another rectangular room of about the same size. Round this last room runs a moulding, above which stand circular plaques of stucco decorated with formal plant-motives in Sasanian style, and with late Syrian leaf-motives. One of the plaques Dr. Moritz detached from the wall, and it can be seen standing upon the floor in his photograph (Plate 80, Fig. 2), and is now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. It is more than a coincidence that to the right of an audience hall there should be found both at Ukhaiḍir and at Kharâneh a chamber, the elaborate ornamentation of which points to its having some special ceremonial significance. At Ukhaiḍir this side chamber is carried through to the audience hall, at Kharâneh it is divided from it by an interposed room, but the principle is the same in both cases, and in both cases it must be connected with laws of etiquette of the Umayyad courts with which we are unacquainted. Over the above-named doorway, leading from the audience hall into the first right-hand chamber, Dr. Moritz found a graffito inscription in which a date corresponding with November, A.D. 710, is mentioned. Kharâneh, therefore, must have been standing at that time. The archway he describes as an ordinary round arch; in the photograph the door appears to be set within a niche, whereof the arch oversails the wall, like the larger archways at Ukhaiḍir. The door itself is covered by a lintel, and a lintel of solid stone covers the door of the main entrance (Plate 79, Fig. 2). In his section Dr. Musil represents some of the doors as round-arched and some with a lintel and a relieving arch above it; the latter follow a scheme which is common to most of the buildings in the west side of the Syrian desert and exists at Ctesiphon, but is unknown at Ukhaiḍir and unusual in the later Mohammadan buildings of Mesopotamia. Of the loophole windows in the outer wall at Kharâneh, those on the ground floor are finished in precisely the same manner as the loopholes in the towers at Ukhaiḍir, the opening is filled in with an upright stone against which two bricks are placed diagonally. On the upper floor the loopholes show the same method somewhat simplified. There is but one main door, as in the original scheme of Ukhaiḍir. The masonry is of undressed stones set in mortar, with an occasional bonding course as at Ukhaiḍir. All round the castle, between the two upper rows of loopholes, runs a decoration consisting of two horizontal courses of brick with a brick zigzag between. On the towers this band of ornamental brickwork is repeated lower down. The presence of brick used decoratively leads one to suspect that it may be used also in the finer vaults, but like all the technical questions at Kharâneh, this cannot be answered without further observation. Over this main gate there appears to have been some kind of hourd, corresponding in level with the upper story; above it the wall between the towers is decorated with five perpendicular bands of late Syrian leaf-motives. Dr. Musil’s reconstruction of the gate[258] cannot be correct; it does not take into account the horizontal floor-line below the opening which gave access to the hourd, and it covers the bands of ornament. The Kharâneh gateway must be reconstructed in much the same fashion as the three gates in the outer wall at Ukhaiḍir. A vaulted chemin de ronde seems to have crowned the walls.

The rooms of the upper story are grouped into five baits. Over the entrance an additional chamber is interposed between two baits (compare the courts at Ṭûbah which are common to two baits) and on the opposite side there are two extra rooms to fill up the angles. These two additional rooms communicate with the baits on either side, and the gate-house chamber communicates with either bait; otherwise the baits are kept distinct from one another. The scheme is in fact that of Ṭûbah or Da’djaniyyeh, but with the small courts vaulted over and turned into audience halls or big living-rooms, and here we may seek the explanation of the difference between the baits of the palaces on the eastern side and of those on the western side of the Syrian desert. The normal bait on the Mesopotamian side consists of two lîwân groups with a court between, and the lîwân is derived, as has been shown, from the khilâni. The domestic arrangements of the East, where the women are lodged apart from the men, and if possible the several wives apart from each other, make the bait system in some form indispensable to every dwelling-house, but in Syria the khilâni plan was adopted only for monumental façades, such as that of Solomon’s temple, and from it, through temples of the pagan era, to Christian churches. The normal bait on the Syrian side has therefore no connexion with the khilâni; the lîwân is absent. The group of chambers consists of two pairs of rooms with an intervening court, or in complexes more closely knit together, an intervening hall. The group thus formed is the half of a new unit, and may either share a central court with other half-baits, as at Kharâneh, or be provided with a small court of its own and another half-bait, as at Mshattâ. This distinction apart—it is a distinction which is due to local custom and local architectural tradition—the close relationship which exists between Kharâneh and Ukhaiḍir cannot be insisted upon too strongly, for it helps to determine the date of Ukhaiḍir.

