Buildings were made of pieces put together, and were therefore articulated. Primitive man tied his wooden construction together, but soon learned to fit the pieces carefully. The upright features of a wooden structure were bundles of reeds, or tree trunks cylindrical in shape, which became columns, across the top of which were laid horizontal beams.

The columns were spaced at equal intervals apart so that each supported an equal weight of the beam, or lintel, and of the rafters and roof which it carried. The building was one story only in height.

As the posts and lintels were straight and the bricks rectangular, the cell became rectangular in plan. In fact, it was a rectangular box without windows, but with an entrance covered by a curtain, and later by a valve or door. In countries having slight rainfall and no snow, roofs were flat, but later a pitched roof, low where there was little snow, high elsewhere, developed.

From such simple beginnings architecture arose, influenced in its expression by climate and materials at hand. The progress of development was always towards greater stability of structure, and greater durability of material. It is manifest that apparent stability and permanency are elemental features of architecture.

The elements of structure are; Verticals, wooden or reed poles and posts, brick and stone posts, and piers; Horizontals, wood and stone beams and lintels; Arches of stone and of brick; continuous arches or barrel vaults, crossed vaults, revolved arches or domes; Surfaces or coverings of walls and of roofs, such as mats, slabs, tiles, etc., and the walls themselves.

As the straight and strong trunks of trees were not long, posts and beams made from them were seldom over 20 feet in length; the columns were therefore not high, and the width of the cells was slight, additional expansion being obtained by length, and the early cells or rooms were narrow and long.

Man, when he ceased wandering and formed clans which

remained in one place, built his shelters where he could graze his flocks and have water near at hand. Communities first appeared on lands which had grain-bearing soil, and wandering clans, which had patriarchs at their heads, settled wherever such land occurred. Hence the history of great nations begins in alluvial valleys and plains, and in the deltas of rivers. Shepherd leaders elected kings, clans united into nations; kings became hereditary, and dynasties were formed. Each clan worshipped its own god, and as nations were formed, these gods were retained and created a hierarchy of gods, some one of which was preeminent in each locality.

Primitive man feared nature's manifestations and deified them, worshipping especially the sun and the elements, and symbolizing them by images. Religions of fear arose. Gods were to be placated. Beliefs in the continuity of life after death led to ancestor worship.

Man had by this time three distinct types of habitations: his house, or home; the house of his ancestors, the tomb; the house of his god, the temple; and their relative importance is in this sequence.

His own house for his lifetime, or less, he considered ephemeral and of comparatively little importance; the tomb of his ancestors he made more permanent; but to the temple of his god he devoted the greatest skill and attention. The fourth house, the palace, appeared after monarchs became supreme and absolute. Thus were established the ethical expressions of architecture, and when government, which began when three men came together and two of them agreed, had become complex and great, demanding special habitations for its several branches of work, the civic building appeared. Finally arose the buildings devoted to defence, to recreations, and to industries.

In the deltas and valleys of rivers, and on the arable lands watered by mountain streams, clans gathered and built their huts, clustering together around a shrine, a fire floor, or an altar upon which burnt sacrifices were offered to the gods.

The old men were judges of disputes and advisers of their clans, and became priests and leaders. Upon the young devolved protection by the strong arm, and from them the kings arose who founded dynasties. Nomadic existence was being replaced by established communities, and buildings became permanent during the bronze age, at least 6000 B.C., when cutting tools of metal made the shaping of wood and stone possible.

II. EGYPT

The oldest civilization of which authentic particulars are known is that of Egypt. The land was originally a desert plateau. The waters from the southern mountains, pouring out of a rocky glen, forced their way north for 800 miles in a river, the Nile, its bed about one-half a mile in width. It made itself a valley 10 to 30 miles wide, between terraces and hills.

The river rose annually and for four months inundated the entire valley, renewed the land for the crops by the deposit of earth brought down from the glens, and then retired to its bed, leaving a fertile soil which produced sustenance for the people, who, during the months of the inundation, worked upon the monuments of architecture erected by the kings. The substratum of the soil in the upper valley was brown stone, in the lower valley near the delta, limestone.

