460 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1957 



of Hadrian (A. D. 117-137), and it was not available in bulk until 

 the middle of the second century. The impact, when it came, was for 

 that reason all the more striking. By the end of the second century 

 there was hardly a major public building in Lepcis Magna or Sabratha 

 that had not been at least partially rebuilt in the new material. 



The effects were not, however, limited to the mere substitution of 

 one material for another. The structural properties of marble dif- 

 fered widely from those of the building stones available in many of the 

 provinces to which it was now imported. This alone was bound to 

 have an effect upon local architectural practices. There were, however, 

 other and more far-reaching consequences. Once again, the case of 

 Tripolitania will serve to illustrate what in varying degrees was 

 happening in many other parts of the Roman world. Here the monu- 

 mental architecture of the earlier Roman period, i. e., down to the end 

 of the first century A. D., was still a typically provincial architecture, 

 in that the classical models on which it was based were often pro- 

 foundly modified by local traditions, building practices, and materials. 

 This local style finds no expression whatsoever in the marble archi- 

 tecture that succeeded it. The constructional forms and ornament 

 of the marble buildings of second-century Tripolitania have nothing 

 to do with the previous architectural history of the province; they 

 were those of the regions from which the marble itself was imported 

 (with some admixture of motifs derived from the contemporary 

 architecture of the capital), and it is quite evident that in this par- 

 ticular case the shipments of partially prefabricated building ma- 

 terials were accompanied by the establishment of workshops capable of 

 carving and handling a material of which the local masons had had 

 no previous experience. This was a somewhat extreme, but by no 

 means unique, case. All over the Empire, even in Rome itself, we 

 find evidence of the establishment of permanent or temporary work- 

 shops, whose business it was to handle the consignments of marble 

 from the great exporting quarries. What had happened was that, 

 under conditions of widespread peace and commercial prosperity, 

 it was the highly organized producer who captured the market; and, 

 as is the rule in such cases, what had started as a practical reorgani- 

 zation, designed to increase output, became in the event a powerful 

 factor in shaping the development of architectural style and practice 

 throughout the eastern, and over large parts of the central and 

 western, Mediterranean. 



It is hardly surprising that the methods employed with such suc- 

 cess in architecture should have been applied also to the manufacture 

 of sarcophagi. Here we lack the evidence of inscriptions; but for- 

 tunately that of the sarcophagi themselves is quite explicit. The 

 Italian quarries, which supplied the bulk of the marble used in the 



