structure, and
the general arrangement of the buildings must have remained the same.

[Illustration: FIG. 54.--Section through the palace at Sarbistan; from
Flandin and Coste.]

There is nothing hazardous or misleading in these arguments from analogy;
from the palace of Chosroes to that of Sargon is a legitimate step. Some
day, perhaps, we may attempt to pursue the same path in the opposite
direction; we may endeavour to show that the survival of these examples and
traditions may very well have helped to direct architecture into a new path
in the last years of the Roman Empire. We shall then have to speak of a
school in Asia Minor whose works have not yet been studied with the
attention they deserve. The buildings in question are distinguished chiefly
by the important part played in their construction by the vault and the
dome resting upon pendentives; certain constructive processes, too, are to
be found in them which had never, so far as we can tell, been known or
practised in the East. We can hardly believe that the chiefs of the school
invented from the foundation a system of construction whose principles were
so different from those of the Greeks, or even of the later Romans. They
may, indeed, have perfected the system by grafting the column upon it, but
it is at least probable that they took it in the first place from those who
had practised it from time immemorial, from men who taught them the
traditional methods of shortening and facilitating the labour of execution.
The boundaries of Asia Minor "march" with those of Mesopotamia, and in the
latter every important town had buildings of brick covered with domes. The
Romans frequented the Euphrates valley, to which they were taken both by
war and commerce; their victories sometimes carried them even as far as
Ctesiphon on the Tigris, so that there was no lack of opportunity for the
study of Oriental architecture on the very spot where it was born. They
could judge of and admire the beauty it certainly possessed when the great
buildings of Mesopotamia were still clothed in all the richness of their
decoration. The genius of the Greeks had come nigh to exhausting the forms
and combinations of the classic style; it was tired of continuous labour in
a narrow circle and sighed for fresh worlds to conquer. We can easily
understand then, how it would welcome a system which seemed to afford the
novelty it sought, which seemed to promise the elements of a new departure
that