IxX REPORT — 1875. 



temples. Accordingly, we soon find men of ability and learning devoting a 

 great part of their time to building and architecture, and the post of 

 architect became one of honour and profit. In one of the most ancient 

 quarries of Egypt a royal high architect of the dynasty of the Psammetici 

 has left his pedigree sculptured on the rock, extending back for twenty-three 

 o-enerations, all of whom held the same post in succession in connexion with 

 considerable sacerdotal offices *. 



As there were in these remote times officers whose duty it was to design 

 and construct, so also there were those whose duty it was to maintain and 

 repair the royal palaces and temples. In Assyria, 700 years before our era, 

 as we know from a tablet found in the palace of Sennacherib by Mr. Smith, 

 there was an officer whose title was the Master of "Works. The tablet I 

 allude to is inscribed with a petition to the king from an officer in charge of 

 a palace, requesting that the Master of Works may be sent to attend to some 

 repairs which were much needed at the time f. 



Under the Eoman Empire there was almost as great a division of labour 

 in connexion with building and design as now exists. The great works of 

 that period were executed and maintained by an army of officers and work- 

 men, to each of whom special duties were assigned. 



Passing by those early attempts at design and construction which supplied 

 the mere wants of the individual and the household, it is to the East that we 

 must turn if we would fiod the earliest works which display a knowledge of 

 engineering. Whether the knowledge of engineering, if we may so call it, 

 possessed by the people of Chaldaea and Babylonia was of native growth or 

 was borrowed from Egypt is, perhaps, a question which cannot yet be 

 answered. Both people were agricultural, dwelling on fertile plains inter- 

 sected by great rivers, with a soil requiring water only to enable it to bring 

 forth inexhaustible crops. Similar circumstances would create similar wants, 

 and stimulate to action similar faculties to satisfy them. Apart from the 

 question of priority of knowledge, we know that at a very early period, some 

 four or five thousand years ago at least, there were men in Mesopotamia and 

 Egypt who possessed considerable mechanical knowledge and no little skUl 

 in hydraulic engineering. Of the men themselves we know little : happily, 

 works often remain when the names of those who conceived and executed 

 them have long been forgotten. 



It has been said that architecture had its origin not only in nature, but in 

 religion ; and if we regard the earliest works which required mechanical 

 knowledge and skiU, the same may be said of engineering. The largest 

 stones were chosen for sacred buildings, that they might be more enduring 

 as well as more imposing, thereby calling for improvement and invention of 

 mechanical contrivances to assist in transporting and elevating them to the 



* Discoveries in Egj'pt, Ethiopia, &c., by Dr. Lepsius, 2jid edit. p. 318. 

 t Smith's (G.) ' Assyrian Discoveries,' 2ud edit. p. 414, 



