What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Philosophy
What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?
Mahaffy, J. P. (John Pentland)
Civilization; Greece -- Civilization; Greece -- Intellectual life
want in the most widely severed parts of the world--usually come to us
in the stage of survival, when men had already learned other kinds of
architecture. Hence they often preserved for the dwellings of the dead
this type of underground beehive house with a long and narrow approach,
though as time went on the house was made higher, and the avenue of
approach better (as we have it in the famous New Grange in Ireland),
and they even ornamented the inner surface of the slabs that formed the
walls. As usual, the prehistoric Greeks did it all more perfectly than
the rest of the world. The beehive house known in former days as the
Treasury of Atreus, but now recognised as a tomb of some prehistoric
king, is a splendid building fifty feet high, and made of thirty-three
horizontal courses of stone overlapping as they rise, with the inner
surfaces cut to form a conical chamber. Not only are large lintel stones
used, but there were rosettes of bronze ornamenting the inner surface of
the walls, and the stately avenue (_dromos_) lined with stone work of
great finish and open to the sky, led to an ornamented gate or entrance.
A restoration of this entrance, made by the aid of the actual pillars
carried home long ago by the Marquis of Sligo, now astonishes the
student of prehistoric art in the British Museum.[22] Why do I, however,
delay over this very perfect and beautiful kind of building of which
another noted specimen is the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos in
Bœotia?[23] In the first place, to show you how the highly developed
and finished forms were the gradual perfection of the oldest and rudest
protected house, to which they merely added height, careful finish, and
ornament, which ornament we know from Egyptian parallels to date some
fifteen centuries before Christ; secondly, to bring home to you the
important fact that the beehive or round house was at an early date
abandoned to the use of the dead, and not employed for the use of the
living till quite late in Greek history, when a few round public
buildings show that the idea had not been lost. The men that built the
great and elaborate tomb of Atreus probably never themselves lived in a
round or beehive, but in a square house. They only maintained the round
form out of respect for the dead, and indeed for the sake of the safety
of the treasures buried with the dead.
To the square house (of course I include under this short word all
rectangular buildings) we now turn. It seems to me that the earliest
model which suggested this form was the hut of logs, laid one over the
other alternately at right angles so as to enclose a square space. Two
upright posts with a horizontal beam over them would supply the first
rude doorway in an opening left by using shorter logs on each side of
it, and then it was very obvious that a gable roof to cover the house
would be made by laying logs from the top of the wall to rest one
against the other at their upper ends, or of course a flat roof in a
similar way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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