Volume II Part 3 (2/2)
For our restoration (Fig 30) we have had to depend very little upon conjecture[42] The only flight of fancy in which we have indulged is seen in the extra height which we have given to the tower at the north-eastern angle of the building It seemed to us probable that at some point upon such a lofty terrace there would be a belvedere or watch-tower to facilitate the proper surveillance of the country round about For the rest we have merely re-established the upper part of the works and restored its depth to the ditch, which had been filled in by the falling of the parapets The line of walls and bastions can be easily followed except at one point upon the southern face, where a wide breach exists The destruction of this part of the wall alone and the clearing of the ground upon which it stood, suggests that it was broken down by man rather than by time It is probable that the fortress was taken by some Ethiopian conqueror, by Sabaco or Tahraka, and that he took care to render its fortifications useless in a way that could not be easily repaired
[42] We have been able to make use, for this reconstruction, of two plans which only differ in details, and otherwise iven by LEPSIUS, Plate 111, vol
ii of his _Denkmaeler_; the plans of the two fortresses are in the middle of his map of the valley where they occur In plate 112 we have a pictorial view of the ruins and the ground about theique de l'Athenaeum Francais_ (1855, pp 80-84, and plate 5), M VOGue also published a plan of the two forts, acco valuable details, details which Lepsius, in his _Briefe aus aegypten_, passed over in silence
Our view of the fort shows it as it must have appeared froineer lavished all his skill on rendering the castle inable fro the stream was impossible; on that side the walls rested upon precipitous rocks rising sheer from the rapids of the Nile
The trace of the walls was a polygon not unlike a capital L The principal arm was perpendicular to the course of the river Its flat su 30) was about 250 feet by 190 feet The interior was reached by a narrow passage in the thickness of the masonry, the entrance to which was reached by an inclined plane The entrance is not visible in our illustration but the incline which leads to it is shown The walls on the three sides which looked landwards were froround They increased in thickness from twenty-six feet at the base to about twelve or thirteen at the summit Externally their upper parts fell backwards in such fashi+on that no ladder, however high, would have availed to reach the parapet We find a siement in the walls of a fortress represented at Beni-Hassan (Fig 31)[43]
[43] In this case the inclination is, however, in the lower half of the wall; a device which would be far less efficient in defeating an escalade than that at Seed fort, Beni-Hassan; frothened, both structurally and from a military point of view, by salient buttresses or small bastions on all the sides except that which faced the river These buttresses were either twelve or thirteen in nuht feet wide at the top In the re-entering angle which faces north-west there is a long diagonal buttress, by the use of which the engineer or architect at once economized material and protected a weak part of his structure in a les of the _enceinte_ were protected by double towers, very well disposed so as to coularity is not to be found here any ypt The curtain wall between two of the towers on the southern face is broken up into srees of salience, instead of being planned on a straight line like the rest
[Illustration: FIG 32--Siege of a fortress; from the Ramesseum, Thebes]
When the fortress was prepared for defence the parapetsas ed could cast javelins and stones and shoot arrows at an ene to scale or batter the walls A bas-relief at Thebes which represents the siege of a fortress seems to indicate that the parapets were crowned by wooden erections of so 32)[44]
[44] Both the plate in the _Description de l'egypte_ (_Ant_ vol ii pl 31), and that in LEPSIUS (part iii pl 166), suggest this interpretation
The walls were surrounded by a ditch, which was from 95 to 125 feet wide We cannot now tell what its depth may have been, but it appears to have been paved The counterscarp and certain parts of the scarp were faced with stone, carefully polished, and fixed so as to auglacis and the wide glacis itself were also reveted with stone All this formed a first line of defence, which had to be destroyed before the assailants could reach the place itself with their machines The external line of the ditch does not follow all the irregularities of the _enceinte_, its trace is the same as that of the curtain wall, exclusive of the towers or buttresses The clear width from the face of the latter is about sixty-four feet Neither ditch nor glacis exist on the eastern face, where the rapids of the Nile render theet to draw attention to the curious way in which the body of the fort is constructed It is composed of crude bricks transfixed horizontally, and at rather narrow intervals, by pieces of wood The situation of these beanized as they have decayed and left channels in the brickwork That the holes hich the walls are pierced at regular distances (see Fig 30) were thus caused, is beyond doubt, especially since a few fragments of hich the centuries have spared have been found These frag coypt, and commoner still in Nubia
We need not dwell upon the other fortress--that on the right bank It may be seen in the distance in our restoration of Se built upon rocks which were on all sides difficult of access, it did not require any very elaborate works It was coular square about 190 feet each way It had but a few salient buttresses; there were only two on the north-east, towards the mountains, and one, a very bold one, on the south-west, co the river There was no room for a wide ditch But at a distance of thirteen feet frolacis si of polished stone, but on account of the irregularities of the rock, the height of its crown varied considerably, and its slope was very steep, almost vertical The trace of the counterscarp followed that of the _enceinte_, including the buttresses Moreover, at its northern and southern angles it followed a line which roughly resembled the bastions of a modern fortification
Its structure was similar to that of Semneh
Lepsius does not hesitate to ascribe both these forts to Ousourtesen III, whose na rocks, and ith the deities of the south, orshi+pped at Se to the chronology which is now generally adopted, to the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth century BC
In any case they cannot be later than the time of Thothmes III, who, in the course of the seventeenth century BC restored the temples which they inclose, and covered their walls with his effigies and royal cartouches Even if we admit that these two castles are not older than the last-naypt the credit of possessing the oldest examples of military architecture, as well as the oldest temples and the oldest toypten_, p 259--See also MASPERO, _Histoire Ancienne_, pp 111-113
CHAPTER II
METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION, THE ORDERS, SECONDARY FORMS
-- 1 _An analysis of Architectural Forms necessary_
We have now described the toypt We have attempted to define the character of their architecture, and to sho its forious beliefs, social condition, and manners of the nation, as well as by the climate of the country We have therefore passed in review the most important architectural creations of a people ere the first to display a real taste and feeling for art
In order to give a coyptian art, and of the resources at its disposal, we s to pieces and show the elements of which they were composed The rich variety of supports, the numerous ”orders” of pillar and column, the methods employed for decoration and illumination,at them from a synthetic point of view, but we must finish by a methodical analysis From such an analysis alone can we obtain the necessary ypt and that of the nations which succeeded her upon the stage of history An exayptian remains carries the historian back to a more remote date than can be attained in the case of any other country, and yet he is far froyptian civilization
Notwithstanding their prodigious antiquity, the most ancient of the monuments that have survived carry us back into the bosoed fro of the Pyramids and theand well-filled past Although we possess no relic from that past, we can divine its character to some extent from the ies Certain effects of which the artists of Memphis were very fond can only be explained by habits contracted during a long course of centuries In the foryptian architects we shall find e of development, such as forms appropriate to wood or metal employed in stone, and childish methods of construction perpetuated without other apparent cause
-- 2 _Materials_
In our explanation of the general character of Egyptian architecture we have already enumerated the principal materials of which it disposed, and pointed out thefrom the choice of one or another of those materials We should not here return to the subject but for a ained a wide acceptance