Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
were as a matter of course provided with a surrounding apron at a gentle gradient
as a construction installation to be subsequently removed. Individual circumstances
must be considered to arrive at a range of possibilities.
It may be that material evidence survives. It is in Palestine where excavation
has revealed (and, to some degree, recorded) the stratigraphy of these walls. Very
commonly Cyclopean city walls are in places abutted by or sandwiched between
layers of earth which are not habitation layers, they are deposits of some other
nature. However on various accounts controversy has arisen concerning this
nature. h e deposits may be both horizontal and rampant. Are they civil or military
engineering?—are they to augment the obstacle or slight it?. . . . Or could they be
in some cases surviving evidence of installation for building the walls? (cf
Shechem III, pp. 105-07; Ills 10, 59, 68).
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8.
Greek Ashlar Building
Monumental building in ashlar stone masonry began in Greece at the end of
the 7th century BC and developed rapidly to take its dei nitive form during the
6th century BC. Its development was thus coaeval with the most significant
innovation in building construction since the Neolithic origins of solid enduring
building—devices for clean lit ing and lowering into position weighty units (notably
i nely dressed stone blocks). h e development of Greek ashlar stone building was
also exactly coaeval with the development in the region of a monetary economy,
together with a truly individualist, literate society. h ese factors conditioned the
nature of Greek building sites.
Monumental building procedure in contemporary Mesopotamia and in Egypt
was essentially unchanged from its age old origins. Monumental ashlar building
procedure in 6th century BC Greece was like no previous building procedure, it
was an entirely new manner. Whereas a Pharaonic Egyptian building site depended
for its functioning on masterly overall direction and organisation of “gang work-
ers”, Greek building sites were based on the conjoint activities of highly competent
individual crat smen, each personally responsible for their tasks and working on
their own personal account for their own personal proi t. h ere could have been
no greater contrast than that between the installations and organisation of a monu-
mental building site in Saite Egypt and a contemporary monumental building site
in Greece, in spite of the fact that the inspiration for Greek ashlar building owed
much to Egyptian example.
Note of the social and economic factors mentioned above will be taken in the
succeeding volume. Here the concern is with the technical aspects of this new
manner of building site organisation.
Rapid
develop-
ment in
new social
environ-
ment
