The Vaulting System of Ukheidar

Gertrude Lowthian Bell

doi:10.2307/624262

The Vaulting System of Ukheidar

The Journal of Hellenic Studies ◽

10.2307/624262 ◽

1910 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 69-81 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Gertrude Lowthian Bell

Keyword(s):

Rapid Development ◽

Equal Part ◽

Direct Information ◽

Inner Asia ◽

The Arts ◽

History Of ◽

Structural Methods ◽

Of Greece

The vaulting system of a Persian palace may seem to be a subject remote from the province of the Hellenic Society. It is not perhaps so remote as it appears. The history of Hellenistic art is closely interwoven with the problems of the Orient, and all evidence is welcome which will help to elucidate a period so obscure, yet of so far-reaching an influence, as that which saw the fusion of Greece with the East after the conquests of Alexander. From the age of the Diadochi the arts emerged profoundly modified. To instance architecture alone, we find the builders in the Greek coast-lands preoccupied with Asiatic structural methods, bringing forth new solutions, modifying, with their quick sense of proportion and of beauty, ancient oriental themes, and giving back to inner Asia as much as they had derived from her. Not one of the great cities of the Diadochi in Mesopotamia or Syria has yet been excavated, and the importance of such fragmentary knowledge of the succeeding civilizations as can be gathered together lies in the fact that they indicate the changes that had taken place during a time of rapid development about which we have no direct information. In this development Greece and Asia bore an equal part, and the lines of interaction are everywhere to be traced. I am not, however, concerned here to disentangle these complex questions, but merely to furnish a few more details that bear upon their oriental aspect.

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The Last Athenian Historian: Laonikos Chalkokondyles

The Journal of Hellenic Studies ◽

10.2307/625934 ◽

1922 ◽

Vol 42 (1) ◽

pp. 36-49 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

William Miller

Keyword(s):

Type A ◽

The Third ◽

The Arts ◽

History Of ◽

Of Greece

From The Roman to the Turkish conquest of Greece, a period of sixteen centuries, Athens produced only three historians: Dexippos, Praxagoras and Laonikos Chalkokondyles. Of the two first only meagre fragments have come down to us; indeed, of the three treatises of Praxagoras, The Kings of Athens, composed when he was only nineteen, his History of Constantine the Great, written at the age of twenty-two, and his maturer study of Alexander, King of Macedon, only a summary of the second, amounting to two pages, has been preserved by that omnivorous reader, Photios, in his Library. Such juvenile histories cannot, however, have had much greater value than prize essays, conspicuous rather for their correctness of style than for any seasoned judgment. But we may regret that only thirty-five pages of the three works of Dexippos, The Events after the Death of Alexander, The Historical Epitome, which went as far as the time of Claudius II. in 268, and The Scythian Affairs, have survived. For Dexippos was an author of a very different type, a man of affairs as well as of letters, the type of historian of which we have familiar examples in England in Grote and Macaulay, in Clarendon and Bryce. A worse writer, but a better general, than his model, Thucydides, he defeated the Goths when they invaded Athens, on which occasion a Gothic leader urged the sparing of the Athenian libraries, in order that the Athenians might unfit themselves for the arts of war by much study of books! After these two historians, who flourished, Dexippos in the third, and Praxagoras in the fourth centuries, no Athenian took their place till, in the second half of the fifteenth, Laonikos Chalkokondyles composed the extant ten books of his history, one of the most interesting and valuable productions of the mediaeval Greek intellect.

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