Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume II.djvu/718

 702 RHAPSII. about 20 feet in height. At the head of a narrow glen, which leads to the principal cjate, stand the ruins of the temple of Nemesis upon a large arti- ficial platform, supported by a wall of pure white marble. But we find upon this platform, which formed the Tffxivos or sacred enclosure, the remains of two temples, which are almost contiguous, and nearly though not quite parallel to each other. The larger building was a peripteral hesastyle, 71 feet long and 33 broad, with 12 columns on the side, and with a pronaus, cella, and posticum in the usual manner. The smaller temple was 31 feet long by 21 feet broad, and consisted only of a cella, with a portico containing two Doric columns in ant'is. Among the ruins of the lar-er temple are some fragments of a colossal .statue, corresponding in size with that of the Rhamnusian Nemesis; but these fragments were made of Attic marble, and not of Parian stone as stated by Pausanias. It is, how- ever, not improbable, as Leake has remarked, that the story of the block of stone brought by the Per- sians was a vulgar ftible, or an invention of the priests of Nemesis by which Pausanias was deceived. Among the ruins of the smaller temple was found a fragment, wanting the head and shoulders, of a statue of the human size in the archaic ityle of the Aeginetan school. This statue is now in the British Jluseum. Judging from this statue, as well as from the diminutive size and ruder architecture of the smaller temple, the latter apj)ears to have been the more ancient of the two. Hence it has been inferred that the smaller temple was anterior to the Persian War, and was destroyed by the Persians just before the battle of JIarathon; and that the larger temple was erected in honour of the goddess, who had taken vengeance upon the insolence of the barbarians for outraging her worship. In front of the smaller temple are two chairs (Sipovoi) of white marble, upon one of which is the inscription Ne;ueVei StiiTTpaTor aveSriKev, and upon the other QeixiSi 'S.warparos a.v(Qr]Kiv, which has led some to suppose that the smaller temple was dedicated to Themis. But it is more probable that both temples were dedi- cated to Nemesis, and that the smaller temple was in ruins before the larger was erected. A difficulty, however, arises about the time of the destruction of the sm.aller temple, from the fact that the forms of the letters and the long vowels in the inscriptions upon the chairs clearly show that those inscriptions belong to an era long subsequent to the battle of ^Marathon. Wordsworth considers it ridiculous to suppose that these chairs were dedicated in this temple after its destruction, and hence conjectures that the temple was destroyed towards the close of the Pelo- ponnesian War by the Persian allies of Sparta. (Leake, Demi of Attica, p. 10.5, seq.. 2nd ed., Northern Greece, vol. ii. p. 434, seq.; Wordsworth, Athens and Attica, p. 34, seq.; Unedited Anti- quities of Attica, c. vi. p. 41, seq.) 2. A harbour on the W. coast of Crete near the promontory Chersonesus. (Ptol. iii. 17. § 2.) Pliny, on the contrary, places it in the interior of the island (iv. 12. s. 2*0). RHAPSII AETHIOPES. [Rhapta.] RHAPTA(Ta'Pa7rTa,Ptol.i.9.§l,14.§4;Per(>;?. Mar. Erythr. p. 10), was, according to tlje author of the Periplus, the most distant station of the Arabian trade with Aegypt, Aethiopia, and the ports of the Red Sea. Its correct hit. is 15' 5". The name is derived from the peculiar boats in use there. These are termed by the natives dows RHAPTA. (did), and, like the modern boats of Pata on the Mozambique coast, were frequently of 100 or 150 tons burden. But whether vessels of this size or merely canoes, all the craft at this part of the E. coast of Africa were formed of the hollowed trunk's of trees and joined together by cords made of the fibres of the cocoa instead of iron or wooden pins, and hence the Greeks gave them, and the harbour which they principally frequented, the name of " the sewed " (to pairra). Ptolemy speaks (i. 17. § 7, iv. 7. § 28, vii. 3. § 6, i. 17. § 12, &c.) of a promontory Rhaptum, a river Rhaptus, and a tribe of Aethiopians named Rhapsii. All these may probably be referred to the innnediate neigh- bourhood of the town Rhapta, since the emporium was doubtless the most striking object to the cara- vans trading there and to the Greek merchants accompanying the caravans. The promontory was one of the numerous blutfs or headlands that give to this portion of the E. coast of Africa the ap- pearance of a saw, the shore-line being everywhere indented with sharp and short pnjections. The river was one of the many streams which are broad inland, but whose mouths, being barred with sand or coral reefs, are narrow and difficult to be dis- covered. This portion of the coast, indeed, from lat. 2° S. to the mouth of the Govind, the modern appellation of the Rhaptus of Ptolemy and the Periplus, is bordered by coral reefs and islands, — e.g. the Dundas and Jiibah islands, — generally a league or even less from the mainland. Some of these islands are of considerable height; and through several of them are arched apertures large enough to admit the passage of a boat. As the shore itself also is formed of a coral conglomerate, containing shells, madrepore, and sand, it is evident that there has been a gradual rising of the land and corre- sponding subsidence of the sea. The reefs also which have been formed on the main shore have afiected materially the course of the rivers, — barring the mouths of many, among them the Rhaptus, and compelling others, e. g. the Wehhe, to run obliquely in a direction parallel to the coast. Another result of the reefs has been that many rivers having no or insufficient outlets into the sea, have become marshes or shallow lakes; and, consequently, streams that in Ptolemy's age were correctly described as runrdng into the ocean, are now meres severed from it by sand and ridges of coral. Rhapta seems, from the account in the Periplus, to have been, not so much the name of a single town, as a generic term for numerous villages in- habited by the builders of the " seamed boats." These were prokably situated nearly opposite the modern island of Pata; and whether it implies one or many places, Rhapta certainly was on the coast of Azania. The lihapsii Aethiopes are described in the Periplus as men of lofty stature; and in fact the natives of E. Africa, at the present day, are gene- rally taller than the Arabs. Each village had its chief, but there was a principal shiekh or chief to whom all were subject. This division into petty communities under a general head also still subsists. In the first century u. c. the Rhapsii were held in subjection by the shiekh and people of Muza, whence c.-une ships with Arab masters, and pilots who un- derstood the language of the Rhapsii and were con- nected with them by intermarriage. The Arabs brought to Rhapta spear-heads, axes, knives, buttons, and beads; sometimes also wine and wheaten bread, not so much indeed for barter, as for presents to the