The hills, three hundred feet to twelve hundred feet in height, were the edges of the rainless desert plateaus east and west. Between the hills and river valley were level terraces above the inundated land upon which the cities and towns were built. The Nile, one hundred and twenty-five miles before it reached the sea, divided into a number of streams and spread into a fan-shaped delta, formed by the soil it had brought down in its course, and it was in this delta that the first buildings of Egypt were erected by peasants who cultivated the soil of the valley and lived in vil

lages of rectangular clay huts with flat wooden roofs, probably identical with those to be seen there today.

The peasants were buried in chambers excavated in the sand at the top of the bluffs above the highest level of the river. The chambers were lined with sun-burned brick and roofed with wood. Over these graves were mounds, or tumuli. But the kings of the first two dynasties were located in the delta, from 3400 to 3000 B.C., and the buildings were of sunburned brick, while brick arches were used for work below ground to sustain the load of earth. The work was primitive, however, and little remains. As time went on, the tomb chamber was lined with limestone, for the Egyptian discovered copper and had metal tools, and tombs were built above ground of cut stone, forming what are known as mastabas (the word means bench), low, truncated, rectangular pyramids, with a door opening into one or more tomb chambers.

Religion had meanwhile taken definite form. Two of the many gods were preëminent: Re, the sun god, and Osiris, the Nile god; for the life of the people depended upon both. Man's soul after death was supposed to go through many tests before it was judged by a conclave of the gods, and during its wanderings was aided by Osiris. The spirit of the dead was supposed to return to the tomb chamber at times as later the spirit of the god returned to his temple; in fact, the tomb was considered the spirit's home, and in the chamber food was left, together with little images of servants to assist the spirit in its journeyings. As the spirit must have a body to which to return, the bodies of the dead were embalmed and concealed to prevent their destruction, and indestructible images of the dead, possibly to take the place of the actual body if it were destroyed, of Nubian granite, were erected. The actual cell in which the body was placed was at the foot of a deep vertical shaft in the mastaba, which was closed by a stone in the roof in such a manner that it was difficult to find.

About 2980 B.C., at the beginning of the Third Dynasty,

the royal tombs began to take the form of pyramids, or mastabas built to an apex, the tombs of the nobles remaining in the truncated mastaba shape. In 2900 B.C. a large pyramid 214 feet high, covered with carefully jointed, polished limestone, was built at Meidum. Almost immediately afterwards one was built at Memphis, 709 feet square and 325 feet high, which was followed by the three great pyramids of Egypt of the Fourth Dynasty kings, Khufu (Cheops), Khafra, and Kephren Menkere, built upon a desert plateau at Gizeh near Memphis. The first is the largest, 736 feet square and 484 feet high, of 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each weighing two and onehalf tons. Records state that it took 100,000 men ten years to build it. The layers were laid by ramps, spiralling around the growing core, the outer layers finished in steps, which were filled in when completed to an even plane with carefully cut and polished limestone.

The increase of civilization and of power in five hundred years was phenomenal. The kings had huge establishments of officers to govern the country, and the kings and nobles had dwellings in the midst of gardens surrounded by walls. These were all of sun-burned brick and wood, or of reed columns and woven reed walls covered with clay or stucco, and have in most cases disappeared; but the pyramids with long sloping galleries descending to the concealed tomb chamber of the kings in the solid rock beneath were of brick and limestone, and seem imperishable and eternal. They are the largest constructions made by man, and have a simple, noble dignity. As the sun set in the west, the soul followed and entered the land of the dead in the west; therefore all tombs and temples were upon the west bank of the Nile, while the cities were upon the east bank.

The first temples appear to have been mortuary temples, placed immediately before the pyramids, and used for ceremonies before the body was placed in the tomb chamber. There was a small temple containing statues of the king on the river bank at which the funeral procession, arriving from