Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/169

THE PIKENICIAN TUMI;. 149 2. The Phoenician Tomb. In Palestine and Phoenicia, in a country where the soil but slightly covers rock which can be readily cut with the most inferior tool, the cave must have been the first sepulchre. This is confirmed by Genesis. We there find that to the oldest in- habitants of Palestine a sepulchre meant a cave large enough to accommodate all the members of a single family. When Abraham lost his wife Sarah, he acquired from Ephron the Hittite, at the price of four hundred silver shekels, the cave of Macpelah, with the field which surrounded it, and all the trees in the field. There the bodies of Sarah, of the patriarch himself, of Isaac and of Jacob, were deposited. l At first natural caverns were used, and used in their natural state. Then art was called in to enlarge them and to make them more convenient for their purpose. The use of these caves was so thoroughly rooted in the national habits that it persisted long after men had learnt to dress and fix stone. Nearly all the Phoenician tombs are hypogea. It is quite by exception that we find a few sepulchres of a different kind, such, for example, as one of the most curious monuments at Amrit, the Burdj-el-Bezzak (Fig. 6). The chambers it contains, which are obviously sepulchral in character, are certainly built above the ground, but in reality it is nothing more than a trans- position. The rooms are, so to speak, artificial grottoes reserved in the mass of masonry, as if the building had been modelled literally upon a natural cave (Fig. 87). 2 Thanks to the thickness of its walls, a cavern like this kept excellent guard over its contents when once the opening had been closed by a huge stone. But men were not satisfied with having their own bodies, or those of their relations, put beyond reach of disturbance, they also wished to put something a ar^a as the Greeks called it upon the tomb to keep green the memory of its occupants. 3 As soon as writing was invented an inscription was 1 Genesis xxiii. xxv. xliv. 2 RENAN, Mission, pp. 81 and 86. 3 Our readers will remember the expression of Homer. T7//xa ^even' = to spread a signal, that is, to heap up earth in such a way that the site of a sepulchre should be clearly proclaimed.