Mshattâ lies a few hours to the west of Kharâneh (Plate 81).[259] It is the best known of the Syrian ḥîrahs, and its magnificent carved façade is now in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. All that concerns me here, however, is its place in the architectural group of which Ukhaiḍir is the eastern representative. It was perhaps built by Yazîd II,[260] and it was left unfinished at his death. It may therefore be a little later than Kharâneh, for Yazîd died in A.D. 724. As at Ṭûbah and Ukhaiḍir, the materials used in it are brick and stone. It is surrounded by a wall set with towers, of which, as at Ukhaiḍir, more than the half-circle projects. The towers on either side of the main gateway are octagonal. Of the buildings immediately within the gate we have nothing but the ground-plan. Roughly speaking they correspond to the three-storied block at Ukhaiḍir, and as Dr. Herzfeld has pointed out,[261] a further correspondence lies in the fact that the oblong court to the right of the gate-house group, with a niche in the qiblah wall, was probably a mosque. The mosque at Ukhaiḍir occupies much the same position with regard to the gate, but since the orientation of the two buildings is different, the qiblah niche at Mshattâ is hollowed out of the main outer wall, while the niche at Ukhaiḍir is hollowed out of an opposite wall. (It must be noted that the big mosque in the palace of Balkuwârâ occupies the same position relatively to the gate.) The conclusion which Dr. Herzfeld reaches, namely that neither palace was a copy of the other, but that both were reproductions by different hands of the same general scheme, is borne out in all other particulars. Beyond the gate-house block lies the central court; beyond the court the hall of audience. At Mshattâ, where the lîwân was unknown, its place was taken by an aisled hall on a basilical plan. Instead of the simple apse there is a trifoliate chamber covered by a dome. The most renowned example of the trifoliate apse is in the church at Bethlehem. The learned disagree as to whether that apse was built by Constantine or by Justinian, but in either case it was earlier than Mshattâ. For the rest, the trifoliate or quadrifoliate chamber covered by a dome is a familiar Hellenistic motive which occurs frequently in palaces and in the baptisteries of early Christian churches. At Ukhaiḍir we have, in the same position as the trifoliate chamber, the quadrangular room No. 30. The throne-room, if I may so term it, at Mshattâ bears comparison with the throne-room at Qṣair ‘Amrah, where two small apsed rooms correspond to the apsed side niches. On either side of the ceremonial chambers of Mshattâ lies a bait, the unit, now complete, which was foreshadowed at Kharâneh and at Qasṭal. Such is the arrangement of the central part of the palace. The two wings (to return to Mas’ûdi’s definition) were never built. Schultz’s ingenious reconstruction gives in each wing a row of baits, all adhering more or less closely to the norm, with subsidiary courts, and chambers at either end to fill up the space. When we come to structural details, the materials are sadly lacking. Either the buildings are too much ruined to afford the necessary information, or the photographs which have been taken are insufficient.[262] Those given by Brünnow and Domaszewski are the best. From them, and from the reconstruction of Schultz, it is possible to see that the vaults oversail the walls[263] and that they are built of a double slice of tiles laid vertically, parallel to the main axis, so as to dispense with centering. The only photograph of a doorway which has been published[264] shows a relieving arch constructed of the same double slice of tiles, with place for a lintel below it. Schultz was able to determine that the lintel was composed of a wooden beam carrying a straight arch of stones. The straight arch occurs at Ukhaiḍir, but without the support of a lintel. The relieving arch has the form of the brick arches at Ṭûbah, a stilted and slightly pointed oval, and from the photograph it would seem that it was set back from the face of the jambs below the lintel, but Schultz in his reconstructions gives it the same width as the door opening.[265] Brünnow and Domaszewski reconstruct the doorways in the domed chamber without lintels, and the doorways in the small chambers of one of the baits without arches—that is to say, they are arch-shaped, but the arch is merely cut out of the solid wall. Schultz places lintels and relieving arches over all the doors. Kim belir? The windows are small and round-arched. The closets were in the towers as at Ukhaiḍir, and Schultz in one of his drawings[266] places over the niche a fluted semi-dome. We know no more.

