Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/29

Rh time the curious altar with a tree on it, which the sacrilegious hand of the British sightseer had already begun to chip and deface.

The pottery I found to be of several kinds; black ware of a heavy, brittle kind, made of black earth, and ornamented with rude rows of notches or indented triangular marks; finer black ware, less brittle and more polished; coarse red ware, and coarse and fine drab ware. Some of the finer black and drab ware had incised patterns of the rudest kind. All the varieties seem to have been baked in the fire, and have a polished surface. I sent some specimens to the British Museum. Pottery somewhat similar in character has been found in the island of Jersey.

Dr. Henry Barth, the well-known African explorer, has given a detailed description and a plan of these remains in Gerhard's "Archaologische Zeitung" for 1848.2 He supposes that both groups of enclosures were hypæthral temples, enclosed within a common peribolus wall, of which he found some traces.

According to his plan, the entry into the upper temple is from the east; a doorway opposite to this entry leads into the middle chamber. In the eastern chamber he found an aperture in the wall, communicating with a small outer chamber; through this hole he supposes that oracles were delivered by the priests. In the museum at Malta is a conical stone, three feet high, resembling in form the well-known symbol of Aphrodite, placed in her temples at Paphos and elsewhere.3 This stone. Dr. Barth states to have been found in the most eastern chamber of the upper temple.