Greek Architecture

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Greek art marks the beginning of European civilization. The Hellenic race gathered up influences and suggestions from both Asia and Africa and fused them with others, whose sources are unknown, into an art intensely national and original, which was to influence the arts of many races and nations long centuries after the decay of the Hellenic states. The Greek mind, compared with the Egyptian or Assyrian, was more highly intellectual, more logical, more symmetrical, and above all more inquiring and analytic. Living nowhere remote from the sea, the Greeks became sailors, merchants, and colonizers. The Ionian kinsmen of the European Greeks, speaking a dialect of the same language, populated the coasts of Asia Minor and many of the islands, so that through them the Greeks were open to the influences of the Assyrian, Phœnician, Persian, and Lycian civilizations. In Cyprus they encountered Egyptian influences, and finally, under Psammetichus, they established in Egypt itself the Greek city of Naukratis. They were thus by geographical situation, by character, and by circumstances, peculiarly fitted to receive, develop, and transmit the mingled influences of the East and the South.

PREHISTORIC MONUMENTS

Authentic Greek history begins with the first Olympiad, 776 B.C. The history of the lay period of primitive and developing culture preceding that date was wholly unknown, otherwise than through legends and the Homeric poems, until the researches of Schliemann and his successors, and in still more recent years the Cretan discoveries of Evans, uncovered the remains of the prehistoric cities of Troy, in Asia Minor, Mycenae and Tiryns, in Greece, and of Cnossus in Crete, and revealed the existence of an ancient culture extending back over 2000 years B.C., already in its decline at the time of the Homeric wars. This civilization has been called the Mycenæan, but is now more properly termed the Aegean or Mediterranean culture. It belongs to the bronze age, and reached its culmination during, the time of the XIX and XX dynasties in Egypt, about 1500-1300 B.C. Its long decline began with the introduction of iron into the Mediterranean countries, and it seems to have been overthrown or submerged by the Dorian migration of the end of the 12th century B.C. It borrowed much from Egypt, with which the primitive Greeks of the Aegean countries and islands main- tained an active commerce; but it is believed to have been largely an independent civilization, for it displays a purely Western vivacity and originality. The swords, gold jewels, carved gems ("islandstones"), bronzes and pottery, as well as the architectural remains, display these qualities in a marked degree.

"PREHISTORIC" ARCHITECTURE

A remarkable feature of the architecture of the Mycenaean or Aegean age is the complete absence of temples. Fortifications, houses, palaces, and tombs make up the ruins thus far discovered. The primitive house consisted of a hall or megaron with four columns about the central hearth (whence, no doubt, the atrium and peristyle of Roman houses, through their Greek intermediary prototypes) and a porch or aithousa, with or without columns in antis, opening directly into the megaron, or indirectly through an ante-room called the prodomos. Here we have the prototypes of the Greek temple in antis, with its naos having interior columns, whether roofed over or hypaethral. The use of timber for certain of the structural details led in time to many of the forms later developed in stone in the entablature of the Doric order. But it is hard to discover, as Dörpfeld would have it, in the slender Mycenaæan columns with their inverted taper, the prototype of the massive Doric column with its upward taper. The Mycenaean column was apparently derived from wooden models, the sturdy Doric column from stone or rubble piers.

The gynecæeum, or women's apartments, the men's apartments, and the bath were in these ancient palaces grouped in varying relations about the megaron: their plan, purpose, and arrangement are clearly revealed in the ruins of Tiryns, where they are more complete and perfect than either at Troy or Mycenae.

