"[A]long with the order, the architecture of Rome had inherited from the Etruscans the arch, despised and rejected by the Greeks... It was probably the child of the bricklayer, who has no other means of bridging an opening; at least we find it first in alluvial Mesopotamia, where the Chaldees, who had no stone to build with, raised their great pyramids and built their palaces of bricks, and where the Assyrian conquerors who appropriated their civilization and art, as the Romans did the Greek, adopted it from them and used it on a great scale. Born in the oriental brick-fields, it came to the Greeks with all the associations of ignoble material, profane uses, and hated sponsors. Every influence of religious association, conservatism, and respect for the Egyptian example, from which they had learned much, bound them to their trabeated style. Still more, the instinct for harmony of form which dominated both Egyptians and Greeks could but warn them that the use of the arch not only implied a change of their constructive system, but was at war with their whole architectural scheme of lines, proportions, and monumental effect. Even as late as the time of , after long subjection of Greece to Roman control, the arcaded conduit to the at Athens seems to show the persistent resistance of Greek workmen on their own soil to the very principle of the arch, for the arches are cut through solid slabs of stone instead of being built up in the fashion of the true arch."