Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/351

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PIKEXICIAX TEMPLE. 329 a hill, where the altar of sacrifice was raised within a belt of trees. As civilization advanced, and the religious notions of the people became more complex, the Phoenicians borrowed from the Egyptians the idea of a tabernacle in which to lodge their fetish ; it was Egypt that taught them to raise their sanctuary in the middle of the consecrated area, the Jiarain. Thus far the Phoenician temple is founded upon that of Egypt, but it never seems to have been a servile copy. It was not hidden, like the buildings at Luxor and Karnak, behind a huge wall ; it had no labyrinth- of dimly-lighted chambers lying between the sanctuary and the outer air ; perhaps through want of skill rather than want of inclination Phoenicia substituted wide courts for the hypostyle halls of the Pharaohs. In spite of its simplicity the Semitic type of religious building had a grandeur and nobility of its own ; it was the first type to meet the pioneers of Greek civilization ; the /Eolians and lonians found it in Cilicia, in Syria, in Cyprus and in the other islands in which they came into contact with the Phoenicians. They began by borrowing from it, and even when, by their own genius, they had created an entirely new system of religious architecture, their buildings still preserved some traces of these early lessons. We may thus explain a peculiarity of classic architecture which had hardly received all the attention it deserves ; the 7rep</3o?) is much more important in the Greek temples of Asia than in those of Europe. It is only in Asiatic temples like those of Magnesia and Ephesus, of Miletus and Samos, that we meet with these vast and richly decorated quadrangles. There was nothing of the kind at the Parthenon, at yEgina or at Phigalia. Whether the lonians were directly inspired by the oriental type, or whether they took possession of temples built by their predecessors on the coast, as they are supposed to have done at Ephesus, is of slight importance ; l the great thing to remember is that in certain temples belonging to this country signs of Semitic influence are to be traced even at the height of the classic period. And the likeness was not only in the arrangement of the building. The 1 On this question see the learned and ingenious paper by E. CURTIUS, entitled Beitra^e zur Geschichte nnd Topographic Kleinasicns (Ephesos, Pcr^anwu, Smyrna, Sardes] in verbindung mit den Herrn Major Regely, Baurath Adler, Dr. Hirschfeld und Dr. Gelzer; 410, 7 plates; Dummler (extracted from the Proceedings of the Berlin Academy). VOL. I.