II — Earliest Temple Altar
1 From House to Temple
A temple is only a more prominent house. As a house was the dwelling of the earlier priest of his household, who was in covenant for himself and his family with the guardian deity of that household; so, afterwards, a temple was a dwelling for the deity guarding an aggregation of families, and for the priests who stood between him and the community.
This is no new or strange truth; it is obvious. “In the Vedas, Yama, as the first man, is the first priest too; he brought worship here below as well as life, and ‘first he stretched out the thread of sacrifice.’”261 The fire-altar of the home was first the center of worship in the family in India;262 as later the fire-altar was the center of the worship of the community.
The same cuneiform characters in old Babylonian stand for great house, for palace, and for temple;263 as similarly, in ancient Egypt, the same hieroglyph represented house or temple,–a simple quadrangular enclosure, with its one doorway.264
The oldest form of an Egyptian temple known to us through the inscriptions of the Ancient Empire indicates that the prehistoric houses of worship in that land were mere hovels of wood and lattice-work, over the doors of which was a barbaric ornamentation of bent pieces of wood.265 The private house became the public temple.
“The design of the Greek temple in its highest perfection was... a gradual development of the dwelling-house.”266 Palace and temple were, indeed, often identical in ancient Greece.267
Strictly speaking, there were no temples in ancient Persia, any more than in early India. But the fire-altars that were first on the home hearth, or threshold, were made more and more prominent on their uplifted stepped bases, until they towered loftily in the sight of their worshipers.268
It is the same Hebrew word, ohel, that stands for the “tent” of Abraham, and for the “Tent” or Tabernacle of the congregation of Israel.269
In China “temple architecture differs little from that of the houses.”270 The house of a god is as the house of a man, only grander and more richly ornamented. And Japanese antiquaries say that the architecture of Shinto temples is on the model of the primeval Japanese hut. The temples of Ise, the most sacred of the Shinto sanctuaries, are said to represent this primitive architecture in its purest form.271
The father of the family was the primitive priest in the Samoan Islands, and his house was the first place of worship. Then “the great house of the village,” or the place of popular assembling, was used as a temple; and afterwards there were special temple structures with attendant priests.272
The transition from house to temple seems to have been a gradual one in the primitive world. The fire-altar of the family came to be the fire-altar of the community of families. The house of a king became both palace and temple, and so again the house of a priest; for the offices of king and of priest were in early times claimed by the same person.273