Walls

All over the East, where wood is not plentiful, walls of houses and even palaces havf WALLS WALLS 891 been Imilt from the earliest times of crude or sun- burnt brick. It is only in certain localities, where stone was plentiful, and in later ages, that stone has been used. Strabo (xvii. 2. 3) tells us that the houses in the cities of Ethiopia were formed by interweaving split pieces of palm wood or of crude bricks, and says (xvi. 1.

5) of Seleucia (Assyria, near Babylon) that on account of the scarcity of timber the beams and pillars of the houses were made of palm wood : they wound ropes of twisted reeds round the pillars, painted them over with colour and drew designs on them ; thej' covered the doors with asphalt. All the houses were vaulted on account ot the scarcity of timber.

The earliest edbrts of construction in Egypt were made in wood, probably like the dwellings now found in Nubia — palm branches interlaced, plastered over with c^lay and straw, roofs of branches or planks, or faggots of wood. Bricks were an advance upon this. The palaces of Egypt were of verj' slifjht construction, stuccoed walls and planks of acacia. In As.

syria stone was so scarce that it was only used as an accessory ; the bodies of the structures were never composed of it : it was mainly coulined to plinths, pave- ments, and the internal linings of walls. In ChaUhea stone wa.s entirely alwent. The moun- tains which run parallel to the left bank of the Tigris were bare of trees, and the palm and poplar alone yielded wood of any length : the one soft and librous, the other brittle and light.

Nineveh, IJabylon, Egypt, and Jerusalem all drew their timber from the forest of Lebanon. The em- ploj'ment, however, of this excellent wood must always have been rare and exceptional (Lenor- mant, Histoire Ancienne, ii. 298; Perrot and Chipiez, i. 124 ; Layard, Discoveries, 356). ' In Chaldiva the architect was condemned by tl\e force majeure of circumstances to eni]il<)y little more than crude or burnt brick and bad tmiber ; in A.

ssyria he voluntarily condemned himself to the limitations they imposed ' (Perrot and Chipiez, i. 125). The Chalda'ans could employ neither pier or column, nor bearers or lintels of stone ; tliey were thus debarred from constructing spacious galleries and chambers, and ' consequently their towns were artificial mountains, as solid and massive from base to summit as the natural hills' {ih. 133).

The few long and narrow apartments contrived within them could be compared only to caves hollowed out in the face of a clilt'. \V hen the arch was discovered it was made frequent use of.

A bas-relief recovered by Layard, showing a group of buildings at Kouyunjik erected by Sennacherib in his palace at Nineveh, depicts them as having not only flat roofs, but hemi- spherical cupolas, and tall conical domes : the same forms are still in use all over that country, the flat roofs usually for dwelling-houses, but yet the jjeasants' houses as well as the store-houses have often domed roofs of brick.

In building the tower of Habel we are told ' lliey had brick for stone, and bitumen had they for mortar' (Gn 11'). Herodotus says (i. 179), in regard to the walls of Babylon, ' As they dug the ditches they converted the excavated earth into bricks, and when they had enough they burnt them in the kilns. Finally, for mortar they used hot bitumen, and at every thirty courses of bricks they put a layer of reeils interlaced.'

There are many bituminous fountains still to be found spring- ing through the soil between Mosul and Baghdad (Layard, Nineveh, ii. 40). See BITUMEN. In spite of the abundance of stone In Egypt, crude brick was extensively used, and the captives taken in war were forced to undertake the erection of public granaries and other buildings in that material ior the Egyptian monarch. Wilkinson (i.

60) refers to the buildings of great size and solidity, found in various parts of the country, of crude brick. At Thebes these buildings consist of walls enclosing sacred monuments and tombs, and some are made with and others without straw. In Palestine all the earliest remains that have been recovered are of crude brick ; and even in the ruins in the mountains, where stone was Iilentiful, there are no stone remains attributed to an earlier time than that of king Solomon.

At Tell el-IIesy (Lachish) at least eight ruined cities have been brought to light, one lying over the other, the earliest being attributed to 1700 years li.C, the latest to 500 years B.C. The houses are of crude brick, similar to those of the coimtry at the present day. No indications were obtained whether the roots were vaulted or supported by beams ; probably the Latter, judf'in" by the thick- ness of the walls (Bliss, Mound of Man>i Cities).

At Tell es-SOfi recent excavations of FEF have exposed a wall of defence of stone earlier than the times of the Crusades, but the date is not yet approximated to. The stones are roughly squared rubble, laid in mud and straw, and the interstices tilled with mud and small stones from the lields : height of courses 1' 5" to 2'. A few drafted stones occur.