It now remains to sum up the conclusions reached with regard to the origin of ḥîrah and bâdiyah on either side of the desert. And first it is clear that Ukhaiḍir stands in the closest relations to the Syrian group, not only in general conception, but in details of construction. But Ukhaiḍir reflects the older Lakhmid ḥîrahs, those palaces that were supposed to represent an army in battle with two wings, and through them it re-echoes the Sasanian palaces which were contemporary with them. These too, as we know from the palace of Khusrau at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, were composed of a centre and two wings. Again, allowance must be made for Byzantine influence in the Sasanian palaces and the Lakhmid ḥîrahs. Justinian lent artificers to Khusrau I; Khawarnaq was built by a Greek. The intercourse, friendly and unfriendly, between the Sasanian and the Byzantine empires was unbroken. When it was friendly it took the form of commerce, and architects were among the exchangeable commodities; when it was unfriendly it took the form of prisoners of war. Khusrau I must have captured a large and varied selection of artificers when he removed the whole population of Antioch to Seleucia. It is improbable that they should have sat idle in their new abode. They exercised their crafts, and they exercised them in their own manner. It may well have become the fashion among the citizens of Ctesiphon to shop in the Greek Bazaar, just as the citizens of Damascus shop in the Greek Bazaar of their own town. Greek influence, as we know, did not begin with Justinian. It began with a mightier figure than that of the imperial lawgiver—with the mightiest of all, with Alexander. I have already shown that the Mohammadan lîwân took to itself a part of the Greek peristyle and uses it still under the name of ṭarmah. Who can tell when this process began? The Greek peristyle exists in a Parthian palace at Niffer and in Parthian houses at Babylon. Hatra fronts the desert with a Hellenistic façade; so does Ctesiphon; it adorns the central court of Ukhaiḍir. But that Byzantine or earlier Western influence affected in any fundamental manner the plan of palace or ḥîrah is not borne out by this evidence. No fundamental change can be observed at any time, but on the contrary a steady, continuous growth of oriental methods, on oriental lines, and a steady development based on developing needs, ceremonial and social. From the days of the Hittites the palace was composed of a centre and two wings. The khilâni palaces of Zindjirli were laid out on a small scale; the khilâni palaces of Pasargadae and Persepolis covered a wide area, but provided little better accommodation; for the courtiers and guards were lodged elsewhere, in buildings of a less permanent character. Persepolis was the capital of an empire; all the needs of the time were fulfilled there. But this is not the case at Firûzâbâd and Sarvistân. Of the capital seats of the Sasanian kings we know but two, in any real sense, Ctesiphon and Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn, and at Ctesiphon we know only the great hall of audience—together with a fairly accurate guess at its flanking chambers. Before we can say that the extensive wings, which at Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn were added to the khilâni palace, were not a natural development (and they are planned on principles which are entirely oriental) we must have a clear conception of that which lay about the great hall at Ctesiphon, of the palace at Dastadjird which Heraclius committed to the flames, and of the palaces in the Zohâb district. The oriental palace, in the form which it had received from Chosroës and Nu’mânid, laid a strong hold upon the imagination of the East. In the Days of Ignorance the Arab of the desert entered its courts with praise; in the days of conquest he divided its spoils with his fellow soldiers, and sent a part to Mekkah, glorying in the God-given strength which had dispossessed the kings of the earth. Not by literary evidence alone can the deep impression which it created be measured. It gave birth to the Syrian ḥîrahs and to the stupendous residences of the Abbâsids.

