How to Study Architecture by Charles H. Caffin (free reads .txt) 📕

they could easily be mounted by horses. The stairs led to a terrace, paved, as was the whole platform, with marble, in the centre of which was the entrance gate, or, to use the later classic term, a Propylæa. This was square in plan, with a portal, front and rear, flanked by winged bulls, while the ceiling was supported by four columns. Its walls, like those of the other buildings, built of sun-dried bricks or rubble masonry, set with clay mortar, have long since crumbled into ruins.

The earliest palace of the group is that of Darius I, to the portico of which we have already alluded. Its plan shows a room, right and left of the portico, in which may have been stairs leading to the roof; then a square hypostyle hall of sixteen columns, set in rows of four, with various chambers, along the sides and at the end.

In one building, the Hall of a Hundred Columns, the roof was carried by ten ranges of ten columns; for the hall, as indeed were all the halls at Persepolis, was square in plan. This can scarcely have been a mere coincidence. Is it fanciful to imagine that a people, trained in Zoroastrianism, found in the principle of the square a fitting symbol of “Creative Strength” and “Right Order”?

But the most important building at Persepolis, “one of the most stupendous relics of antiquity,” is the great Palace of Xerxes. Elevated on a terrace of its own, twenty feet high, which was ascended on the north side by four flights of steps, it occupied an area of one hundred thousand square feet, more than double that of the Great Hall at Karnak, and larger than that of any Gothic cathedral in Europe, Milan and Seville alone excepted. Two rows of six columns supported each of the three porticoes, and six times six the ceiling of the Hall: in which combination one may perhaps detect a symbol of the Six Helpers of Ahuramazda, “the spiritual Wise One” or “Great Wisdom.”

The columns, including base and capital, rose to a height of 65 feet, which may be compared with the 69 feet of the central nave columns in the Hall of Karnak. The latter, however, had a diameter of 12 feet, and were separated by intervals of scarcely twice that width; while those in Xerxes’ palace were set at a comparatively far greater distance from one another and measured in diameter only about 5 feet. Moreover, instead of a minimum of light percolating through a clerestory as at Karnak, the light and air streamed freely through the windows in the walls of Xerxes’ palace, so that in every respect the impression produced by the two halls must have been very different.

The grandeur of Karnak was weighted down with mystery and awe, while Xerxes’ “lordly pleasure house” was an exalted symbol of the Zoroastrian belief in the joy of life. For in addition to the grandeur of its structural features, the imagination must picture the accompanying gladness of marble floors, water basins, fountains, and flowers, and varicoloured rugs and hangings. The walls, also, may have been resplendent with brilliantly enamelled tiles as in Xerxes’ other palace at Susa, where the French explorer, M. Dieulafoy, discovered the magnificent frieze of archers, a frieze of lions, and other decorations executed in bright-coloured enamels on concrete blocks. That Xerxes spared no pains to render his palace at Persepolis as superb as possible may be inferred from the columns in the hall and north portico. For in them the double capital of beasts does not rest directly on the fluted shafts, but is supplemented by two lower members; the first a curious arrangement of scrolls or volutes, the second a sort of conventionalised calyx of the lotus, beneath which, in bell-like form, is a conventionalisation of pendant leaves. In the volutes a suggestion of the Ionic capital has been detected, while the lower points to an Egyptian origin.

This medley of motives has a certain decorative value, but lacks the supreme beauty of architectural relationship between the parts and the whole. That is to say, the use of the various parts has not been regulated by constructive logic, necessity, or fitness; but represents a purely whimsical and arbitrary multiplication of motive. The student may assure himself of this by comparing the Persian column with the Doric Order. In the latter he may observe a superior quality of fitness in the relationship of the parts and of the sense of an inevitable logical growth in the composition as a whole.

The fantastic elaboration of the columns at Persepolis, as well as the general conglomeration of motives in Persian architecture, points to the fact that the latter was the work of foreign artists, imported from various parts of the great Persian Empire. It represents the character of the empire—a variety in unity; a unity, however, not of natural growth, but one that, having no artistic traditions of its own, puts the world under tribute to supply motives for the exploitation of its magnificence.

CHAPTER VII

MINOAN OR ÆGEAN CIVILISATION

So far our study of ancient civilisation and architecture has been fairly consecutive. We have now to break the continuity of the story and take a leap back into a remote past and explore the origins of a civilisation which was a forerunner of that of Greece. This civilisation had been called “Mycenæan” because its existence was first brought to modern knowledge by Schliemann’s discoveries in Mycenæ. But subsequent exploration has proved that the civilisation was far spread and that Mycenæ was not even the centre of it.

One of the most astonishing results of recent exploration is the knowledge of a civilisation that developed without break from the polished stone age and reached its highest point contemporaneously with the New Empire in Egypt; ending, that is to say, about 1000 B.C. Not the least interesting feature of the discovery is that it throws a new light on the civilisation of prehistoric Greece.

