EGYPT.—AN INTRODUCTION. 
7 
the quarries, which they present to a tyrannical yet economic government like the 
present, of materials for building forts, granaries, and other public works, will lead 
to the utter destruction of these magnificent remains. They were raised to defy time, 
and but for the injuries which they have sustained by violence, as far as the Persian 
conqueror could gratify his vengeance on the Egyptians by destroying their temples 
—the hundred pylons of Thebes might still have existed; for on the parts uninjured 
by the vindictive Cambyses, or the early Iconoclasts, the sculptured records and 
painted decorations which time has spared through three thousand years, show how 
much might yet have been seen and known of the works of a people, whose decline 
preceded the infancy of Greece. 
Some of the peculiar features of Egyptian architecture are instantly recognised, 
in the great extent of the horizontal lines seen in the long unbroken entablatures; 
and in the greater breadth of the base of the building than its superstructure. For 
the walls on the outside slope upwards to the summit, whilst within they are vertical. 
This principle of strength has not been followed by the architects of any other nation, 
except in the use of buttresses. The Greeks in their earliest Doric temples, though 
of a thousand years later date than the Egyptian, adopted this principle in the tapering 
form of their columns, but not in the outline of their temples; whilst the Egyptian 
columns are almost always cylindrical; but these differences scarcely enable us to 
trace the transition of the style of the structures of Egypt into that of Greece, though 
the Greeks were evidently indebted to the Egyptians for much that is now valuable 
in their architecture and sculpture. The travels of their artists and philosophers in 
that country during the fifth, fourth, and third centuries, B.C., to study the arts and 
learning of the Egyptians, led, on their return to Greece, to improvement in their 
own structures, and the adoption of decorative forms from sources similar to those 
observed by them in the works of the Pharaohs by which they had been surrounded. 
The more light and beautiful proportions, now observed as rules for the guidance of 
art, were only elegant modifications by the Greeks of the columns and entablatures of 
the Egyptian temples, which, like the members of Greek architecture, may be traced to 
the simple huts of the aborigines, and still represent the banded reeds of their rude 
and early domestic structures. The acanthus leaf of the Corinthian capital is a deviation 
only from those which the vegetation of the Valley of the Nile suggested, in imitation 
of the lotus and the palm. The Greeks, however, reflected as well as observed; and 
the architecture of Egypt, instead of being viewed by them as the basis of a law 
from which they were never to deviate, only suggested to their graceful minds those 
improvements which have given to their own productions an immortal character. 
But there was one obvious and striking distinction between the Egyptian temples 
and those of Greece; the former were plain externally, but within contained cloistered 
courts, and halls with massive columns that supported vast roofs, formed of enormous 
blocks of stone. The priests and the devotees, in their processions, passed along a 
dromos, or paved avenue, often bordered by ranges of sphinxes, to a lofty propylon, 
through which they entered an hypsethral quadrangle, in which obelisks were raised 
and colossal statues placed, thence through a grand pronaos or hall, enriched with 
