Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/62

40 A History of Art in Ancient Egypt. the soil is cut up by valleys and rocky hills ; the Greek towns, or, at least, their citadels, occupied the summits of rocky heights which varied greatly in profile and altitude. Hence the military architec- ture of the country showed great diversity in its combinations. In Egypt the configuration of the soil was not of a nature to provoke any efforts of invention or adaptation. All the cities W'ere in the plain. Fortified posts were distinguished from one another only by the greater or less extent, height, and thickness of their walls. We shall, however, have to call attention to the remains of a few_d£i£nsixe_works which, like those established to guard the defiles of the cataracts, were built upon sites different enough from those ordinarily presented by the Nile valley. In these cases we shall find that the Egyptian constructors knew how to adapt their military buildings to the special requirements of the ground. Egyptian cities seem always to have been surrounded by a forti- fied enceinte ; in some cases the remains of such fortifications have been found, in others history tells us that they existed. At Thebes, for instance, no traces have, so far as we know, been discovered of any wall. Homer's epithet of hundred-gated {iKaToybirvKos) may be put on one side as evidence, because the Greek poet did not know Egypt. He described the great metropolis of the Empire of the South as he imagined it to be. The Homeric epithet is capable also of another explanation, an explanation which did not escape Diodorus,^ it may have referred, not to the gates of the city, but to the pylons of the temples, and should in that case be translated as " Thebes of the Jiitndi'ed pylons " instead of hundred gates. We have better evidence as to the existence of fortifications about the town in the descriptions left to us by the ancient historians of the siege of Ptolemy Physcon : the city could not have resisted for several years if it had been an open town. It was the same with Memphis. On more than one occasion, during the Pharaonic period as well as after the Persian conquest, it played the part of a fortress of the first class. It was the key of middle Egypt. It even had a kind of citadel which included almost a third of the city and was called the white wall (XevKcv relx^s).'^ This name was ^ DioDORUs, i. 45, 6. 2 Thucvdides, i. 104. Cf. Herodotus, iii. 94, and Diodorus, xi. 74. After the Persian conciuest it was occupied by the army corps left to ensure the submission of the country.