§ I Temples
Before the introduction of Egyptian and Assyrian influence into Syria, the Semitic and Canaanitish races of this country held the high places (bâmoth) in veneration. On the highest summit of the mountains, in spots which recalled ancient memories, on peaks that had been struck by lightning, stone altars were raised and victims were immolated upon them; the surrounding forest became a sacred grove. In the same way our Celtic ancestors erected their dolmens.
Soon, under Egyptian influence, the Phœnicians began to construct temples. The maabed (temple) of Amrith90 is still an Egyptian temple on a small scale; as in the latter, there is a cella or tabernacle of stone, within which the divine image was contained. It is composed of slabs erected on three sides. One side remained open, and was only closed by a curtain. The monolithic slab of the roof is adorned on its four edges with a light border with mouldings, and projects like eaves above the door; in the interior it is cut in a semicircular form, so that it presents the appearance of a shallow vault. The rock which forms the base has been isolated from the mountain by sapping, and thus the chapel, including this natural pedestal, reaches 22 feet in height. At the edge of the surrounding court were certain structures, doubtless a colonnade bordering the sacred enclosure; but this has disappeared.
The maabed of Amrith is the most important remaining representative of the temples of Phœnicia. At Ain el-Hayât, however, two shrines have been discovered similar to that of Amrith; one (fig. 188) tolerably well preserved, consists of a monolithic cella, resting on a substructure of large blocks; the whole is 17½ ft. high. Above the door a row of Egyptian uræi is seen; the ceiling within is perceptibly cut into the form of a vault on which two pairs of wings, surrounding the Egyptian solar disk, are sculptured in relief.
The famous temples of Melkarth at Tyre, and of Astarte at Sidon and at Gebal (Byblos), which excited the admiration of ancient travellers, are no longer known except in memory. The maabed of Amrith alone gives us some idea of their architectural arrangement; they consisted of courts, in the centre of which rose the shrine of the deity built upon a platform. The Phœnician and Canaanitish temple showed therefore a strong resemblance to the temple of Jerusalem and also to the great mosque of Mecca,—the only monument which perpetuates this architectural type among us.
Nothing but a few fragments is now left of the temples built by the Phœnicians in Cyprus. The great prosperity of this island under the Romans and in the middle ages is the direct cause of the destruction of the monuments of an earlier age. The superb cathedrals of Famagusta and Nicosia, the fine churches built under the Lusignan dynasty, the formidable ramparts constructed by the Venetians, rose at the expense of ancient buildings, the materials of which were turned to profit as stone-quarries. The celebrated sanctuary of Astarte at Paphos, for instance, is only known to us by the conventional representation of it upon coins belonging to the Roman period. We are able to distinguish in this figure a court surrounded by a balustrade, and beyond the court a structure which reminds us of the pylons of Egyptian temples: it is a gigantic gate between two towers, provided with a large aperture through which we perceive the sacred stone, flanked by two candelabra; above hover the star and crescent. The roof, on which doves are resting, was supported by columns forming a portico. Tacitus, who relates the visit of Titus to the temple of Paphos, says that the goddess was represented in it under “the form of a circular block, rising in the form of a cone, gradually diminishing from the base to the summit.” This description corresponds with the stone which the medals show us. According to the excavations carried on by P. di Cesnola on the site of the temple, the building was almost 220 ft. long by 164 ft. broad; the peribolus measured 688 ft. by 540 ft.; the principal gate, perhaps that which figures on the coin, had an aperture more than 16 ft. broad.
The temple of Golgoi (Athieno), the ruins of which were disinterred by Cesnola, was a rectangular building constructed of bricks dried in the sun; the substructure alone was of stone. On the north and on the east were doors with wooden frames. Within, wooden pillars, surmounted by stone capitals, supported the roof, formed of pieces of wood placed close together, on which mats and reeds were arranged with a thick layer of beaten earth. The exterior of the temple, coated with white rough-cast, must have been of a most modest appearance. The interior, on the contrary, was laden with the richest ornaments. In the middle of the enclosure a tall cone of grey stone was found, a yard high, which must have been the sacred stone of the goddess, and reminds us of the image at Paphos described by Tacitus. Round the mystic cone, a whole population of stone statues painted in brilliant colours, set in a line along the walls or ranged in files in the centre of the building, formed, as at Tello, the dumb train of worshippers of the goddess. Votive offerings were hung on the walls above a row of bas-reliefs, analogous to those of the Assyrian palaces. Stone lamps in the form of shrines, fastened to the walls, lighted up this curious scene.
