Page:History of Art in Sardinia, Judæa, Syria and Asia Minor Vol 1.djvu/398

 368 A History of Art in Sardinia and Jud.ea. nationalities that have left no literature, why the Hebrews, although they were scarcely taken into account by the great nations of antiquity, owe it to their written records to be classed among the foremost. In our delineation of the Semitic temple — certainly older than the Greek sanctuary, and which may have served as its model — we showed that it was everywhere the same ; though the deities that were worshipped in it might be different according to time and place. In our study upon Phoenicia, we made use of the smallest indications interspersed in classic writers ; we passed in review every little vestige of the places of worship, both in Syria, in Cyprus, and the more distant colonies of Gaulos and Malta. Nevertheless, when we cast about for a reconstruction from base to crown of a Punic specimen of architecture, we were fain to look for it in the temple of Jerusalem. Had the sacred building of Jupiter at Olympia, or the Parthenon, been as utterly destroyed, no one would have dreamt attempting a restoration on the mere verbal description of Pausanias ; although we can do so aided by examination of the actual remains. Nor can the information to be gleaned in Strabo and Pliny, compare for a single moment with the descriptions of the buildings of Jerusalem in the Bible, and the paraphrase of them in Josephus, both of which have been our chief guides. We may smile at the importance given by the chronicler and the prophet of the exile to details that verge on the puerile ; but for them, however, we should not have been rash enough to try our hand at rebuilding the most conspicuous struc- ture on Moriah. Our ambition went yet further afield : we hoped, through the house of Lebanon, to reconstitute in a satisfactory manner, the type of the Semitic temple which seemed irretrievably lost ; we wished to place before our readers an exemplar which should unite the general features to be found in all ; which, con- sidered in its broad aspects, constitutes a building as divergent from the Greek sanctuary as it is from the Christian church. The Semitic temple has something of the aglutinous Semitic phrase ; whilst the Grecian sacred building might be likened to the translucent flowing period of a Sophocles or a Plato ; secondary ideas being grouped in marvellous order around the dominant one, held together by particles which, whilst they determine the place which each is to occupy, serve to show the subordinate position of each. On the other hand, with Hebrew prose or poetry, ideas