Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/61

Military Architecture. 39 and in the upper gorges of the Nile, but, unfortunately such works were always carried out in brick and generally in crude brick. The Eo-yptian architect had at hand in great abundance the finest materials in the world, except marble, and yet they were used by him exclusively for the tomb and the temple. When it was a question of providing an indestructible dwelling for the dead, and so of perpetuating the efficacy of the funeral prayers and offerings, " eternal stone " was not spared ; but when less important purposes hacTto-be-fiilfilled they were content with clay. Baking bricks was a more rapid process than quarrying and dressing stone, and if the house or fortress in which they were used had comparatively slight durability, it was easy enough to replace it with another. The~cnHe~Bricks, dried simply in the sun, became disintegrated with time and fell into powder ; the kiln dried bricks were carried off from the ruins of one building to be used in another. The few piers or fragments of wall which remain are confused and shapeless. A few blocks of stone, sometimes even a single chip of marble, is enough to enable us to tell the history of a building which has been long destroyed. Such a chip may be the only survivinof frao^ment of the edifice to which it belonged, but it preserves the impression of the chisel which fashioned it, that is of the taste and individuality of the artist who held the chisel. We have nothinsf of the kind in the case of a brick. Bricks -were almost always covered with a coat of stucco, so that nothing was required of them beyond that they should be of the right size and of a certain hardness. It is only by their inscriptions, when they have them, that the dates of these bricks can be determined ; when they are without them they tell us nothing at all about the past. Sometimes a brick structure presents, from a distance, an imposing appearance, and the traveller approaches it thinking that he will soon draw all its secrets from it. But after carefully study- ing and measuring it he is forced to confess that he has failed. It has no trace of decoration, and it is the decoration of an ancient building which tells us its age, its character, and its purpose. Stone, even when greatly broken, allows mouldings to be traced, but bricks preserve nothing ; they are as wanting in individual expression as the pebbles which go to make a shingly beech. Even if it had come down to us in a less fragmentary condition, the military architecture of Egypt would have been far less in- teresting than that of Greece. The latter country is mountainous ;