Golgi--Treasure chambers of Curium--Walls of Phoenician
towns--Phoenician tombs--Excavated chambers--Chambers built
of masonry--Groups of chambers--Colonnaded tomb--Sepulchral
monuments--The Burdj-el-Bezzâk--The Kabr Hiram--The two
Méghâzil--Tomb with protected entrance--Phoenician
ornamentation--Pillars and their capitals--Cornices and
mouldings--Pavements in mosaic and alabaster--False arches--
Summary.

The architecture of the Phoenicians began with the fashioning of the
native rock--so abundant in all parts of the country where they had
settled themselves--into dwellings, temples, and tombs. The calcareous
limestone, which is the chief geological formation along the Syrian
coast, is worked with great ease; and it contains numerous fissures and
caverns,[61] which a very moderate amount of labour and skill is capable
of converting into fairly comfortable dwelling-places. It is probable
that the first settlers found a refuge for a time in these natural
grottos, which after a while they proceeded to improve and enlarge,
thus obtaining a practical power of dealing with the material, and an
experimental knowledge of its advantages and defects. But it was not
long before these simple dwellings ceased to content them, and they were
seized with an ambition to construct more elaborate edifices--edifices
such as they must have seen in the lands through which they had passed
on their way from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the seaboard of the
Mediterranean. They could not at once, however, divest themselves
of their acquired habits, and consequently, their earliest buildings
continued to have, in part, the character of rock dwellings, while in
part they were constructions of the more ordinary and regular type. The
remains of a dwelling-house at Amrith,[62] the ancient Marathus, offer a
remarkable example of this intermixture of styles. The rock has been cut