328 The Evolution of Architecture. 



truly a forest of columns one hundred and thirty-eight in 

 all the larger seventy feet in height with capitals of twenty 

 feet diameter. It may well be doubted whether the world 

 has ever known another architectural effect so grand and so 

 imposing as this must have been, seen in its glorious prime. 

 No wonder it became a type so fixed that it withstood even 

 the onset of the Koman power which carried everywhere 

 else throughout its wide dominions the hybrid forms of its 

 own art. Egyptian art under the Ptolemies was Egyptian 

 still ; the temple of Edfou its most characteristic work, 

 which, till the reading of its inscriptions, the archaeologists 

 fancied of an earlier date than the temples of the Theban 

 dynasty two thousand years before. It was Cleopatra's 

 nose, they say, that changed the world ; but these Egyptian 

 builders changed Cleopatra's nose ; made her Egyptian 

 utterly, and dressed her in the clinging garments of old 

 Rhamses's queen, who had been dead about three thousand 

 years. 



In the last analysis we should, no doubt, be able to detect 

 a great many actions and reactions of European and Asiatic 

 architecture upon each other, but the main stream of archi- 

 tectural evolution, which is all that I can hope to trace 

 in one short hour, was, with one exception, not seriously 

 affected by Asiatic influences, great builders though the 

 Hindoos and Iranians and Assyrians and Sassanians un- 

 questionably were. Westward the star of architectural em- 

 pire took its way. In our Metropolitan Museum we see 

 the struggle for existence between the sculpture of Egypt 

 and Assyria, with the gradual emergence of the Hellenic 

 type. This struggle must have had a wide extent, and ar- 

 chitecture as well as sculpture must have been affected by 

 it in both Ionian and Doric Greece. In Ionia, upon the 

 western coast of Asia Minor, we should expect to find the 

 Oriental influence more evident than in Attica, and it is so. 

 If the tombs of Lycia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, 

 with their Ionic columns imperfectly developed, do not 

 mark a station of the western march of architectural forms 

 from Mesopotamia, they are " a distinct parallel develop- 

 ment of the most primitive Ionic forms," and their Oriental 

 origin in either case admits of little doubt. But Greece 

 touched nothing that she did not beautify ; and the differ- 

 ence of the completely developed Ionic column and its order 

 from the primitive forms of Lycia and Ionia is a differ- 

 ence which makes for symmetry and beauty in every least 