On the Syrian side of the desert there is another element to be considered, the Roman legionary camp, and this too had a centre and two wings. The truth is that any complex of buildings laid out on an ordered plan falls almost inevitably into this disposition. The palace of the Flavians on the Palatine had a centre and two wings, yet it was not for that reason derived from the khilâni or related to the oriental palaces. Its ancestor was the Greek peristyle house which goes back in turn to the megaron palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns and Troy. Neither were Qaṣr-i-Shîrîn and its offspring in the Syrian desert derived from the limes camp. Gradually but surely, while Rome still held the Syrian frontier, or rather while Rûm—the Hellenistic, the Byzantine Rome, itself half-orientalized—held it, the ancient Asiatic scheme invaded the limes fortress, pushed out the Praetorium, or pushed it back against the encompassing wall, which had become an indispensable requisite, and having grouped its baits after its own fashion, left a court over. The union of both sides of the desert under the hand of a single ruler quickened the process. Neither the Roman Qasṭal nor the Umayyad Ṭûbah are palaces on the Persian ḥîrah plan; then suddenly Kharâneh and Mshattâ spring into being, uniting the oriental traditions of the Mesopotamian side of the desert with oriental traditions which had developed independently from the same root on the Syrian side. The Syrian architects were masters of a more scientific technique, for they had been trained in a Graeco-Roman school. They taught their Mesopotamian brothers, and even the builders of remote Ukhaiḍir had learnt how to lay a cross vault.

But if the legionary camp is powerless to affect the ancient palace plan, it did not wither away, unnoticed, like a plant upon uncongenial soil. It bloomed again in the cities of the eastern Roman empire, in Boṣrâ, in Damascus, in Apamea. Towns such as Diyârbekr, where not one Roman stone remains upon another, still betray a Roman origin in their crossed thoroughfares and quadruple gateways.[267] And therewith it returned, remodelled, to the West. The palace at Antioch was built on the plan of the Roman limes camp. Diocletian copied it at Spalato, and Constantine’s palace in his new capital was in some respects an echo of that of Diocletian, though the true oriental palace was not without effect upon Constantinople.[268] The imperial residence, stereotyped by him, went on into other phases, too complex, and often too obscure, to be followed here, but it is curious to note that five hundred years later, Theophilus, himself an Asiatic, since his father, Michael II, was a Phrygian by birth, built for himself a palace on the Bithynian coast which was modelled avowedly on the palace of the khalifs at Baghdâd.[269] A few years later Mutawakkil laid out Balkuwârâ—what sister ḥîri with two sleeves stood at Bryas, on the shores of Marmora?

One other point remains. The palace of Ukhaiḍir is contained within a towered wall which is wholly distinct from it. This is not the encompassing wall of the ancient East, the primary condition of the structure. It has the four gateways of the Roman camp, though the unneeded cross-roads have dropped away. Here at last Imperial Rome has come to her own. For all its oriental system of fortification, its towers and its hourds, its machicolations and its loopholes, its casemates and its crenellations, this wall is perhaps no other than the wall which surrounded the legionary camp. But I doubt whether the camp itself, which made so fleeting an apparition on the Asiatic frontiers, was the deciding factor. The camp lived on in the city and made a far deeper impression through the city than through the limes fortresses. The scheme is repeated at Sâmarrâ. Balkuwârâ forms part of a great enclosure similarly disposed, with three gates, like the gates of Ukhaiḍir, the palace taking the place of the fourth.[270] The area covered by the enclosure is so extensive that it resembles a town rather than a royal dwelling, and through this town run the crossed thoroughfares which were once the Via Principalis and the Via Praetoria.

