Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/296

 274 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. 1 880 the English governor caused the hillock to be removed in order to fill up the marshy hollow beside it, and during the opera- tion the substructures of buildings with many antique fragments, and especially terra-cotta figures, strewn about them, were brought to light. Many signs were present to suggest that the mound had once supported a temple of Astarte, a temple to which two marble tablets found in the neighbourhood may have belonged. These tablets were inscribed with tariffs in the Phoenician language. 1 Some Ionic capitals which were sketched by a French architect, M. Saladin, in the course of a voyage in the East, seem to have belonged to this temple. We reproduce below his drawing of the best preserved among them. This fragment belongs, of course, to a date much later than that of the first temple ; it dates, in fact, from a time when Greek art had already won a preponderating FIG. 198. Capital from Kition, cut from the local stone. Height 18 inches. Drawn by Saladin. influence at Kition ; but yet it preserves a certain originality. There are no oves, and the volute is very deeply hollowed, peculiarities which decided us to reproduce M. Saladin's drawing, although the capital cannot be presented as an example of Phoenician art. It may be looked upon, however, as the last of the series which commences with the far more strange-looking caps reproduced in our Figs. 51, 52, 53. The classic style was near its universal triumph, but at the time when this temple was restored it had still to lay its account with certain local habits and traditions, The only temple in the island of which we know anything from the old writers is the most famous of all, the temple of Paphos. 1 See M. KENAN'S paper on these inscriptions in the Rwue arcJieologique, 2nd series, vol. xli., 1881, p. 29, and the Corpus Inscriptionum Serniticarum, pars i. p. 92. Cf. HEUZEY, Catalogue des Figurines, &c., p. 168 and above, p. 271.