Part of the wall is plastered with dark mud and straw, over which is a layer of white mud and straws, made by mixing a powder of unburnt limestone with water. This kind of plaster is used in the Lebanon to-day (PEFSt, 1899, 195). Foundations of a city in Egypt. — When a new district was to be added to a city, the ground was prepared by building with crude brick a number of long and thick walls parallel to one another ; then cross walls at right angles with the first, che.ss-board fasliion.

The square pits tlius con- structed were tilled with eartli, broken stone, or anything else witliin reach. The foundations of the future city were laid upon the mass thus obtained, and they profited by the operation both in health and amenity. The cities of Memphis and Thebes both seem to have been built in this manner (Edouard Mariette, p. 1.39). Diodorus (i. 45. 4) says there were houses of four and live storeys at Thebes, and attributes them to the time of the fabulous monarch Busires.

As a rule we find a ground floor, one floor above that, and a covered flat roof on the top. Egyptian houses were built of crude brick made of loam mixed with chopijcd straw. These bricks are usually a foot long and 6 inches wide. The ceilings of the larger rooms were of indigenous or foreign wood, the smaller rooms were often vaulted: the walls of the houses were coated with stucco, and painted with religious and domestic scenes.

The galleries and columns of the porch were coloured in imitation of stone, or painted. The ceilings were covered with arabesques and interlacing ornaments of all kinds, wliUe the floors were strewn >vith net* woven of many coloured reeds (M. Gailhabaud's Monuments ancicns et mudcrns). Wilkinson (Anc. Egyp. iii. 316) states that tho brick arch was used 1540 years B.C., and the sto.ne arch GUO B.C.

in Egypt, and suggests that it came into use owing to the small quantity of wood in Egypt, and considers that the invention of the arch tliere may date as far back as 2020 years B.C.* Ho gives instances of stone monoliths of over 290 tons weight being dragged by manual labour over 500 miles from the quarries : the power to move the mass was the same, whatever might bo the dis- tance.

They simply put on a sulhcient number * In all probability thin dat« should be carried much further tm'-k, for recent excavations at Nippur liovo shown that in Babylonia the arch of burnt brick was employed prior to b.c 4000. See Babylonia in vol. L p. 1W>. of men to move the stone by hauling it along on a sledge. One case he mentions of a sinj;le block, 587 tons weight, bein" transported 138 laiies.

The walls of temples and the fortihuations of cities required to be of a verj' soliil descrii)tion, on account of the battering-ram (which see) ; and as the latter became more scientilically constructed, and other arts of war came into existence, the walls had to be made more and more solid, and the foun- dations extended deep into the soil or to the solid rock (Lk 6*).

There exist a number of instances at the present day of the magnificent walls of cut stone built in early days from the time of Solomon to Herod, at Jerusalem, Hebron, Arak el-Emir, Baalbek, Tyre and Zidon, and Egypt. At Jerusalem some of the stones in the wall of the temple enclosure, still existing, are over 30 feet long, 8 feet vnde, and 3i feet high, weighing over 80 tons.

The ancient walls are in places still over 150 feet in height, and were originally at the comers at least 230 feet in height. The stones are of hard mountain limestone, approximating to marble, and are carefully chiselled, with a sunken draft of about 3 to 5 inches width all round. The stones of the wall surrounding the cave of Machpelah at Hebron are very little in- ferior in size to those at Jerusalem.

At Baalbek the stones of the waU of the temple are not quite equal in size to those of Jerusalem, and the stone is much softer ; but this wall is pro- tected by another one in front built of exceedingly large stones, 3 of which weigh each about 800 tons, and are over 60 feet in length, 17 feet in breadth, and 14 feet in height. The manner in which these stones were cut and brought down from the quarry can be seen in the quarry itself.

When a large stone was ready to be brovight away, it could be brought doNvn by gravity with not a very great expenditure of la\>our. Josephus (Ant. XX. x. 7) speaks of square and very wuite stones used in the temple, the work of king Solomon, 20 cubits long and 6 cubits high ; he also speaks {BJ v. v. 1) of stones in the temple itself 40 cubits in length.

These great stone walls are taken do\vn to the rock for their foundations, while the buildings of Babylon had their founda- tions usually on the sand near the surface (Perrot and Chipiez, L 157). The Pharaonic temples were also rather laid on the surface than solidly placed in the ground. The gardens in Syria formerly, as at present, had stone walls as boundaries (BJ V. iii. 2), and narrow paths traversed the gardens of the suburbs (Nu 22-''').

The bare hillsides were terraced with stone walls and soil brought up from the bottom, so that the bare hills became fertile fields, as is the case at the present day in Spain, Northern India, Java, Japan. This also is carried out at the present day in many parts of Palestine (BJiP iL 493, iii. 14). For other points connected with the subject of this art. see BRICK, GATE, HOUSE, MORTAR, PAVE- MENT, Roof. Por details regarding the walls of Jerusalem, Babylon, Nineveh, etc.

, see the articles under these titles. C. Wareen.