Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/323

 THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. ?oi obstacle which had stopped his predecessors and digging much deeper, he arrived at the hiding-place which they had missed. Evidently the first explorer had not belonged to the personne I of the temple. He was not one of the priests or servants who, at the first alarm, had carried every precious object into the crypt and arranged them there in an order which proves that the operation was not hastily carried out, but completed at leisure by men who thought the necessity for concealment would soon be over. But their hopes were vain, and it is probable that every man about the temple perished in the massacre, carrying with him the secret of these vaulted chambers. We dare not pretend to regret their death, but let us at least join the archaeologist who has described the intaglios from Curium with such loving care, 1 in rendering our tribute to the memory of those faithful guardians who took such efficient means to preserve the wealth of their god from sacrilege. 3. 772e Temples of Gozo and Malta. We have already had occasion to quote the Phoenician monu- ments found at Malta (Figs. 28 and 46). That island and its neighbouring islet of Gaulos, now Gozo, were the first points to be occupied by the Tyrians and Sidonians when they began to frequent the central basin of the Mediterranean. W T e do not know whether they were the first inhabitants or not, but it is certain that the peculiarities of the situation caused them to colonise the islands in force. When Carthage took up the heritage of Tyre in the western Mediterranean, Malta became one of her naval stations, and even when the fortune of war brought Malta and Gozo under the Roman standard, the o Phoenician language continued to be written and spoken in them, as we know from the inscriptions on some of the coins and still more from the types which most of them bear (see Fig. 218). The Italian merchants and magistrates must have introduced Latin, but perhaps it had not entirely superseded the Semitic idiom even when, at the end of the ninth century of our era, the 1 KING, in Cesnola's Cyprus, p. 387.