Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/348

 526 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. all ve want to know. At Malta and Gozo, where the remains are clear enough, we are in presence of buildings of the second or third class which cannot be taken as worthy representatives of the national architecture. But in spite of the scantiness of these data, the individuality of the Phoenician, or rather of the Semitic, temple, stands out with sufficient distinctness to allow the historian to grasp its salient features. It is distinguished from the most familiar of our types, that of Greece and Rome, by one capital difference ; it attaches much less importance to the cella, the chamber in which the image or symbol of the god is placed. It consists of a great court, or open-air hall, in the centre of which, or at one extremity, rises a tabernacle or pavilion with the emblem of divine power beneath its shelter. In Greece the attention of the architect was con- centrated on the cella, the home of the god, the dwelling-place of his often colossal statue ; in Phoenicia the symbol was, as a rule, of no great size. The grandiose feature of the Semitic temple was the 7re/3io, the courtyard with its continuous portico, which in some cases included a fine order and a rich scheme of decoration. Even now the Semitic race is not without places of worship in which the general arrangement is much the same as this. In the first place, there are old mosques at Cairo, those of Amrou and Touloun, for instance, where great quadrangles are surrounded by single- or double-aisled colonnades, and nothing is wanting but the idol. But if we go to Mecca we shall find the type in all its completeness in the mosque of the Caaba (Fig. 236). Even the triumph of the Koran has not abolished the betyle, and there, standing in the centre of the wide inclosure, the mystic stone has received for centuries the homage of the Arab tribes. 1 The primitive form of worship of these peoples was the courban, or sacrifice offered on a high place, which is still practised near Mecca on the occasion of the great pilgrimage. At first their temple was no more than a clearing of levelled earth at the top of 1 Our view of Mecca and the mosque of the Caaba is from a drawing by M. Tomaszkiewicz after a photograph by Colonel Sadik-Bey, for which we have to thank M. G. Schlumberger. The black stone itself is not visible ; it is a rounded mass of basalt, framed in silver and let into one of the angles of the Caaba or Beit Allah (house of God). The Caaba is the cubic mass, 37 feet high, which stands in the middle of the square, and is draped in the black veil called the tob-el-Caaba (shirt of the Caaba). See on this subject ALI BEY BEN ABBASSI, Voyage, Q, ii. pp. 348-351.