In the temple of Curium, Cesnola ascertained the existence of a crypt to which a staircase gave access; it was composed of four subterranean chambers cut in the form of apses in the rock and communicating with one another by doors and a passage. These chambers are about 22½ ft. long on each side, and 13 ft. high; it was here that the famous treasure of Curium was found, consisting of the plate of the temple, and of votive offerings made to the deity.
The recent excavations which we have shortly described, though they have scarcely brought more than substructures to light, yet enable us to describe the Cypriote temples with some exactness. While those of Phœnicia are built on heights, reminding us of the primitive high-places, the sanctuaries of Cyprus are generally in the plain, in the midst of fertile fields, like the temples of Egypt. The shrine of the deity was under the open sky like the Greek temples; around, and at a greater or less distance, rose a gallery covered with a roof supported within by colonnades forming a portico, and without resting upon the wall of enclosure.
A Phœnician inscription of the fourth century before Christ relates the erection of several temples to various deities, notably to the god Sadambaal and to the goddess Astarte in the island of Gaulos (Gozo). The remains of these sanctuaries are still in existence: they are called the Giganteja, or “Giant’s dwelling,” and consist of two neighbouring enclosures not communicating with one another. Constructed of irregular masonry, formed of enormous blocks, they are parallel, and their gates open on the same façade; though one is larger than the other they both follow the same interior arrangement. Each is composed of two oval or elliptical chambers next to one another, and communicating by a narrow passage; the farther chamber contains also a semicircular apse. The great temple is 119 feet long from the entrance to the bottom of the apse; its greatest breadth is 75 feet. The area is uncovered; in one of these enclosures a conical stone has been discovered analogous to those in the temples of Phœnicia and Cyprus.
At Malta, ruins of temples have been discovered constructed on the same principles as the Giganteja of Gozo. The Hagiar Kim, “stones of adoration,” near the village of Casat Crendi, presents identical architectural features, with the enormous blocks of its irregular masonry. The plan, however, is a little more complicated: it is a series of seven ellipsoid chambers built next to one another.
Not a single stone is left above ground of the temples raised by the Phœnicians in Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and even Carthage, The famous sanctuary of Astarte, which stood on the scarped peak which overlooks Eryx, in Sicily, has perished; so has the temple of Baal-Hammon at Marsala (Lilybæum) and the Sardo-Phœnician sanctuaries of Baal-Samaim, Astarte, Eshmun, and Baal-Hammon indicated by the Punic inscriptions discovered at Sulci. The temple of Melkarth, at Gades, so much resorted to in the time of Strabo has left no traces. It is in vain that the name of the powerful city of Carthage and of the illustrious men whom she brought forth excite our enthusiastic curiosity; to no purpose has the site upon which she was built become French soil: the Romans respected nothing in the city of their most formidable enemies. The destruction which followed Scipio’s conquest, in the year 146 before our era, was systematic, and extended to the very foundation of the walls. What did escape was altered and transformed for the profit of the Roman colony which rose upon the Punic ruins, and which was itself upon two occasions the object of a savage demolition. There is, therefore, nothing Phœnician to be expected from the archæological excavations at Carthage from the architectural point of view; except mutilated inscriptions, almost all that is discovered is Roman, Christian, or Byzantine. The Chapel of Saint Louis, near which Boulé undertook his excavations, stands on the site of the famous temple of Eshmun in the middle of the acropolis of Byrsa; on the neighbouring hill was the temple of Tanit, whom the Romans called Virgo cœlestis; between Byrsa and the harbour, beside the forum, in the neighbourhood of which I carried on some excavations with M.S. Reinach in 1884, rose the temple of Baal-Hammon. To these topographical indications the memorials of the sanctuaries of Hannibal’s city are limited.