CHAPTER V

THE FAÇADE

The breaking up of the wall-face into horizontal zones was a device familiar to the ancient East. In the main gateway of Sargon’s palace at Khorsâbâd the wall is divided into a high orthostatic podium, decorated with reliefs, and a brick superstructure diversified by vertical flutes and rectangular recesses.[271] In the interior of the palace, the court of the ḥaram shows a similar disposition, except that the podium is of enamelled brick, not of stone.[272] The upper part of the walls is in no case preserved. On Assyrian reliefs it is not uncommon to find a horizontal band along the top of the walls below the crenellations;[273] but the nature of the upper zone or zones in decorated façades such as those of Khorsâbâd is a matter of conjecture. Concerning Chaldaean wall decoration we have little evidence. The building on the Wuswas mound at Warka, of which Loftus published a sketch,[274] has recently been re-examined by Dr. Jordan, who believes it to be post-Babylonian.[275] The walls of the temple of Bel at Niffer were decorated with shallow buttresses, while the gates bore resemblance, both in plan and decoration, to the gates of Khorsâbâd.[276] The gateway of Gudea at Tellôh has the same doubly recessed rectangular niches that have been noted at Khorsâbâd, but they do not seem to have been grouped in panels, and the plinth is reduced to insignificant proportions.[277] It is significant that in the post-Babylonian construction at Tellôh both the rectangular niche and the flute are present, and it may be surmised that the walls of Wuswas, with their recessed and fluted panels placed one above the other, represent an ancient scheme. It is a scheme which may be compared with that of the façade of Ctesiphon (see below, p. 134). At intervals groups of recessed niches are carried up continuously to the height of two registers of panels, just as in the two lower zones at Ctesiphon the engaged columns embrace two registers of arched niches. But at Ctesiphon we have architectural forms borrowed from Hellenism instead of the surface decoration (recess and flute) of Chaldaea and Assyria.

The orthostatic construction was used in Hittite architecture at Zindjirli, Boghâz Keui, and Sakcheh Geuzu. Mr. Hogarth has found it at Carchemish and Baron Oppenheim at Râs al-’Ain.[278] But in all these buildings, Babylonian, Hittite, and Assyrian, there was no attempt to ornament the façade with the similitude of plastic architectural forms. The elements of such ornament were not indeed lacking, but they appear in isolated examples and were not applied to the wall-face in a continuous decorative system. Side by side with stelae and altars adorned with fluted motives akin to those of the façades[279] there are instances of mock architecture in relief. An Assyrian stela upon a slab found at Quyundjik and now in the British Museum will serve as an illustration (Fig. 11). Two pilasters carry an architrave consisting of a double fillet and a band of crenellations; between and behind the pilasters an arched niche, placed in counterfeited perspective, frames a hunting scene. It is an early example of the application of the third dimension to architectural ornament, and it conveys the impression of plastic architecture in two planes. As Professor Delbrück observes, by the addition of free-standing columns placed before the pilasters, we should have here a motive familiar to Graeco-Roman façades.[280] The archivolt, of which the enrichment is expressed at Quyundjik in the terms of a shallow fillet, appears at Khorsâbâd, with enamelled brick enrichment, over a doorway,[281] and also upon reliefs.[282] All the methods of decorating the face of the arch which were known to antiquity are found on the Assyrian monuments. The podium façade is oriental, for it was used in Assyria and in Persia. Pre-Greek is the employment of blind openings; in the Persepolitan palaces a blind niche is placed in every intercolumniation, and in plastic architecture an open gallery or loggia was common to Egypt and to Assyria.[283] In pre-Hellenic Egypt and western Asia there is, however, no example of a continuous series of arches in relief, though the continuous treatment of decoration on the wall-face is typical of Babylonian architecture from the earliest time, and it remained only to apply it to true architectural motives instead of to the purely decorative motives of Chaldaea and Assyria. That these last were mainly based upon the outward aspect of primitive wooden structures, I do not doubt, but at the remote date at which we first know them they had already lost all structural significance. The step from pattern to imitative architecture must have been taken at an early stage in the Hellenistic East. Seleucid buildings which have vanished are reflected in the stupas of Hellenistic India, where the surfaces are adorned with blind openings between engaged piers, and in the rock-cut temples, where the decorative scheme of the façade is a podium carrying a colonnade in relief.[284]

In Egypt rows of niches are present in the interior of tombs,[285] and an early example of the same motive can be seen in the gateway at Perge, a city which lay under the direct influence of Antioch.[286] The lightening of the massive wall by means of niches and blind openings can be traced through pre-Greek architecture in Mesopotamia (Assyrian palaces and temples) and in Egypt (from the Eighteenth Dynasty and even earlier) down to the Achaemenid period. The systematic application of this principle to the wall-face, and its union with imitative architecture in relief as a decorative scheme took place, as far as can be determined at present, in the Hellenistic age.

