None of these are original buildings, but still, when put together and compared the one with the other, and, above all, when examined by the light which discoveries farther east have enabled us to throw on the subject, they enable us to restore this style in something like its pristine form. At present, it is true, they are but the scattered fragments of an art of which it is feared no original specimens now remain, and which can only therefore be recovered by induction from similar cognate examples of other, though allied, styles of art. CHAPTER VII. ASIA MINOR. CONTENTS. Historical notice—Tombs at Smyrna—Doganlu—Lycian tombs. It is now perhaps in vain to expect that any monuments of the most ancient times, of great extent or of great architectural importance, remain to be discovered in Asia Minor; still, it is a storehouse from which much information may yet be gleaned, and whence we may expect the solution of many dark historical problems, if ever they are to be solved at all. Situated as that country is, in the very centre of the old world, surrounded on three sides by navigable seas opening all the regions of the world to her commerce, possessing splendid harbours, a rich soil, and the finest climate of the whole earth, it must not only have been inhabited at the earliest period of history, but must have risen to a pitch of civilisation at a time preceding any written histories that we possess. We may recollect that, in the time of Psammeticus, Phrygia contended with Egypt for the palm of antiquity, and from the monuments of the 18th dynasty we know what rich spoil, what beautiful vases of gold, and other tributes of a rich and luxurious people, the Pout and Roteno and other inhabitants of Asia Minor brought and laid at the feet of Thothmes and other early kings eighteen centuries at least before the Christian era.