Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/324

 o^- HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. island fell for two hundred years into the hands of the Arabs. 1 The latter would therefore have no difficulty in ingrafting their own tongue upon that of the islanders, and to this day Arabic forms the basis of the very peculiar dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the little archipelago. Twice, therefore, in its history Malta has been an advanced port for Oriental or African powers, once when the Phoenicians attempted to bring all the coasts of Italy and Sicily within their grasp, and again in the middle ages, when it had mosques and minarets from whose summits the muezzin proclaimed the still widening faith of Mahomet. The existence far into the full flush of Graico-Roman civil- ization of temples in which everything, idols, rites, and archi- tecture, was Semitic and Oriental, is proved by inscriptions. One of the most curious Phoenician texts extant mentions the FIG. 2lS. Coin of Malta. Bronze. From Uuruy.* construction of three or four sanctuaries by the people of Gozo. 8 One was raised to the glory of Sadambaal, a second in honour of Astarte ; chips in the marble have removed the name of a third divinity, perhaps of a fourth. But whatever the number may have been, the names of Sadambaal and Astarte are enough 1 In the Acts of the Apostles (xxviii. 2} the inhabitants of Malta, on to which St. Paul was carried by the tempest, are called barbarians by the sacred writer ; we may infer from that that Paul and his companions were surprised to find in the peasants and fishermen by whom they were saved and warmed at a great fire people who spoke neither Greek nor Latin. As for their Semitic dialect, it was, no doubt, so much altered that a Jew could not understand it. 2 The inscription MEAITAK2N is Greek, but the types are both quite Oriental in character. On one side we find Isis, with an Egyptian head-dress, and one of those symbols which are continually met with on the votive steles of Tanit from Carthage. On the reverse we find one of those winged deities, with the points of their wings urned up, which also occur so often on Carthaginian steles (Fig. 187) and Phoenician coins (GERHARD, Gesammelte Abhandlungen, plate 43). 3 Corpus Inscriptionum Semi/icarum, pars i. No. 132.