In the third and in the second century B.C. the division of the wall into two zones by means of a moulding appears at Delos, Priene, Magnesia, and other parts of western Asia,[287] and a little later it is found in what is known as the incrusted style at Oscan Pompeii. The lower zone consists of unpainted stucco decoration representing a stone wall, composed of one or of two rows of orthostatae, and above them several courses of dressed stones. The upper zone, which was at first undecorated (it represented space, the upper air), takes on later the semblance of a colonnaded gallery[288] in imitation of the open galleries characteristic of Eastern Hellenistic architecture.[289] The podium façade carrying an open arcade is, as Professor Delbrück is careful to point out, in origin different from the galleried wall, but in façade schemes the two run together so as to be almost indistinguishable. The theme is represented in relief upon the façade of the Bouleuterion at Miletus[290] and frequently in Pompeii, where, however, the engaged columns do not stand upon a podium.[291] Behind the columns, both at Delos and in the Pompeiian examples, the wall is still divided into two zones by a moulding. In all cases it is a theme which stands as a representation in relief of plastic architecture, of deep colonnades such as those which were to be seen on the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus.[292] The blind order of the Ephebeum at Priene may be cited as another striking example of imitative architecture.[293] Similarly the superimposition of one blind order upon another, a decorative motive so familiar in Roman theatres and amphitheatres, finds its prototype in the colonnades of Hellenistic stoae, such as those erected by Attalus in Athens and in Pergamon.[294]

Professor Delbrück is of opinion that the impulse towards decorating the wall-face with the similitude of plastic architecture was quickened by Greek painting, which, from the fourth century B.C. onward, gained an increasing mastery in the representation of spatial dimensions. Plastic examples of the phase of development represented by the Boscoreale frescoes might be expected in the second century B.C., and in fact there were at that period mock colonnades in relief, such as the Ephebeum at Priene. The cutting away of the wall-face by means of niches was foreshadowed in Hellenistic art; the lightening of the wall-mass by niches has been noticed in the gate at Perge and the tombs of Alexandria, while windows in the intercolumniations were of frequent occurrence.[295] It is possible, as Professor Delbrück suggests, that in Hellenistic Mesopotamia decoration by means of blind openings, whether doors, windows, or niches, won a great popularity because it was based on pre-Hellenic tradition, and it is interesting to observe that the only early examples of the arched niche, which is the leading motive at Ukhaiḍir, are to be found in western Asia.[296] But the systematic application of these principles to the façade was accomplished only in the latest phases of Hellenistic art, and we may perhaps owe it to Roman builders. In the intercolumniations of the decorated zone niches, arcades and windows take the place of the traditional moulding,[297] and the upper wall is broken by a row of arches or of windows.[298] On inner walls a double row of niches is sometimes accompanied by stucco incrustation,[299] while the podium is decorated with engaged columns.[300]

