Butler, Howard Crosby; Princeton University [Hrsg.]: Syria: publications of the Princeton University Archaeological Expeditions to Syria in 1904 - 5 and 1909 (Div. 2, Sect. A ; 1): Ammonitis (1907)

28

II. A. i. Ammonitis.

cyma reversa below a plain fascia, and is unlike any Christian detail of the same sort
that I have ever seen. The columns with their architraves would seem to have formed

a portico, distyle in antis, nearly 8 meters wide, in front of the grotto with its spring.
No inscription was found, and there are no other architectural fragments in the immediate
vicinity: there is nothing, in fact, about the ruin to indicate whether the portico originally
formed a sort of shrine before the cave, a little aedicula where an altar to some local

2.2.0

Km IRBIT il-Bardhon·


- Portico ot Grotto·'
•Plan andDeta’ils-

Ill. 18.

nymph may once have stood; or whether these
architectural features were simply part of a spring-
house, built by the owner of the spring to dignify
a valued source of water. I have said that the
details appear to be late; yet I do not feel that
one is safe in assuming that any isolated building
is late on the evidence of architectural details alone;
for there is a singular resemblance between the
early imitations of classic forms by oriental artists
and the late, debased forms that follow the period
of pure forms, as may be seen in certain details
at cArak il-Emir. From the evidence at hand there
is nothing to disprove the assumption that the ruins
at Khirbit il-Bardhon belong to the same general
period as those at cArak il-Emir, though they differ
from them in many important respects; yet, at the

same time, it cannot be denied that they may be later even than the Roman period
of the second century of our era.