transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most
visible, most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition
beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had not
touched," as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was
first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and
each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of
ideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest races
did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world.
We find the "standing stones" of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the
pampas of America.

Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled
those syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic
dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words.
Some, especially the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men
had a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The
immense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.

At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneath
which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage;
all these symbols in which humanity placed faith continued to grow, to
multiply, to intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first
monuments no longer sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing
in every part; these monuments hardly expressed now the primitive
tradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. The
symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice. Then architecture was
developed in proportion with human thought; it became a giant with
a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this floating
symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While Daedalus, who is
force, measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;--the pillar,
which is a letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which
is a word,--all set in movement at once by a law of geometry and by a
law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended,
ascended, placed themselves side by side on the soil, ranged themselves
in stories in the sky, until they had written under the dictation of
the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were also
marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of Egypt, the
Temple of Solomon.

The generating idea, the word, wa