Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/401

 ATTEMPTS TO RKSTORK TUP. PRINCIPAL TYPKS. 377 which the platform on which the temple stood was reached. 1 At the foot of the temple on the rig-hit of the engraving there is a palace, on the left two obelisk-shaped steles and a small temple of a type to be presently described. Behind the tower stretch away the waters of a lake. Nebuchadnezzar, in one of his inscriptions, speaks of surrounding the temple he had built with a lake. In seeking to vary the effect produced by these external ramps, the idea of a more complicated arrangement than the one last I'IGS. 174 176. Trar.svene section, plnn, and horizontal section of a square, single-ramped, Chaldrean Temple. noticed may have occurred to the Chaldees. This M. Chipiez has embodied in his restoration of a SQUARE DOUP.LE-RAMPED 1 These courts must have been at certain times of the day the meeting place of large numbers of the population, like the court-yards of a modern mosque. Shops in which religious emblems and other objets-de-picte were sold would stand about them, just as in the present day the traveller finds a regular fair in the courtyard of the mosque Meshed-Ali. Among the commodities that change hands in such places, white doves are very common (LoFius, Travels, p. 53). In this perhaps, we may recognize the survival of a pagan rite, the sacrifice of a dove to the Babylonian istar, the Phoenician Astarte, and the Grecian Aphrodite. It was in the courtyards of one of these temples that those sacred prostitutions of which HERODOTUS speaks, took place (i. 199). The great extent of the inclosures is readily explained by the crowds they were then required to accommodate.