Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/271

CHAPTER IV. SACRED ARCHITECTURE. i. The Temple in Phoenicia. THE earliest form of religion practised by those Canaanitish and Semitic tribes who peopled Syria was that of the high places so often mentioned in the Bible. At the time of their first arrival in the country their creed was fetishism. Their worship and respect were given to those natural objects and phenomena which made the deepest impression on their eyes and imaginations, to the clear and refreshing springs at which they quenched their thirst and to the torrent whose noise and turbulence oppressed their spirits, to trees, to mountains whose sides were covered with forests and whose heads were often lost in clouds. In a country in which plains were of small extent, where chains of mountains rise on every horizon, a mountain especially was a great fetish, and what could be more natural than to do it honour by erecting an altar of sacrifice on its summit ? And with time another idea may have come to mingle with this ; when the conception of personal or semi-personal deities first sprang up and they were given a dwelling-place in the skies, men thought that by climbing hills they brought themselves near the homes of the gods. From the hi^h summits which commanded o o the country and the long length of coast, the smoke of the sacrifice and the prayers of the officiating priest would have a shorter distance to travel before they reached the ears and the nostrils of the divinity to whom they were addressed. Whatever the original cause of this form of worship may have been it was always of an extreme simplicity. Of this we have a proof in a curious passage of Tacitus, who tells us and he is