latter building is noticeable for the entire absence of decoration upon its walls;[312] and as late as the sixth century angle pilasters set upon a podium were considered a sufficient decoration for the walls of the exquisite tomb at the southern Dânâ,[313] while the porticoes of house and stoa are models of severity.[314] The fantastic variety which characterized the late Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial age must be sought for in south-west Asia in another group of monuments. The influence of Alexandria dominates over the tomb façades of Petra, and was felt even in the earlier tombs at Madâin Ṣâliḥ.[315] With the latter I am not immediately concerned, except in so far as they help to determine the date of the Petra tombs. It is enough to notice that the local oriental forms, the pylon tombs with a band or bands of crenellated ornament, or with a staircase motive at the angles, dropped out of fashion during the first half of the first century after our era, and that in the first century A.D. Hellenistic forms had invaded the Ḥedjr tombs.[316] The gable tomb and the columned façade, which Domaszewski has christened the Roman temple tomb, do not indeed appear at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, but the fully developed aedicula, with quarter-columns in the antae, is found there as early as the year A.D. 31 in the tabernacle which frames the doorway,[317] and the tabernacle, both with a gable and with an archivolt, was employed in Arabia at an early date for votive niches.[318] It is therefore unnecessary, as Puchstein has pointed out, to assign such gable tombs at Petra as date from a period before the Roman occupation (i.e. before A.D. 106) to some fortuitous Greek influence,[319] since the type was familiar to the stone-cutters of an earlier period. Not later than the middle of the first century A.D. a second order of dwarf columns was placed in the attic (the earliest dated example is tomb F 4 at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, A.D. 63-64), but it is instructive to note that the appearance of a new form does not imply the elimination of older types. At Madâin Ṣâliḥ all the different variations continue to exist side by side, and there is an example of the primitive pylon tomb with a single band of crenellations, the unmitigated copy of an Arabian house for the living turned into a house for the dead, which is dated as late as the year A.D. 74,[320] just as the Egyptian gorge is found side by side with, and indeed upon the same tombs as, a fully developed Ionic entablature. The Roman temple tomb of Petra is predicted in the dwarf piers of the attic (which are of frequent occurrence at Madâin Ṣâliḥ) inasmuch as they imply a corresponding series of engaged piers in the wall below. A single example of this so-called temple tomb exists at Madâin Ṣâliḥ, but without the piers in the attic; it is probably to be dated in the middle of the first century A.D.[321] The engaged column, in contradistinction to the engaged pier, is employed at Madâin Ṣâliḥ only in the antae of