ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to investigate the considerations which led the Egyptians to choose for their architectural supports one form rather than another. Floral columns with a wealth of detail in which stucco has played its part have existed from the Ancient Empire times, as certain remains discovered at Abusir show. When in the stone-built temples they aimed at copying the forms thus obtained, they failed to understand that the stones had to be arranged in a manner corresponding to the arrangement of the bricks. Egypt, possessing no metal-liferous strata, had always to import the raw material from abroad, and consequently all objects of metal were liable to be melted down and recast. The Egyptians, it is true, rapidly succeeded in perfecting the process and of ridding it of most of its clumsiness, but only by recourse to supports, such as dorsal pillars and tenons of stone fixing the members to one another or to the body.
