At Cyprus traces of structures which could be attributed to the period of Phœnician dominion are sought in vain. The only monuments which give some idea of the civil architecture of this famous island are models of houses in terra-cotta, found at Dali and preserved at the Louvre (7¾ in. high). The most remarkable of these little buildings has a door guarded by a sphinx. At the two windows appear the heads of women; on each side of the door, columns with capitals in the form of lotus-flowers support a projecting roof. But of what architectural value can such a toy, modelled in so coarse a manner, be? [Illustration: Fig. 192.--Terra-cotta house. (Louvre.)] The poverty of monuments is even more absolute in the case of Carthage and the western basin of the Mediterranean. What travellers who visit the site of the old city admire above everything are the unheard-of efforts made by the ancients to catch the water from the sky and store it in vast covered basins, or else to bring water from springs at great distances. Nowhere throughout the East, where there has always been the greatest anxiety to provide water--not at Jerusalem, where the Siloam aqueduct was tunnelled, nor at Tyre, where the aqueduct was dug which brought the waters of Ras el-Ain into the city--are such grand traces left of the works undertaken with this useful object. Only the gigantic viaduct which goes for several leagues to bring the waters of Mount Zaghouan to Carthage, does not date, as it is at the present day, from an earlier period than the reign of Hadrian; and the same must be said of those immense vaulted cisterns, near Byrsa, in which a whole Arab village lodges at the present day, and in which tourists take drives: it has never been possible to say exactly how much is anterior to the period at which the Roman colony was founded. The Carthaginians, two hundred years before our era, certainly knew the vault and the dome, the natural and primordial elements of oriental architecture, as well as the Romans. The walls, vaults, and domes of the cisterns of Carthage are of a mediocre stone, furnished by the quarries of Zaghouan: small irregular blocks are buried in a very thick mortar of lime, so excellent that it unites with the stone and gives to the whole structure the homogeneous character of one single immense block. The Byzantine ruins which cover the plain of Carthage are built with equally bad materials and an equally good cement. We must now enquire whether any trace remains of the constructions which the Phœnicians must have [Illustration: Fig. 193.--Plan of the harbours at Carthage (after Daux, _Emporia phéniciens_).]