Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/309

THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 287 fewer traces than the thick- walled treasure-house in which these votive statues were protected from the weather, but even now, after De Vogue, Duthoit, and Cesnola, and the peasants of Athieno, have each and all turned over the soil, remains may yet exist which, if rightly questioned, would confirm or confute the hypothesis we have here ventured to put forward. The temple is generally accompanied by its diminutive, by what we should call a chapel. In a curious little terra-cotta model found at Dali (Fig. 208) we may, perhaps, be allowed to recognize a copy of one of these chapels. It represents a small square building with a doorway ornamented by an isolated, lotus-headed shaft on each side, and a flat shelf, or rudimentarv I'n;. 208. Model of a small temple in terra-cotta. Louvre. Height Si inch*. pent-house, above. In the doorway stands a kind of w T oman- headed bird, and two more women's faces peer from small windows in the sides of the model. The occurrence of the anthropoid bird suggests that the little building is funerary in its character, but there are things about it which also hint that the artist modelled his work on some building with which he was familiar. These are the shafts already mentioned and a number of small circular cavities which can hardly represent anything but holes for pigeons, the sacred bird of Astarte. We are also inclined to recognize Phoenician chapels in two chambers built of huge, roughly-dressed blocks, which still exist at Larnaca and in the neighbourhood of the prison of Salamis, the