It remained for the Imperial period to complete the development. Orders of columns were placed in zones one above the other; niches of richer type occupied the surface of the wall, and not infrequently they were placed one within the other; rounded and rectangular niches followed one another in a rhythmic sequence; columns and piers stood out in higher relief and the podium and architrave were broken above and below them. Gradually the orders and niches lost their original significance; they were looked upon merely as decorative motives, and as such followed a development of their own. They lent to the wall-surface an ever-increasing movement and rhythm as their forms grew richer and freer. This evolution can be seen upon the walls of Roman buildings which are yet standing; if in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean most of the monuments have fallen, the elements of their composition have been found and put together, as in the Nymphaeum at Miletus,[301] or the theatre at Ephesus,[302] and similar decoration can still be studied upon the walls of Ba’albek.[303] But in western Asia, and notably in Syria, the old classical love of unbroken wall-surfaces died hard—perhaps it may be said to have survived long into the Middle Ages in the smooth faces of dressed stone which give so much dignity to the Mohammadan buildings of Damascus and Aleppo. Older and simpler decorative forms continued to rule when in Rome the evolution had gone on to other stages. The façade of the Nabataean temple at Sî’, for example, echoes in free-standing architecture the features of the relief decoration of the Ephebeum at Priene.[304] In the temenos of the basilica at Apamea (second century A.D.) the solid outer wall has disappeared, and its place is taken by a series of piers with rectangular openings between, but in the basilica itself the treatment of the wall is still of an extremely simple character.[305] The temenos wall of the temple at Palmyra is treated with the old formal severity. At Bâqirḥâ and at Isriyyeh the walls are unbroken save by shallow pilasters,[306] a simplicity which rivals that of the pre-Roman tomb of Ḥamrath at Swaidâ.[307] At Mushennef and at Qanawât pilasters are set at the angles, and the rest of the wall is undecorated.[308] In the pre-Roman temple at Swaidâ, niches, in imitation of small doors, are placed on either side of the single entrance;[309] at ‘Atîl a double order of niches, the lower rectangular, the upper rounded and arched, occupy the same position, but the walls of the cella are without even the customary pilasters;[310] in the Qaisariyyeh at Shaqqâ a genuine opening flanks the doorway on either side, but the façade is otherwise unadorned.[311] In the Philippeion at Shahbâ the side niches are omitted and there are no pilasters except at the angles; rounded and rectangular niches are employed on the interior walls of the palace, and on either side of the interior doorways of the bath, but in all other respects the latter building is noticeable for the entire absence of decoration upon its walls;[312] and as late as the sixth century angle pilasters set upon a podium were considered a sufficient decoration for the walls of the exquisite tomb at the southern Dânâ,[313] while the porticoes of house and stoa are models of severity.[314]

