Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/63

Military Architecture. 41 given, as the scholiast to Thucydides informs us, " because its walls were of white stone, while those of the city itself were of red brick." The exactness of this -statement may be doubted. The Egyptians made their defensive walls of a thickness which could only be attained in brick. It seems likely therefore that these walls consisted of a brick core covered with white stone. An examination of the remains of Heliopolis suggested to the authors of the Description de f Egypte that the walls of that cit}' also were cased with dressed stone. They found, even upon the highest part of the walls, pieces of limestone for which they could account in no other way. Nowhere else is there anything to be discovered beyond the remains of brick walls, which have always been laid out in the form of a parallelogram.^ These walls are sometimes between sixty and seventy feet thick.^ In some cases their position is only to be traced by a gentle swelling in the soil ; at Sais. however, they seem to have preserved a height of fifty-seven feet in some parts.^ No signs of towers or bastions are ever found. At Heliopolis there were gates at certain distances with stone jambs covered with inscriptions.^ The best preserved of all these enceintes is that of the ancient city of Nekheb, the Eilithyia of the Greeks, in the valley of El-Kab. The rectangle is 595 yards long by 516 wide; the walls are 36 feet thick. ^ About a quarter of the whole enceinte has been destroyed for the purposes of agriculture ; the part which remains contains four large gates, which are not placed in the middle of the faces upon which they open. In all the paintings representing sieges these walls are shown with round-topped battlements, which were easily constructed in brick. The only fort, properly speaking, which has been discovered in Egypt, appears to be the ruin known as CJionnct-cs-Zezib at Abydos.^ This is a rectangular court inclosed by a double wall, Plate 55 of the first volume of Lepsius's Denkmceler contains traces of the enceintes of Sais, Heliopolis, and Tanis. See also the Description de TEgpte, Ant., Ch. 21, 23, 24. ^ At Heliopolis they were 64 feet thick {Description), at Sais 48 feet {ibid.) while at Tanis they were only 19 feet. ^ IsAMBERT, Itineraire de V Es.ypte. ■* Maxime du Camp, Le Nil. p. 64. ^ Lepsius, Denkmceler, vol. ii. pi. ico. — Ebers, {^Egypten,) makes the enceinte of Nekheb a square. " Mariette, Abydos, Description des Fouilles, vol. ii. pp. 46-49, and plate 68. VOL. IT. G