Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/340

 3i8 HISTORY OF ART IN PIKKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. all the features encountered in the Levant, the same irregular masonry, the same huge units, the same liking for worship in the open air, the same altars and isolated piers, finally, the same emblem in the place of honour, the sacred cone. The similarities are striking and the differences are much the same o as those we should find between a village church and a great cathedral. In spite of its advantageous situation Malta was too small to become, especially in antiquity, an important centre of population. In the fine season, when merchant fleets and ships of war lay in the ports of the archipelago, all was life and animation ; captains and seamen escaped from the perils of the deep, carried their offerings to Melkart, Esmoun, and Astarte, and some of these offerings, like the cippi on which the names of Abdosir and Osirsamar appear, were of considerable value ; l but their number and richness did not raise the sanctuaries of the island above their station as provincial and even rustic temples, constructed and decorated by a community of peasants, fishermen, and small traders. The great want of the Maltese was not material re- sources but refined taste ; they had plenty of excellent stone, stone which at the present day is exported to Tunis and there largely employed, but they were without the models and practical in- struction in their use which the natives of Cyprus owed to their proximity to Egypt, to Syria, and to the cities of Greece. 4. The Temples of Sicily and Carthage. While, by a singular chance, Malta and Gozo have handed down to us several Phoenician temples in which both the general arrangements and not a few accessories of the cult may still be traced, nothing remains of the far richer and more important sanctuaries raised by the Syrians, and still more by their Car- thaginian cousins, on the shores of Sicily. The existence of these shrines is proved only by numerous passages in ancient authors and by the existence of a few votive steles, the last remains of the mass of votive offerings accumulated in them by the piety of many generations. Nothing is left of the famous temple in which Astarte was worshipped as Erck-Hayim, literally " long-life," that 1 Corpus Inscriptionum Semilicarum, pars i. Nos. 122 and 122 bis.