Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/308

 286 HISTORY OF Airr IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. wet and he.it. The outside ot the temple of Golgos must, then, have been very simple to look at. In the inside, which was lighted only from the wide doorways, stood a silent population of statues, their cheeks and robes heightened with colour, and in their midst the symbolic cone. Pavilion-shaped lamps of stone cast a dim light into the darker corners, where the long lines of ex-votos hung upon the painted walls. 1 ' Purely conjectural as this description must be in many of its details, as a whole it is probable enough ; but the chief question after all never seems to have suggested itself to the explorers, and that is whether the building discovered by Cesnola was the temple itself, or only one of its dependencies. PhcL'nicia, no doubt, like Greece and Egypt, may have had temples built on different models, but it is singular that this temple of Golgos, as it is described to us, should afford so wide a variation from all the types of Semitic temple with which we are acquainted. There is neither a great courtyard surrounded with porticoes, as at Amrit, at Byblos, and Paphos, nor a building in which, as in the temples of Jerusalem and the Nile valley, we may distinguish a sanctuary and a pronaos, a holy place and a holy of holies. Finally, taking the plan given as correct, where, in this nave encumbered with statues, are we to rind a place for the divinity of the temple, a place where she would be well in view, as she appears to have been in the sanctuaries of Byblos and Paphos ? We are scarcely inclined to see the goddess in the cone we have figured (Fig. 205) ; the latter is little more than a yard in height, and must have been altogether crushed by the statues, some ot them seven feet high, which stood in serried ranks about it. Where, then, are we to look for the real representative of the goddess, and for its place ? There is one way of getting over the difficulty, and that is by supposing that the building in question was not the temple itself, but one of its dependencies, a covered hall raised for the express purpose of receiving the votive offerings and securing to them a greater degree of safety than they could enjoy in the open air. Thus we find on the coin of Byblos, side by side with the great court in which the cone stands, a small closed cella which certainly belongs to the same 'whole (Fig. 19). The temple itself may well have been so constructed that it has left 1 Monuments antiques de Cvfre, pp. 47, 48.