Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

956 31. building and architecture
payment. Consequently, cities had dozens of churches – Justinian built or
rebuilt thirty-three at Constantinople alone – and large villages had several:
in the provinces of Arabia and Syria, by the early seventh century, Umm
idj-Djemal had fifteen churches, Androna had ten, and Rihab had eight,
five of which were built between 594 and 623. The relatively small village
of Dar Qita had three (Fig. 42). 63
Architecturally, church building is less complicated than building baths,
where there are functional constraints imposed by plumbing and heating,
combined with considerable choice in the shape and arrangement of the
various components that make up the progression from cold to tepid to
hot chambers (Figs. 47,8). The requirements of the church, whether congregational
or memorial, were simpler. For the congregational type, the
faithful’s need for simultaneous participation in a service demanded a
single space, while subsidiary spaces such as the baptistery were not necessarily
used in sequence with the main church, and did not require direct
communication with it (Figs. 41–2, 57, 59, 62). For the memorial church,
the venerated place or saint’s tomb provided an architectural focus, and
additional space was required for pilgrims to circulate and pray in, and for
services to be performed in (Figs. 56–7). 64
Architecturally, churches were of two types – longitudinal and centralized
– the first remaining the primary form of western church architecture,
the second becoming that of the east. In late antiquity, the basilica was the
standard form of church. In the western empire Constantine used it at
Rome both for his cathedral, the Lateran, and for the memorial church of
St Peter. Simultaneously, and independently of Constantine, a basilica was
built in the eastern empire, then under the emperor Licinius, at Tyre, as
described by Eusebius of Caesarea. Yet centralized structures also
appeared at the outset in the eastern empire – Constantine built the cathedral
of Antioch as an octagon, and he used centralized forms for the focal
part of the pilgrimage shrines of the Nativity Church at Bethlehem and the
Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. 65
(a) The longitudinal church: the basilica and the hall church
The Roman civil basilica, which continued to be built in the secular sphere
during late antiquity, had been adopted and adapted for church architecture
by the time of Constantine, if not before. In its ecclesiastical form it occasionally
had a single aisle (in which case it is termed a ‘hall church’), but the
great majority of church basilicas were divided into three (Fig. 60) or five
(Fig. 56) aisles by piers or big monolithic columns. Most also had a timber
roof, with or without a coffered ceiling below, although in areas where long
63 Kaper Barada, Rihab: Mango, M. M. (1984) i.b.41 399–402; vi.b.51; Thantia (Umm idj-Djemal):
Lassus (1947) 60–2; Androna: Butler (1920) 47, 52–62; Constantinople: Mango, Studies on Constantinople
i.126. 64 On church architecture and liturgy see Mathews (1971).
65 Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture 17–44; Mango, Byzantine Architecture 58–61.
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