A most interesting addition has recently been made to our knowledge of this style by the researches of the Count de Vogüé among the ruined cities recently discovered in the mountains of Central Syria. [Illustration: Fig. 192.--El Barah, Central Syria.] These cities seem to have been in prosperity up to the moment of the Mahometan conquest of Syria, but to have been suddenly deserted, as in one day, on the approach of the Arabian armies, and since then to have remained untouched but by the elements and earthquakes; so that they hand down to us the earlier Byzantine architecture (as practised in Syria) in the most perfect and instructive manner. In these wonderful cities we have not only the churches, but nearly every description of Byzantine building, either nearly perfect, or--when thrown down by earthquakes, as is often the case--with the parts still lying as they fell, so that the entire design can be perfectly understood. These remains supply the connecting link between the Byzantine and the old Classic styles; but it is the _later_ buildings, such as St. Mark’s at Venice, which give the link at the opposite end of the chain, connecting it with the churches of Aquitaine, and through them with our own Romanesque and transitional works; while the various productions of Byzantine art of the same period, with which Western Europe was so liberally supplied, became the germs from which much of the ornamentation of our own earlier works originated. All this it behoves the Gothic architect to study; nor should he neglect the parallel supplies of suggestions from the _Mahometan_ styles--themselves the offspring of the Byzantine. But still more incumbent is it on him to follow out that direct _catena_ by which, in _Western_ Europe, the Roman style passed through the Early Basilican phase in Southern Italy, the Lombardic in Northern Italy,[82] and the various derivative forms of Romanesque in Southern France and Rhineland, as well as in the less familiar European countries.