Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/193

CONSTRUCTION. 171 The corporations of architects and workmen must have pre- served the traditions of their craft from century to century, traditions which had their first rise in the natural capabilities of their materials and in the data of the problem they had to solve. The historian cannot, then, be accused of going beyond the limit of fair induction in arguing from these modern buildings to their remote predecessors. After the conquest of Alexander, the ornamental details, and, still more, the style of the sculptures, must have been affected to a certain extent, first by Greek art and afterwards by that of Rome ; but the plans, the internal structure, and the o-eneral arrangement of the buildings must have remained ^> o o the same. FIG. 54. Section through the palace at SarbLstan ; from Flandin and Coste. There is nothing hazardous or misleading in these arguments from analogy ; from the palace of Chosroes to that of Sargon is a legitimate step. Some day, perhaps, we may attempt to pursue the same path in the opposite direction ; we may endeavour to show that the survival of these examples and traditions may very well have helped to direct architecture into a new path in the last years of the Roman Empire. We shall then have to speak of a school in Asia Minor whose works have not yet been studied with the attention they deserve. The buildings in question are dis- tinguished chiefly by the important part played in their construction by the vault and the dome resting upon pendentives ; certain constructive processes, too, are to be found in them which had never, so far as W T C can tell, been known or practised in the East.