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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ JULY, 1918
Some examples of this form of ruofing were published by De Vogüé fifty years ago. Recently the ground has been thoroughly gone over by the Princeton Expedition, which has published and described many new buildings. Confining myself to those which are dated, I have compiled the following list
A.D. 345. Church of Julianos at Umm al-Jamal.10 371. Prætorium at Umm al-Jamal. 11 412. Kaşr al-Bâ'iļ, near the western border of the southern Haurân. A Greek
inscription states that it was built in the reign of the Emperor Arcadius
under the dux Phil. Pelagios, A.D. 412.12 430-1. A small house at al-Majdal, in which it occurs on the ground floor,13 508 (?) Church No. 1 at al-'mtâ'iyah. Inscription gives date which may possibly
be A.D. 508.14 515. Church of S. George at Zor'ah, dated 410 of the Era of Bosra (=A.D. 515).15 578. House of Flavios Soog-a Roman-Nabat sean name-at al-Haiyât. 10 624-5. Monastery of S. George at Sameh. This date is exceedingly late for a
Christian inscription to be found in situ in Syria, as Islam had been proclaimed and Christian Arabia was on the point of extinction. Bosra, however,
had not fallen and the country was still under the protection of the Empire.17 Let us now stop a moment to examine the exact raison d'étre of this roofing system. Being a country of stone, the people naturally had a predilection for the lintel, and used it wherever possible. Where, however, this was not possible they used the arch, and it may well be asked, why did they not make the arch continuous, and thus form a barrel-vault. I think the answer must be that, as they were not acquainted with the Mesopotamian method of building a vault without centering by using flat-bricks in rings sloping backwards at a considerable angle against a head wall, any barrel-vault built by them would have required considerable timber for the centering-& serious matter. By building a series of separate arches, however, the same piece of centering could be used over and over again as soon as one arch had set, thus reducing the timber required to an absolute minimum, and their favourite lintel method could be used as a final covering. In all these early buildings, however, the fact that the roof is borne on points of support spaced at regular intervals permits the piercing of the side walls for lateral lighting. Yet out of the large number of examples. some thirty cr forty described by De Vogüé and Butler, there are not many in which this opportunity has teen realised, and even in these cases it has only been made use of in a timid and halting manner, small square windows pierced at irregular intervals, and not in each bay, being all that is attempted.
The Persians must have been acquainted with this system at a fairly early date, since it is found in the palace built about 50 miles south of Mosul at Hatra 18 (or al-Hadr) by the Parthians, (Plate II, B) whose dynasty came to an end in A.D. 226. It was left to the keen architectural insight of the Persians to realise its potentialities fully and to carry it to its final 10 Ancient Architecture in Syria, pp. 173-176.
11 Ibid, pp. 160-166. 12 Ibid, pp. 81-83. 13 Ibid, pp. 120-122.
14 Ibid, p. 92. 15 De Vogüé, Syrie Centrale, tome I, pp. 61-62 and plate 21. 16 Butler, Ancient Architecture in Syria, pp. 362-363.
1 Ibid, p. 85. 18 Andrae (Dr. W.). llatra. Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft. Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen, Nos. 9 and 21. It occurs in Room 15—see Abb. 21 and 228.
