Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/339

 THE TEMPLES OF Gozo AND MALTA. of St. John, and now hardly anything is left of it beyond the wall of which we have already given a wood-cut (Fig. 46). This wall surrounds an apse whose dimensions suggest larger rooms than those of the other temples. A marble pavement and some shafts of columns have been rescued at different times from the dddns. The two marble cippi with inscriptions to Melkart came from these ruins (Fig. 28), l whence it has been reasonably concluded that the temple was dedicated to that god, and was, perhaps, the chief religious building in the island. Finally, there are some more ruins of the same character on the slope of the Corradino hill, close to the great harbour. In 1840 excavations, too soon abandoned, laid bare the entrance and two apses. 2 FIG. 231. Statuette. Height 8| inches. From Carnana. Our readers may be surprised at our insistance on monuments in which the art is so poor, but we had our reasons for treating them at length. They are little known ; several of them are really well preserved, at least in parts, while they furnish us with authentic if not elegant types of that religious architecture of the Phoenicians of which we know so little. When we compare the temples of Gozo and Malta with those of Cyprus and Phoenicia proper we only find one feature peculiar to the former, and that is the love of the Maltese architect for the elongated ellipse and its conse- quence, an apse-shaped sanctuary. 3 With that exception we find 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, pars i. Nos. 122 and 122 bis. 2 CARUANA, Report, pp. 19, 20. 3 Some of the temples of the great Syrian goddess were also of this shape. A painting at Pompeii represents a semicircular pavilion with a great cone in the centre (Roux, Herculaneum et Pompei, 5th series, vol. iii. pp. 16-22, and plate vii.)