Adjuncts to temples

Phoenician temples had sometimes adjuncts, as cathedrals have their chapter-houses and muniment rooms, which were at once interesting and important. There has been discovered at Athiénau in Cyprus--the supposed site of Golgi--a ruined edifice, which some have taken for a temple, but which appears to have been rather a repository for votive offerings, a sort of ecclesiastical museum. A picture of the edifice, as he conceives it to have stood in its original condition, has been drawn by one of its earliest visitants. "The building," he says, "was constructed of sun-dried bricks, forming four walls, the base of which rested upon a substruction of solid stone-work. The walls were covered, as are the houses of the Cypriot peasants of to-day, with a stucco which was either white or coloured, and which was impenetrable by rain. Wooden pillars with stone capitals supported internally a pointed roof, which sloped at a low angle. It formed thus a sort of terrace, like the roofs that we see in Cyprus at the present day. This roof was composed of a number of wooden rafters placed very near each other, above which was spread a layer of rushes and coarse mats, covered with a thick bed of earth well pressed together, equally effective against the entrance of moisture and against the sun's rays. Externally the building must have presented a very simple appearance. In the interior, which received no light except from the wide doorways in the walls, an immovable and silent crowd of figures in stone, with features and garments made more striking by the employment of paint, surrounded, as with a perpetual worship, the mystic cone. Stone lamps, shaped like diminutive temples, illumined in the corners the grinning /ex-votos/ which hung upon the walls, and the curious pictures with which they were accompanied. Grotesque bas-reliefs adorned the circuit of the edifice, where the slanting light was reflected from the white and polished pavement-stones." In length and breadth the chamber measured sixty feet by thirty; the thickness of the basement wall was three feet. Midway between the side walls stood three rows of large square pedestals--regularly spaced, and dividing the interior into four vistas or avenues, which some critics regard as bases for statues, and some as supports for the pillars which sustained the roof. Two stone capitals of pillars were found within the area of the chamber; and it is conjectured that the entire disappearance of the shafts may be accounted for by their having been of wood, the employment of wooden shafts with stone bases and capitals being common in Cyprus at the present time. Against each of the four walls was a row of pedestals touching each other, which had certainly been bases for statues, since the statues were found lying, mostly broken, in front of them. The figures varied greatly in size, some being colossal, others mere statuettes. Most probably all were votive offerings, presented by those who imagined that they had been helped by the god of the temple to which the chamber belonged, as an indication of their gratitude. The number of pedestals found along one of the walls was seventy-two, and the original number must have been at least three times as great.

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