Sunday, January 23, 2011

Tomb Entrances II

After hours of fruitless poking around I finally hit the jackpot, ladies and gentlemen.  Some more nice illustrations of tomb entrances.  These are public domain and come from: History of art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, and Lycia (1892).
There are more nice illustrations in the book if you don't want to wait for me to post them.

10 comments:

  1. Very nice - thanks for sharing this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Very, very cool. It's a real treasure trove of goodness. Thanks for sharing your efforts!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Awesome - just snagged the pdf!

    - Ark

    ReplyDelete
  4. I never know if I'm speaking out of turn here. So, sorry if you know all these, but just in case, I think you'd like them. Also, please excuse some cheesy images on following linkage: in each case the cheese is paid for with another good image or two...

    The rock-cut temples of Ajanta. These are all carved out of the mountain. cf City of the Jains, Badami.

    ...and a master list of rock-cut architecture. I think I understand what you like about these Hellenic tombs, maybe: the relative smallness of the entrances, the sense that you have a modest door here into an underground world? The Ihlara valley, not so far from your Carian examples, housed a community and monastic shrines complete with St. George and the dragon frescoes, while kaymakli's an honest-to-goodness half-explored underground city. Short form: go to Turkey if you can.

    more...

    ReplyDelete
  5. ...I also like shining cities in secret valleys and tombs and temples "marooned in a level plain" that look like vertical access hatches into the unknown beneath.

    Finally, just because: there's another bunch of doors into the earth like the ones you reference at Persepolis, but what I really love is the inexplicable tattooed building in front of them, variously called a tomb, a fire temple and a reliquary (relics long since looted).

    ReplyDelete
  6. Sweet sauce on a stick, richardthinks, your comments are better than my post!

    I do like the idea of illustration over photos, though. Somehow it allows me to enter a fictional space easier. And I really like public domain images so people can make things with them. But you've given me a lot of new key words to try on archive.org. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks again for featuring these. I'm posting them to my blog over the next little while.

    Yours,
    James.

    ReplyDelete
  8. My pleasure. I've been meaning to bundle all these up in one pdf but haven't got around to it.

    ReplyDelete