§ II Civil Architecture
If hardly anything is left of the Phœnician temples on all the shores of the Mediterranean, it must be admitted that the state of the case is almost the same with regard to civil monuments. The position of the formidable ramparts of Tyre, which held conquerors of cities like Sargon, Nebuchadnezzar, and Alexander so long in check, can with difficulty be recognised at a single point: it is probably marked by a submarine wall of enormous blocks, bonded with a concrete in which lime is mixed with crushed bricks; these walls, according to Arrian, were 147 ft. high.
The enclosure of Banias (Balaneum), between Tortosa and Latakieh, is still partly standing; but is it of Phœnician or of Pelasgic origin? It extends to a length of about 1,970 ft.; the wall, pierced by three gates, from 26 ft. to 32½ ft. broad, is built of blocks of grey limestone of irregular form, which are neither trimmed nor cemented. It is from 16 ft. to 26 ft. thick, and, in places, is still as much as 32½ ft. high. Broken lines, recesses and projections seem to announce the approaching appearance of bastions and towers in the art of fortification. The Pelasgic walls of Eubœa, Tiryns and Sipylus present analogous features.
What remains of the substructures of the walls of Aradus, Berytus, and Sidon, indicates the employment of large and fine blocks irregularly laid. In the Carthaginian ramparts of Eryx, in Sicily, the stones bear Phœnician letters which acted as position marks for the masons, but this fortified enclosure does not date from an earlier period than the fourth century, and the Punic architects must have imitated their neighbours the Greeks. The walls of Carthage, which roused the astonishment of the ancients, were from six to seven leagues in circumference; they consisted, at least at certain points, of three concentric walls, arranged in steps in consequence of the declivity of the ground. Nothing is left of them except a sort of talus at intervals, which serves as the boundary of cultivated fields. Constructed of hewn stone, they were, according to the statements of ancient writers, 77 ft. high and 34 ft. thick; the towers were still higher and stronger.
Since temples and ramparts have always been constructed in the most solid form, and that most capable of resisting the attacks of time and of men, if very little of these is left there is a much stronger reason why hardly anything should remain of civil monuments and private houses. In the soft limestone of the Phœnician coast the primitive inhabitants hewed out their dwellings like Troglodytes. In later times, by the aid of civilisation, the tombs alone were opened in the sides of the mountains, and the living cut out enormous blocks of stone with their picks, in which they hewed doors and chambers. At Amrith there is a monolithic house cut in this fashion, which M. Renan considers as the type of the genus. It is 98 ft. square and 71 ft. high; the walls are 2 ft. 7 in. thick; in the interior three chambers are divided by thin partitions contrived during the hollowing of the rock. Sometimes only the lower part of the walls have been hewn in the rock, which thus only forms a monolithic plinth one or several yards high, and completed to the roof by light masonry.
At Cyprus traces of structures which could be attributed to the period of Phœnician dominion are sought in vain. The only monuments which give some idea of the civil architecture of this famous island are models of houses in terra-cotta, found at Dali and preserved at the Louvre (7¾ in. high). The most remarkable of these little buildings has a door guarded by a sphinx. At the two windows appear the heads of women; on each side of the door, columns with capitals in the form of lotus-flowers support a projecting roof. But of what architectural value can such a toy, modelled in so coarse a manner, be?
The poverty of monuments is even more absolute in the case of Carthage and the western basin of the Mediterranean. What travellers who visit the site of the old city admire above everything are the unheard-of efforts made by the ancients to catch the water from the sky and store it in vast covered basins, or else to bring water from springs at great distances. Nowhere throughout the East, where there has always been the greatest anxiety to provide water—not at Jerusalem, where the Siloam aqueduct was tunnelled, nor at Tyre, where the aqueduct was dug which brought the waters of Ras el-Ain into the city—are such grand traces left of the works undertaken with this useful object. Only the gigantic viaduct which goes for several leagues to bring the waters of Mount Zaghouan to Carthage, does not date, as it is at the present day, from an earlier period than the reign of Hadrian; and the same must be said of those immense vaulted cisterns, near Byrsa, in which a whole Arab village lodges at the present day, and in which tourists take drives: it has never been possible to say exactly how much is anterior to the period at which the Roman colony was founded. The Carthaginians, two hundred years before our era, certainly knew the vault and the dome, the natural and primordial elements of oriental architecture, as well as the Romans. The walls, vaults, and domes of the cisterns of Carthage are of a mediocre stone, furnished by the quarries of Zaghouan: small irregular blocks are buried in a very thick mortar of lime, so excellent that it unites with the stone and gives to the whole structure the homogeneous character of one single immense block. The Byzantine ruins which cover the plain of Carthage are built with equally bad materials and an equally good cement.
We must now enquire whether any trace remains of the constructions which the Phœnicians must have undertaken in order to establish or maintain those ports on the Mediterranean coasts in which their vessels found a sure refuge. These works must have shown the most characteristic side of the art of building among this nation of merchants. However, they have perished almost entirely like the rest, or else they are still buried under the sand. Tyre and Sidon had two harbours, of which only the site is now to be distinguished. The two harbours at Carthage, the commercial harbour and the cothon or military harbour, are still there, but three-quarters of them are covered with sand, and they no longer contain more than a pool of shallow water. Lengthy and costly excavations, of which those undertaken at Utica may give some idea, could alone tell us what they formerly were. At present we can only confirm the exactness of Appian’s description when he says: “The harbours of Carthage were constructed in such a way that ships passed from one into the other; on the side of the sea they had only one entrance, 70 ft. broad, which was closed by iron chains. The first harbour, intended for merchant vessels, was furnished with numerous and various mooring-cables. In the middle of the second there was an island; round this island, as on all the edges of the basin, were large quays. The quays presented a series of docks which could contain a hundred and twenty vessels. Above the docks, storehouses had been constructed for the rigging. Before each dock rose two columns of the Ionic order, which gave to the circuit of the harbour and the island the appearance of a portico. In the island a pavilion had been built for the admiral, from which trumpet-signals sounded, and orders were transmitted by the herald, and in which the admiral kept his look-out. The island was situated near the mouth; its surface had a perceptible elevation above the plane of the water, so that the admiral might see all that passed on the sea without those who were coming from the open being able to distinguish what was being done within the harbour. Even the merchants who found shelter in the first basin could not see the arsenals in the second; a double wall separated them from it, and a special entrance gave them admission into the town without having to pass through the military harbour.” Go at the present day to Carthage, and you will observe with astonishment the modest extent of these two reservoirs, which formed the harbour of the great African city. They are parallel to the sea, from which a narrow strip of land separates them; the admiral’s island is still in the centre of the cothon, which is circular in form, and communicates by a narrow canal with the merchant harbour; the latter forms a large rectangle, and opens into the Mediterranean by a mouth a few yards wide. The Carthaginian vessels were scarcely larger than our fishing-smacks. The jetty which sheltered them on their entrance into the harbour of Carthage has left a trace marked by large blocks, which at certain points reach the level of the sea. The two harbours of Utica were not more spacious: one was only 328 ft. by 108 ft., the other 780 ft. by 327 ft.
Of all the Phœnician towns, that which has preserved the most remarkable remains of its ancient jetty is Thapsus (Dimas), on the eastern coast of Tunis. The mole which, though dilapidated, still rises 8 ft. above the waves, is 850 ft. long, and its breadth is 35 ft. The peculiarity of its construction is that it is pierced by a series of small passages, arranged in three rows: their object was to deaden the violence of the shock of the waves, by allowing them to pass through the openings. Here again it is uncertain whether we are looking at a work exclusively Phœnician, Roman, or Byzantine.