Lynne C. Lancaster. Parthian Influence on Vaulting in Roman Greece? An Inquiry into Technological Exchange Under Hadrian

In the second century CE, the so-called “pitched brick” vaulting – a technique developed in Egypt and the Near East as early as the third millennium BC – appeared for the first time in Roman architecture in Greece and then spread to Asia Minor. It eventually became a common vaulting technique in Byzantine architecture. The sites of Athens, Eleusis, Dion, Gortyn and Argos are examined to analyze this technique and its variants. The appearance in Greece of Parthian-inspired vaulting techniques ..