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A Palmyra ceiling in Lincoln

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Richard Hewlings
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Extract

In the best room of an otherwise unpretentious house in Lincoln is a ceiling ornamented with octagonal plaster coffering modelled on that of the first-century Temple of Bel, at Tadmor (the ancient Palmyra), in Syria. The most frequently copied antique coffering is composed of octagons whose cardinal sides are each adjacent to, and parallel with, the cardinal side of another octagon. The residual space between any four octagons in this arrangement is a small square. In the Palmyrene variant the octagons meet each other only at their angles. The residual space is a four-lobed star, which always (though not of necessity) inscribes a small square.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 31 , 1988 , pp. 166 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1988

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References

1 T. Wiegand, Palmyra (1932). In the eighteenth century this temple was known as the Temple of the Sun.

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42 Idem.

43 Johnson,‘Phillips Glover….’passim.