The classical writers of Greece pointed to Mycenæ and Tiryns in Argolis as being the principal evidence of a prehistoric civilisation, which was assumed to belong to the Homeric period or even farther back to a rude heroic beginning of Hellenic civilisation. This opinion continued to be held by scholars until A.D. 1876. In this year, however, Dr. Schliemann, opening up the graves which are just inside the Lion Gateway of the citadel at Mycenæ, came upon a quantity of objects which proved the high state of civilisation to which the prehistoric inhabitants of the city had attained. Furthermore, they corresponded in character to the vases and gold, silver, and bronze objects which, three years earlier, he had dug from the ruins of the “Burnt City” (Troy) at Hissarlik in the Troad. These objects from the peninsula of Peloponnesus and the mainland of Asia Minor were not only similar in character but also of a fabric and decoration which differed from those of any known art. But a relation between the objects of art described by Homer and these “Mycenæan” treasures was generally allowed.

In 1884-1885 Schliemann and Dörpfeld, exploring the ruins of Tiryns, came upon a building which offers the most complete example in Greece of a palace of the “Mycenæan” age, belonging to a period probably between 1400 and 1200 B.C. During the subsequent years of the nineteenth century, when exploration was extended to other parts of the Peloponnesus and Northern parts of Greece, dome or beehive tombs, such as had been found at Mycenæ, were discovered in Attica, Thessaly, and elsewhere. By degrees, exploration was carried beyond the mainland of Greece to the Ionian Islands and the islands of the Ægean, particularly to Cyprus and Crete and the mainland of Asia Minor. This resulted in further discoveries of objects, related in a common family, distinct from that of any other art division. Meanwhile, objects of similar character were met with in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain.

Finally, the culmination of all this mass of corroborative evidence was reached by the explorations of Dr. A. J. Evans, at Cnossus in Crete, which have been followed up by explorations in Phæstus, and other Cretan sites. The net result is to establish the knowledge that Crete was the centre of a civilisation which had dealings with Egypt and Mesopotamia and extended to the sea-coast of Asia Minor and Phœnicia, the other islands of the Ægean Archipelago, the Ionian Islands, and the mainland of Greece and spread its offshoots along the west shores of the Adriatic, into Sardinia and Spain and took deep root in Sicily. To the far-extending ramifications of this civilisation has been given the comprehensive name of Minoan or Ægean.

In a most remarkable way the discoveries in Crete have corroborated the Greek legends of the Cretan King Minos. It is conjectured that a Minos may have been the founder of a dynasty and that the name passed into a title of all the rulers, corresponding to the title, Pharaoh, in Egypt. Scholars, therefore, have given the name Minoan to the civilisation of Crete; dividing it into Early, Middle, and Late Minoan.

In the Early Minoan Period, represented in the contents of early tombs and dwellings and such objects as stone vases and seal-stones, there is evidence that the Cretans had already reached considerable cultivation and had opened up communications with the Nile Valley. The date of this period is conjectured to have centred around 2500 B.C., and to have corresponded, roughly speaking, with the earlier of the Egyptian dynasties. Most remarkable of Dr. Evans’s discoveries was the finding in 1900 of whole archives of clay tablets in the palace of Cnossus, which prove that the Cretans had a highly developed system of hieroglyphics and lineal script 2000 years before the time when the Phœnicians introduced writing into Greece. Incidentally, this knowledge corroborates the statement of the historian Diodorus, that the Phœnicians did not invent letters, but only altered their forms.

The Middle Minoan Period centres round 2000-1850 B.C., and corresponds with the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt. It was the age of the earliest palace building. Already appears the beginning of a school of wall-painting, while a manufactory of fine faience was attached to the palace at Cnossus.

The Late Minoan Period covers the period of the Hyksos usurpation in Egypt and reached its own culmination about the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty when the New Egyptian Empire or Second Theban Monarchy commenced. We have already noted the appearance in Egypt of this Cretan influence, inducing a habit of naturalistic representation in place of the old conventionalised forms of sculpture and painting. To this late Minoan period belongs the greatest development of palace building, as seen at Cnossus, Phæstus, and Tiryns, while the painting on walls and vases becomes more free and animated than anything of the kind in Egypt.

Toward 1400 B.C. a period of decline becomes apparent in Cretan art, which is reflected all over the Ægean area. The conclusion is that the islands and mainland of Greece had been invaded by less civilised conquerors, who, having no cultivation of their own, adopted the art they found and spoiled it. Probably they came from the North of Greece and were precursors of the later “Hellenes.”

Finally, about 1000 B.C., the palace at Cnossus was again destroyed, never again to be rebuilt; and at the same time the “Bronze Age” of Minoan and Mycenæan civilisation came to an end. It fell before a nation, barbarous, but possessed of iron weapons; probably the tribes which later Greek tradition and Homer knew as Dorians. Then followed a period of several centuries of unrest, as, successively, Achaæn, Æolian, and Doric migrations came from the North through the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Ægean, while an Ionian migration from Armenia spread to the west shore of Asia Minor. Finally, when the Ægean area emerges into history, it