Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/245

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IN THE LEVANT.
195

Liudia and Zeus Polieus.82 Near the governor's house is a piece of wall which Ross recognized as part of the cella of a Doric temple. Fragments of its architecture still remain in situ. On the S.E. side of the Acropolis, and on its highest point, is the wall of another temple, built on the very edge of the precipitous rock, and hence incorporated in the subsequent wall built by the Knights round their castle. Ross found very few traces of the architecture of this temple, but supposes that it was Doric, like the other. He thinks that the temple on the summit of the Acropolis must from its commanding position have been that of Athene Lindia, who from the evidence of the inscriptions found here seems to have occupied a higher place in the worship of Lindos than Zeus, with whom her name is associated in these dedicatory inscriptions. The temple of Athene Lindia was of remote antiquity; its foundation was attributed in Greek legend to Danaos and his daughters. Many precious and celebrated works of art were stored up here as votive offerings, the earliest of which were ascribed to the mythic period. Here were shown a brazen caldron inscribed with Phœnician characters and dedicated by Cadmus, and the model in electrum of a female breast, the offering of Helen on her return from Troy; here in the 5th cenury B.C., Amasis, king of Egypt, dedicated two marble statues and a cuirass of linen, a master-piece of textile art; and here, in letters of gold, was preserved a copy of the ode in which Pindar has immortalized the Olympic victory of the Rhodian Diagoras.83