The fantastic variety which characterized the late Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial age must be sought for in south-west Asia in another group of monuments. The influence of Alexandria dominates over the tomb façades of Petra, and was felt even in the earlier tombs at Madâin Ṣâliḥ.[315] With the latter I am not immediately concerned, except in so far as they help to determine the date of the Petra tombs. It is enough to notice that the local oriental forms, the pylon tombs with a band or bands of crenellated ornament, or with a staircase motive at the angles, dropped out of fashion during the first half of the first century after our era, and that in the first century A.D. Hellenistic forms had invaded the Ḥedjr tombs.[316] The gable tomb and the columned façade, which Domaszewski has christened the Roman temple tomb, do not indeed appear at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, but the fully developed aedicula, with quarter-columns in the antae, is found there as early as the year A.D. 31 in the tabernacle which frames the doorway,[317] and the tabernacle, both with a gable and with an archivolt, was employed in Arabia at an early date for votive niches.[318] It is therefore unnecessary, as Puchstein has pointed out, to assign such gable tombs at Petra as date from a period before the Roman occupation (i.e. before A.D. 106) to some fortuitous Greek influence,[319] since the type was familiar to the stone-cutters of an earlier period. Not later than the middle of the first century A.D. a second order of dwarf columns was placed in the attic (the earliest dated example is tomb F 4 at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, A.D. 63-64), but it is instructive to note that the appearance of a new form does not imply the elimination of older types. At Madâin Ṣâliḥ all the different variations continue to exist side by side, and there is an example of the primitive pylon tomb with a single band of crenellations, the unmitigated copy of an Arabian house for the living turned into a house for the dead, which is dated as late as the year A.D. 74,[320] just as the Egyptian gorge is found side by side with, and indeed upon the same tombs as, a fully developed Ionic entablature. The Roman temple tomb of Petra is predicted in the dwarf piers of the attic (which are of frequent occurrence at Madâin Ṣâliḥ) inasmuch as they imply a corresponding series of engaged piers in the wall below. A single example of this so-called temple tomb exists at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, but without the piers in the attic; it is probably to be dated in the middle of the first century A.D.[321] The engaged column, in contradistinction to the engaged pier, is employed at Madâin Ṣâliḥ only in the antae of the tabernacles; at Petra it takes its place among the main supports of the façade. At Petra, too, the plastic freedom of late Hellenistic architectural forms makes itself felt. Broken podiums are found upon wall paintings of the second style at Boscoreale, though their architectural counterpart cannot be pointed out at so early a date; broken entablatures are present in late Hellenistic work at Alexandria, but not elsewhere in the Greek cultural sphere at the same period.[322] Both these features, together with the preference for engaged columns instead of piers, are common at Petra, and they are like sign-posts pointing to the source whence the stone-cutters of Petra drew their inspiration. There are, it is true, early examples of the broken architrave in Italy in the triumphal arches of Rimini (27 B.C.) and Aosta (25 B.C.), but the systematic use of broken podium and entablature is one of the distinctive features of the later Imperial period. In the Lion Tomb at Petra, which recalls the tabernacle of the tomb F 4 at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, architrave, frieze, and cornice are broken over the angle columns and piers. In the tombs of the second century the principle is carried further; architrave, frieze, and cornice are all broken, and the system is extended to the plinth-like member which is interposed between the entablature and the dwarf order of the attic, and, when the façade reaches a second story, to the upper entablature also.[323] In the Corinthian tomb, the Dair, and the Khazneh a second order is superimposed upon the first. In each case a tholos occupies the centre of the upper story and the pairs of flanking columns are crowned by a broken pediment. In the Dair an engaged pier and quarter-column fill out the façade on either side (Plate 82, Fig. 2). In the Corinthian tomb the lower zone is complete in itself (Plate 82, Fig. 1). The engaged columns stand upon a high plinth and carry a broken architrave composed of frieze and cornice only; the dwarf piers are placed upon a broken plinth with a moulded cornice, which is interrupted above the central door by a moulded archivolt. The dwarf columns carry a complete entablature, architrave, frieze, and cornice, and a low broken pediment occupies the centre of the façade. Above this structure the second order, with its tholos, stands upon a moulded plinth. In the Storied tomb the lower order carries a complete entablature and a broken attic which contains the gables and archivolts of the doors; upon a plinth with a moulded cornice rises a second order bearing an entablature; a second plinth, itself divided by a horizontal moulding, carries a dwarf order which is crowned by a third entablature (Fig. 30). Yet another order crowned the tomb, but it was built, not rock-cut, and little of it remains. The tholos in these façades is a Hellenistic motive, though it is known to us at an early period only from wall paintings and from literary sources.[324] To the multiplication of horizontal decorations earlier Nabataean tombs had shown a strong inclination. The double band of crenellations in the pylon tombs of Madâin Ṣâliḥ and of Petra, the double attic of the so-called Ḥedjr tombs in both places, point the way to such compositions as the Storied tomb. Everywhere a strong centralization rules the scheme of the façade. It is rare to find more than one door; where doors are placed in the flanking intercolumniations they are insignificant in size, as in the Corinthian tomb. In the Dair (Plate 82, Fig. 2), mock windows occupy the outer intercolumniations. In the Storied tomb, where there are four doors, the two central entrances are higher than the others, and, in the upper story, the central intercolumniation is wider than those on either side. But the long unbroken lines of the horizontal mouldings give an exceptional monotony to this façade. Usually a gable or archivolt, breaking into the attic, emphasizes the centre of the façade and is re-echoed in the pediment, with its central acroterion which crowns the whole, while in the tholos tombs the centralization is even more strongly underlined. The angles are commonly in antis, with a quarter-column set against the corner pier. The archivolt is conspicuous by its absence. It is never used except in exchange for the pediment over aediculae, and, exceptionally, over mock windows, as for example in the lower zone of the Dair.