subdivide this into Palmyrene, Herodian, or construct an imaginary Persian style out of what went before and came afterwards. Choisy himself shows that a large use of burnt brick was first made by the Romans, and that the system of building vaults in sections known in Assyria and Egypt had been adopted by Roman builders in the East in the time of Constantine. But this was the essential germ of Byzantine construction. It was the falling away of a dead scholasticism that left Roman building in the East free to be shaped into Byzantine architecture. Mr. Bury, who is extreme in the opposite direction, and makes the same claim for the continuity of Roman art as he does for the Empire, suggests that Romaic would be a better term than Byzantine. But whatever name is given to the political system we must remember that the arts are shaped by the people, and that the people were truly Greek who, in the age of Justinian, thought out and left to the modern world the last great gift of Hellenic genius--mediæval Greek architecture. [Illustration: FIG. 30.--Roman Tomb in Palestine.] While the art of building in the East, particularly in Syria and Asia Minor, and possibly in Egypt, was still distinctly Roman, a ferment and change may be detected which cannot be matched in Rome itself. Both in construction and ornamentation there is much already at Palmyra and Baalbec that belongs to the new, and repudiates the rules of merely official art. In Rome the dome never appears to have been finally adapted to a composite building by being directly applied to a square plan. The dome on pendentives, so far as we know, was invented and perfected entirely in the East. M. Choisy figures a building from Jerash, which may be of the third or fourth century which he considers the earliest known dome on pendentives. This building, although it is plainly early, has nothing characteristically Roman about it. A building of the same class however, recently discovered by the Palestine Exploration Society at Kusr en Nûeijîs in eastern Palestine,[330] is an ornate example of late Roman work; Ionic pilasters and carved entablature mask the outside, while within we have a perfected dome on pendentives covering a central square area, counterpoised by four barrel vaults. We agree with the Memoir that--“there can be little hesitation in ascribing this building to the second century A.D.” This building, probably a mausoleum, in adjustment of parts, and geometrical development might be a Byzantine church of three hundred years later. It is a little Sancta Sophia, and taken together with the Jerash building it makes a class invaluable as a fixed point to work from.[331] This however like most Syrian buildings is of stone.