THE FESTAL DEVELOPMENT OF ART. 745 



trace. The most ancient architectural remains are huge mono- 

 liths, undoubtedly intended as monuments of the dead. Perhaps 

 hardly less old are the dolmens, or flat stones laid horizontally 

 upon several tall upright pillars ; and the cromlechs, or circles of 

 rude stones, indicating a place of assembly or the marking off 

 of a sacred inclosure. All these are probably early tombs. The 

 tomb is, among primitive people, a place of religious festival. It 

 becomes a shrine of the deified hero. Around it the living gather 

 to celebrate the deeds of the dead and to invoke his blessing. The 

 tomb-shrine gradually becomes a temple. The whole history of 

 the development of architecture shows the shrine as the constant 

 center about which are arranged the pillared halls, the colonnades, 

 the ornate portals, the ornamental courts, and the sculpture-lined 

 avenues of the most elaborate temples. Prof. G. Baldwin Brown 

 says, in his recent manual on the fine arts : " Through a fortunate 

 circumstance we are able to get behind these elaborate construc- 

 tions, and learn the arrangements which preceded them in respect 

 to the shrine and its furnishing forth. The pictures in the Egyp- 

 tian hieroglyphic writing supply us with minute but extremely 

 spirited delineations of structures and objects which may have 

 been familiar to the inhabitants countless generations earlier than 

 the erection of the tombs and temples that remain to us. Among 

 these pictures are one or two representing small huts or arbors of 

 rustic work. These, we learn, are shrines of the gods, and they 

 represent the original shape of the sacred chamber, which re- 

 mained to all time as the heart and kernel of the vast temples of 

 a Seti or a Rameses. . . . Religious worship, it need not be said, 

 is infinitely older than the permanent temple, and for its perform- 

 ance all that was needed was a gathering of the pious at a sacred 

 spot about a rustic altar, to which might be added a movable ark, 

 or a fixed hut or canopy for the safe keeping of any totem or 

 apparatus of secret mummery belonging to the local divinity. 

 Given such a permanent structure, the approach to it would be 

 specially hallowed ground and fenced off from profane tread. 

 Any simple device, such as a lofty flagstaff, would be adopted to 

 give it importance from afar, and on the occasion of the festival 

 every kind of decoration in the form of fluttering streamers, 

 branches of green trees, and garlands of flowers, would be lavished 

 on the building and its approaches. • Here, in the little Egyptian 

 shrine, we see at the entrance two lofty flagstaffs, and in front 

 the indication of a palisade, evidently marking off the sacred 

 precinct, or temenos. . . . Now it will be recognized that we have 

 here, reduced to their simplest terms, just the same elements that 

 went to make up the vast complexus of the monumental temples 

 of Thebes or Abydos. The shrine remained as it had been, 

 though now wrought in stone. The chambers round about it in 



