#archaeoposting

so this has a lot to do with what a basilica is. there's the Christian basilica, which is just any church that was important/cool/old enough to get the title from the pope (there's around 2000 of those in the world), the oldest one is the basilica of st john lateran in Rome, aka the archbasilica. but basilica is also an architectural form, which essentially means usually rectangular building with one main nave and at least 2 side aisles and an apse. it's important that the nave is taller than the aisles and has windows in the clerestory, otherwise it's not a basilica (see diagram below, triforium is optional).

so, not every christian basilica is a basilica in the architectural sense. to put it simply:

a church where the nave and aisles are the same height -> ❌that's a hall church

a church where the nave is taller than the aisles but doesn't have windows -> ❌that's a pseudo-basilica

a church where the nave is taller and has windows -> ✔️that's a basilica!! yay!!

this is an important distinction because when archaeologists find ancient churches most of the time it's just foundations, so they decide if a church was a basilica based on how many aisles it had. and normally that's not a problem, because if your church is wide and tall and has multiple aisles, you need the windows in the clerestory an a gable roof, otherwise the construction won't construct properly. the thing is, that's most cases, not all.

ok now imagine you're howard crosby butler, it's 1905, you're an architect (so you know everything I just explained), and you just convinced your friend to sponsor your huge trip to syria. you get to syria, you do your little sketches, which, btw are the most beautiful drawings of this architecture ever created, I mean:

(they don't draw anything like this anymore fr)

and it's all well and good, until you get to southern Syria, particularly to the basalt plateau of Hauran (also partially north jordan), where suddenly the churches aren't churching. a normal basilica build from limestone or sandstone (image above), vs the basalt "basilica" (image below)

the first time i saw this i was like "wym 'basilica' this is clearly a hall church, was he stupid?" and there was no immediate explanation why he decided this was a basilica, and you can't do that sir ma'am, you have to show your thinking. it pissed me off so bad I dedicated like a chapter of my bachelor's thesis to this. so here's the thing:

usually a church of this size would need a clerestory and a gabled roof

that is because you can't cover a 10m-wide nave with a single slab of stone, because it will be too heavy and it will break under its own weight

UNLESS you're building stuff out of basalt, which is so dense and special and tough and beautiful that you can absolutely do that

so if you don't feel like building a a whole clerestory and then calculating the proper triangle for a roof, and have some basalt, you can just

slab

and when i went digging deeper i found this quote from butler himself:

Butler 1929, 17

anyway, so my beef with some random architect who's been dead for almost 100 slutty, slutty years, is 1. words have meanings, definitions even; 2. how do you have a whole ass degree in architecture and then name the architecture in question the wrong thing; 3. I realize this is because of the "3 aisles = basilica" tradition, but well maybe I'm pedantic and maybe it shouldn't be. maybe (I realize it's because basilica has a certain status and these churches did too, but like. we should invent separate names for them. maybe); 4. I had to dig for the basalt-roof slabs-no clerestory explanation, because it's not like butler himself ever explains any of this, I had to harass my geology professor; and 5. the plans are also wrong about the dimensions but we don't have time for this rn