Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/325

 THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. 303 to show that no gods of the Greek pantheon are in question. The text, without being very old, is apparently no later than the end of the third Punic war. Taking a mean between the extreme dates proposed, we may place the works it was meant to record at about the middle of the third century before our era. By a curious coincidence the ruins of two buildings obviously religious in their character have been discovered on this very soil of Gozo. Such a small island can hardly have been blessed with many temples, so that we may fairly guess that in these remains we see all that is left of two of the temples referred to in the in- scription. Not that the point is of any great importance ; long before this inscription was discovered and translated the buildings in question were recognised as temples. The only mistake made by the explorers who first drew attention to them was in taking au sdrieux the name given to them by the peasants, the Giganteia, or "giant's building." 1 This name led them to credit the ruins with a prodigious antiquity, and even to half accept them as the work of a race of giants who inhabited the island before the arrival of the Phoenician colonists, perhaps before the flood ! Such dreams are to be explained and excused by the want of all points of comparison. The ancient monuments of Syria were as yet hardly known, and explorers came to their conclusions without knowing how fond the Phoenicians were of materials of extravagant size, and how they inoculated all the peoples with whom they cim^ in contact with that taste. In the Giganteia, as in soms of the ruins in Malta itself, there are stones from ten to twenty feet long, and of proportional height and width (Fig. 2 1 g). 2 Such dimensions might well astonish the agriculturists of Gozo, who were accus- tomed to build with mere chips of stone ; but they will seem modest enough to those who have stood before the walls of 1 During the last eighty years these ruins have been often drawn and studied. A list of these successive explorations is given in CARUANA (Report on the PJmnidan and Roman Antiquities in the Group of the Islands of Malta, 8vo, Malta, 1882). This report, which was drawn up under the orders of the English governor by the keeper of the public library, gives a sufficiently accurate statement of the present condition of these monuments. We gather from it that the so-called Giganteia has suffered much during the last fifty years. Many curious parts of the structure are no longer in existence which were there in 1834, when Albert de la Marmora made the drawings which we reproduce. For the history of the monument and its present state see the Report, pp. 7-9. 2 Our figs. 219 and 220 have been engraved from a photograph sent to us by M. Dugit, Dean of the Faculte des Lettres of Grenoble.