FORTIFICATIONS AND WALLS

The most imposing remains of Aegean architecture are the acropolis fortifications and city walls of Mycenæ and Tiryns. At the latter place the walls of huge stones, piled without cement, contain passages covered by stones successively corbelled out until they meet overhead. At Mycenæ the city wall is pierced by the remarkable Lion Gate, consisting of two jambs and a huge lintel, over which the weight is relieved by a triangular opening. This is filled with a sculptured group, now much defaced, representing two rampant lions flanking a downward-tapering column. This symbolic group has relations with Hittite and Phrygian sculptures, and with the symbolism of the worship of Rhea Cybele. The masonry of this wall is carefully dressed but not regularly coursed. Other primitive walls and gates showing openings and embryonic arches of various forms, are found widely scattered, at Samos and Delos, at Phigaleia, Thoricus, Argos and many other points. The very earliest are hardly more than random piles of rough stone. Those which may fairly claim notice for their artistic masonry are of a later date and of three kinds: the coursed, the polygonal, and the uncoursed or Cyclopean, so called from the tradition that they, were built by the Cyclopes. The polygonal walls were composed of large, irregular polygonal blocks carefully fitted together and dressed to a fairly smooth face, as at Mycenae. The Cyclopean masonry, of huge irregular stones with smaller pieces to wedge the interstices, is illustrated by the walls of Tiryns. All three kinds were used contemporaneously, though in the course of time the regular coursed masonry finally superseded the polygonal.

THOLOS OF ATREUS

All these structures present, however, only the rudiments of architectural art. The so-called Tholos (or Treasury) of Atreus, at Mycenae, on the other hand, shows the germs of truly artistic design. It is in reality a tomb, and is one of a large class of prehistoric tombs found in almost every part of the globe, consisting of a circular stone-walled and stone-roofed chamber buried under a tumulus of earth. This one is a beehive-shaped construction of horizontal courses of masonry, with a stone-walled passage, the dromos, leading to the entrance door. Though internally of domical form, its construction with horizontal beds in the masonry proves that the idea of the true dome with the beds of each course pitched at an angle always normal to the curve of the vault, was not yet grasped. A small sepulchral chamber opens from the great one, by a door with the customary relieving triangle over it.

Traces of a metal lining have been found on the inner surface of the dome and the jambs of the entrance-door. This entrance is the most artistic and elaborate part of the edifice. The main opening is enclosed in a three-banded frame, and was once flanked by half columns which tapered downward as in the sculptured column over the Lion Gate. Shafts, bases, and capitals were covered with zig-zag bands or chevrons of fine spirals. This well-studied decoration, the banded jambs, and the curiously inverted columns (of which several other examples exist in or near Mycenae), all point to a fairly developed art, derived partly from Egyptian and partly from local or possibly Asiatic sources. That Egyptian influences had affected this early art is further proved by a fragment of carved and painted ornament on an alabaster ceiling in Orchomenos, imitating with remarkable closeness certain ceiling decorations in Egyptian tombs. This fragment was found in a "beehive" tomb analogous to that of Mycenae.

Few other details of the Aegean architecture have been preserved. Certain alabaster fragments display a peculiar ornament like a diglyph flanked by half-rosettes encircled by a guilloche. The columns had well-defined bases and capitals, but show little if any analogy to the columns of later Greek art. Except for the ceiling in the Orchomenos tomb there is little evidence of influences from Egyptian architecture. This is the more notable as the chief buildings of Mycenæ and Tiryns belong to the 13th and 12th centuries B.C., the period of Egyptian greatness under the second Theban monarchy, and it argues for the independent development of this art.

Until further investigations of the remarkable Cretan art revealed in the ruins of the Palace of Minos at Cnossus shall have made known something more of the architectural forms and decorative art of that early culture than we now know, it will be impossible to determine how far, if at all, the architecture of Mycenae, Tiryns and Troy was dependent upon or inspired from that of Crete.

With the Dorian migration (cir. 1100 B.C.) this chapter of Greek architecture comes to its close. The artistic revival of the eighth century under the Ionian Greeks in Rhodes and Melos produced no architecture that has come down to us. There is a nearly complete sundering between the Mycenæan architecture and the historic architecture of Greece. The end of the one and beginnings of the other are alike shrouded in uncertainty.