Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/294

 272 HISTORY or ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. The ritual and the cost of each of the customary sacrifices are there minutely regulated. Such tables must have been fixed up at the entrance to the temple, where they would at once show the merchant who landed from some weary voyage what it would cost him to keep the vows he had made to Melkart, Astarte, or Tanit, as the case might be. While neglecting nothing that might content the g ( >d, he could then take care that he was not cheated by the priest ; the Marseilles Tariff specifies, for instance, that the skin of the animal sacrificed was reserved to the worshipper. The fees, on the whole, seem to have been high enough, but it is ex- pressly stipulated that the very poor, who could not afford to provide a living victim, either bird or quadruped, should have nothing to pay. 1 This shows that every facility was given to the poor to bring their gift of bread, or of those figured animals in stone and terra-cotta of which so many were found by Cesnola in the ruins at Golgos. 5 2. The Temple in Cyprus. However slight may be his smattering of classic letters, every reader has heard of those temples of Cyprus in which the vague but imposing image of the great Nature goddess of the Syrians was, as it were, gradually condensed into the definite personality of the Greek Aphrodite. 3 The names of the famous shrines of 1 Line 20. 2 CKSXOLA, Cyprus, p. 158. 3 Xo one has yet succeeded, or seems likely to succeed, in explaining the word Aphrodite by a Greek or Aryan derivation. Its etymology must be sought for in another quarter, and therefore we have the less hesitation in repeating a conjecture recently given out by Herr FRITZ HOMMEL, one of the best Assyriologists of Germany. According to him, Aphrodite is no more than a kind of anagram on Astarte, through Ashtoret, the name given by the Western Shemites to the Chaldreo-Assyrian Ishtarit. The Greeks have never had such consonants as sh or/, so that even now they are quite incapable of pronouncing them, and when they had to adapt their vocal organs to the name of the Syrian goddess they substituted, perhaps unconsciously, the labial < for the sh. It was at the price of this change that the name of the goddess entered their language and she herself their pantheon. Ashtoret became Aphtoret, then by an easy permutation Aphrotet. In much later times, again, they deliberately adopted a new transcription of the Syrian form of the name, and, like their modern descend- ants when they take words from the Turkish, they replaced the lingual letter by a pure sibillant, so that Astarte is one of those derivatives due to educated people which are never so faithful to their prototype as the natural and unconscious modifi- cations set up by the crowd. It is not uncommon to find terms like this, which,