Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/293

 THE TEMPLE IN PHOENICIA. 271 composed. 1 The inscription is written in ink on both sides of a slab ; it seems to be a fragment from what we may call the ledger of a Phoenician temple at Kition, which appears to have been dedicated to Astarte. There are some gaps in it, but, as a whole, it gives the expenditure for two months, the sums paid to work- men, to builders and decorators, and the wages or salaries paid to the officers of the temple. The latter are not arranged in the order of their dignity, for the inscription is rather a memorandum than a formal record. The chief officials must have been the sacrificers and those masters of the scribes who are mentioned in other texts ; besides them, there were figure porters and men charged with the care of the veils, or curtains, of the sanctuary, barbers who shaved the priests and to whom certain incisions and amputations, which formed part of the rites, were entrusted, parasites, or people who lived at the table of the god, singing women, and women whose persons were the vehicles of worship ; for the sacred prostitutions to which we have already alluded were practised here as in all Astarte's temples. Traces of this rite are to be found in several artificial grottoes in the neighbourhoods of Gebal and Tyre, which are dubbed by M. Renan " prostitution caves." These have in their further wall a niche for the statue of the goddess, and along each side seats and benches cut in the rock. Their purpose is shown by the existence of numerous little triangles cut in the walls, in which archaeologists agree to recognize a summary representation of the female pudenda, which Herodotus tells us he himself saw cut on the rocks in this very neighbourhood. 3 In spite of the licentious nature of their rites the Phoenicians were an orderly and far-seeing people. Among the longest and most interesting documents they have left us, we may point out especially those texts engraved upon stone slabs which are known among epigraph ists as the Tariffs of Marseilles and Carthage? 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. 86, A and B. 2 Mission de Phmicie, pp. 648-652 and 662. 3 HERODOTUS, ii. 106. 4 The Marseilles Tariff is No. 165 in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum. That of the Tariff of Carthage is not yet fixed (December, 1883). The latter, however, is nothing but a repetition, with a few slight alterations, of the former. It would appear that an identical tariff was adopted for all the temples of the Phosnician rite, whether they were in the metropolis or in one of the colonies. The Tariff of Marseilles runs to 21 lines; that of Carthage has but n, and those considerably mutilated.