Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/305

 THE TEMPLE ix CYPRUS. 283 Like that of Paphos, this temple was rectangular. It was about sixty-one feet long by thirty wide. 1 Neither here nor at Paphos was the temple oriented as it was in Greece. The two narrow sides of the rectangle faced north and south. We cannot tell through which side the principal door was pierced. Two large doorways, one slightly larger than the other, may, however, be traced in the northern and eastern walls ; the upper parts of all the walls have disappeared ; it would seem that, as in Assyria, stone was only used for the lower parts. No trace of an outside inclosure has been found. A broken cone found by Ceccaldi, in the middle of the temple, seems to indicate that the goddess was here represented by a symbol like that of Paphos (Figs. 205 and 206). No remains of columns but a few capitals in the stone of the country were encountered. At several points within the site, votive figures carved from the same material were picked up. Some of these represented women suckling children, others cows performing a like office for their calves. One much damaged group is composed of four figures ; one of these holds a new- born child, while the mother lies stretched upon a sort of couch, her face still drawn by the agonies of childbirth, and her head upheld by an attendant.' 2 The community of subject which links together most of these little sculptures confirms the idea suggested by the presence of the cone, that the goddess of the sanctuary was one of love and generation, that is to say, a form of the Semitic Astarte. She must have been invoked with no less frequency than the deity who gave health and prolonged life. In the same place detached members of human bodies modelled in clay or carved in stone have been found ; these, of course, are thank- 1 We reproduce Cesnola's plan, but without any desire to exaggerate its authority ; it differs from the plan given by the same explorer in the account of his explorations at Athieno addressed to the Academy of Turin. If we test the two by the same scale none of the measurements coincide. In the plan presented to the Academy, which is reproduced by DOELL (Die Sammlung Cesnola in the Memoires de V Academic de Saint- Petersbourg, yth series, vol. xix. No. 4), there are columns against the door jambs which have disappeared in the map given in his Cyprus. A much simpler plan than the latter is given by CECCALDI (Monuments antiques de Cypre, p. 41) ; it shows fewer column bases in the interior, and no shafts or pilasters against the wall. To which of all these documents is our confidence due ? We prefer that given in our Fig. 204, because it best corresponds to the double description given by Cesnola and Ceccaldi. 2 CESNOLA. Cyprus, p. 158.